Arebyte X Strange Attractor Press present:
Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries
Symposium and live play sessions
Part of Arebyte 2023/24 programme The Body, The Mind, The Soul
Saturday 9 March 2024, 11am - 8:30pm
Programme info here
Artist David Blandy & writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press, Jamie Sutcliffe have co-curated ‘Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries’, a day-long event that includes presentations, tabletop game-play sessions and talks.
Artwork from Eco Mofo’s!! by David Blandy & Daniel Locke, Image: Daniel Locke
Speakers at the event include acclaimed RPG designers Emmy Allan, Kayla Dice, Mike Mason, Chris McDowall, Samuel Mui, and Zedeck Siew, alongside writers, historians and theorists such as Stu Horvath, Timothy Linward, Mark Pilkington, and Simon O’Sullivan.
An exhibition of TTRPGs-inspired video games by artists Kitty Clark, Uma Breakdown, John Powell-Jones, Petra Szemán, and Holly White are hosted on computers and available to play for visitors throughout the whole event.
The day culminates in live TTRPG play sessions of the games Eco Mofos by artist David Blandy and SUPERZEROES by TTRPG game designer Samuel Mui, amongst others, inviting the audience to play with a deck of uniquely designed TTRPG playing cards.
The event features a selection of merchandise and publications from Strange Attractor Press and independent London-based bookshop Igloo Tree, Massachusetts-based MIT Press and zine supplier Antipode Zines. Games from Laurie O’Connel and Loot the Room will also be on sale.
Image: A section from “Colouring In A Coming of Beige Story“ (Colourblind Edition), Hardeep Pandhal, 2021
Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) have a uniquely transportative quality. Despite a popular renaissance—due in large part to their appearances in cult TV and film series—they remain deeply strange cultural artefacts that afford disarmingly immersive experiences, often leading their players into challenging scenarios and situations.
While an increasing number of contemporary artists have started to embrace the form, bringing tabletop gaming mechanics into the development of participatory artworks, the TTRPG community itself remains a remarkable testing ground for the possibilities of play as a kind of “empathic technology”. Here, critical play might untether us from the stagnant imaginaries of a post-capitalist inertia, even coming to function as vital tools for activism.
Strange Attractor Press is an independent publishing house, founded in 2003, based in London, UK and run by Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe. Celebrating unpopular culture since 2001, Strange Attractor Press publishes books from the outer edge, documenting lost, neglected, emerging and underground currents from areas including history, anthropology, psychology, science and magic, natural history, literature, sound and music, film and the visual arts.