• Details
    • 2020-2022
    • Ongoing RPG development project
  • Text
    • After the Maestro is a prototype tabletop RPG set within an ‘anthropomorphised anatomy’ as seen in animations like Once Upon a Time.. Life, Osmosis Jones and Cells at Work!, which depict the inner human body as a vast industrialised city, sustained by microscopic workers analogous to cells and microbes. In the game, players take on the role of groups of labourers during the aftermath of a successful labour emancipation within the inner body, where the ‘Maestro’, or centralised vital force of the body, has been removed.
      Through collaborative storytelling and ludic mechanics, each session of the game generates a new narrative of anatomical and social re-organisation, complicating and estranging common body-politic metaphors into a tale of emancipatory body-horror.
    • The game currently exists as a tabletop RPG for 3-6 players, produced in consultation with Avery Alder and as a 'megagame' for 20-30 players with the assistance of megagame designer John Mizon.
    • After the Maestro was initially developed as part of a Research Fellowship with the Sandberg Instituut. For 2021, the development of After the Maestro has kindly been funded by the Stimuleringsfonds.
  • Playsessions and Presentations
    • Podcast with Xenogothic and Wyrd Signal, 2021
      • Recorded at Rupert Residency, LT, I was joined by Matt Colquhoun aka Xenogothic, and Lucy and Sean of the horror philosophy podcast Wyrd Signal and Deleuze and Guattari podcast Buddies Without Organs. Over these 2 episodes, Matt, Lucy and Sean and myself use the game to tell a semi-improvised story incorporating biological fact, phenomenology, political analogy and ‘the body without organs’. How might toxiplasmosis parasites articulate their desires? What responsibility does spermatazoa have to its origin body? What lies beneath the ruins of a stopped heart?

        These episodes are kindly hosted by fanfare Amsterdam and MKG Hamburg as part of Radio Orsimanirana.
    • Universes, 2020
      • Playsession documentation and discussion with Dr Anna McFarlane, Andrea González and Daniel Sean Kelly as part of Universes
      • After the Maestro featured in Universes, a series of online talks and films from artists and writers exploring ideas of worldbuilding creation as a mode of contemporary arts practice. Universes was curated by Daniel Sean Kelly and hosted by The Gallery, Leicester UK.  

        This play report brought together a playthrough of the game with Daniel Sean Kelly, Dr Anna McFarlane, whose research interests draw upon the medical humanities, science fiction and cyberpunk, broadcaster and architect Andrea González.
    • Sandberg Instituut, 2020
      • Presentation as part of Sandberg Research Fellowship programme:
    • Unverifiable Realities, Veem House, Amsterdam 2021
    • Gut Feeling, Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam 2021
      • Live participatory session