Future Artefacts for The Couch / Het Hem
Future Artefacts FM / Het Hem Podcast episode launches February 11th 2024
& Online exhibition of Androids Dream, David Blandy, 2022
Image credit; Images by Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery
The Couch / Future Artefacts FM
Hosted by artists Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Also available on the following platforms:
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Future Artefacts FM are producing a mini-series for Dutch organisation, Het Hem and their online space The Couch on Magic and Technology with a focus on artists that work with soundscapes.
What would you do at the end of the world? For the third part of our collaboration with The Couch, we are thrilled to share David Blandy’s work, The End of The World, a 13 minute audio piece, originating from a larger video installation made in 2017.
Revisiting this work, we explore the ends of multiple worlds; family illness, the foundations of a political system shattering and the end of a 17 year old magical gaming world, Asheron’s Call. When reflected in the present moment, we hear from Blandy about collective grief, and where places of solidarity, like that in Asheron’s call, can help us come to terms with the endings of multiple worlds.
Together we discuss the rules that allow these games to exist, particularly that of table-top role-play, by defining a space for worldbuilding or escape, parameters to enter and leave worlds, and to destroy them. The similarities of this logic to embodied magical practices further connects the community of spell making in Asheron’s Call, to the broader realities witchcraft or ritual suggest. These rules could also be a set of fictions, enabling us to review which worlds around us are ending, and what the end of one world might impose on another.
*The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Online exhibition of Androids Dream, David Blandy, 2022