Experience how relationships and environments change in this open worlding game experience.
Join us for the first event of this weekend series exploring worlding and life cycles through the lens of ecology. Part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.
You can apply to attend by registering your interest here by Friday, 20 September at noon. Successful applicants will be notified by Tuesday, 24 September.
Participants will experience and discuss the worlding potential of gaming while playing David Blandy’s new tabletop role-playing game, Alien Pastoral: The Strain.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain centres on a biological research station, run by an Authority, as the scientists try to engineer a new strain to solve an existential problem. An adaptation of Blandy’s previous work Gathering Storm, this game explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players will collaboratively design a research station complete with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories to experience how relationships change with their environments in this open worlding game experience.
You do not need any prior role-playing game experience to participate. The workshop is followed by a feedback session with the artist.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain is a participatory event which involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling; including material around body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.
The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is a long durational project that looks at the world-building potential of culture in the face of ecological destruction. Committing to working towards planetary thriving, this interdisciplinary series centres artist-led reimaginings for environmental action.
Ecologies is Serpentine’s new interdisciplinary department, focusing on developing a holistic, flexible and adaptive approach to embedding environmental purpose throughout Serpentine’s programmes, infrastructure and networks. Our mission is to place culture at the heart of environmental efforts, demonstrating how environmental commitment can guide the cultural sector. Ecologies was born from the learnings of the General Ecology project and Back to Earth.
BSL interpretation is available upon request. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you would like to request this.
David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.
He has exhibited & performed at venues nationally and worldwide, with solo shows at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; The Exchange, Newlyn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. Blandy has also exhibited in museums internationally including at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; & MoMA PS1, New York.
Curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies, and Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes. Produced by Isobel Peyton-Jones, Producer.
The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies, Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes, and Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes
