A Bell is Tolling; FA X The Couch
12/18/23 • 60 min
During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical tropes and expectations, such as their preference for mediaeval villages, steampunk gadgetry or queer-coded villains. We question, who are the typical protagonists, how do these games enforce gendered and heterosexual stereotypes, and how can magic and fantasy enforce these rigid identities in RPGs? Collectively we consider the counter-culture found in online gaming spaces, such as Roblox, as a testing ground for different identities, constructing social orders mimicking contemporary cultural production and what kinds of subversive techniques these games can show us about the virtual and meat worlds we occupy.
*Role-Player-Games
**The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Jan Berger (1993) is a visual artist and platform designer based in Berlin. His practice is primarily occupied with ludic simulation, subject formation and the emergence of cultural mythologies in online spaces. He is the founder and attending curator of the Mythical Institution, a digital project space and art school. As StJennifer, he streams gameplay on twitch.tv.
Artist: Jan Berger
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical tropes and expectations, such as their preference for mediaeval villages, steampunk gadgetry or queer-coded villains. We question, who are the typical protagonists, how do these games enforce gendered and heterosexual stereotypes, and how can magic and fantasy enforce these rigid identities in RPGs? Collectively we consider the counter-culture found in online gaming spaces, such as Roblox, as a testing ground for different identities, constructing social orders mimicking contemporary cultural production and what kinds of subversive techniques these games can show us about the virtual and meat worlds we occupy.
*Role-Player-Games
**The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Jan Berger (1993) is a visual artist and platform designer based in Berlin. His practice is primarily occupied with ludic simulation, subject formation and the emergence of cultural mythologies in online spaces. He is the founder and attending curator of the Mythical Institution, a digital project space and art school. As StJennifer, he streams gameplay on twitch.tv.
Artist: Jan Berger
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
Previous Episode
EsƨƎ-1; Future Artefacts FM X The Couch
How can rituals guide, mislead or comfort us? For the second episode of our collaboration with The Couch*, Bea Xu’s piece EsƨƎ-1 invites us to follow the leader of an anthrax death cult. Made in collaboration with Markéta Skalková and formed by Xu’s research into melting permafrost, their work imagines a post-anthropocentric future where anthrax spores have become objects of fascination and obsession, containing magical properties, transforming skeletons into talismans and forests into autonomous actors against climate devastation. Together we delve into how the occult can provide tools to process extinction beyond nihilism, a means to navigate death in organic or organised ways and how rituals can engage with technological advancements, through both individual and collective means of relating to the planet.
This episode contains themes of death and suicide.
*The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Bea Xu is a Chinese-British psychic worker experimenting with reality production. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention they design and means-test integral, post-Anthropocene cosmologies with live participants and fellow accomplices. Often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus, their work engages with archetypal shadow and is informed by their training as an integrative, transpersonal psychotherapist.
A studio resident at London’s HQI, Bea is a member of oiioiooi collective and completed the 9th Alternative Education Programme at Rupert, Vilnius. They are the creatrix of ritual laboratory LUNARCHY 2.0 and have collaborated with Furtherfield Gallery, Omsk Social Club and Ittah Yodah – with work selected for Solo Show, Plague Space, Arts of the Working Class, amongst others, and shows in Prague, Oslo, Seyðisfjörður, Berlin, NYC and Milan.
Artist: Bea Xu
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
Next Episode
The End of the World; FA X The Couch
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. From online MMORPG’s to table-top role-play, together we discuss the rules that allow these games to exist 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.
Image credit; Images by Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery
Artist Bio;
David Blandy (1976, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning 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.
Blandy’s projects involve complex installations, performance, writing, gaming and sound.
Artist: David Blandy
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
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