Tom K Kemp employs roleplaying game design, animation and filmmaking to tell collaborative ghost stories about complexity and the humans who constitute it.
Working through the roleplaying game form to combine political simulation, fan-fiction and divination into semi-improvised group storytelling, participants are invited to parse systems, complicate common narratives, and synthesise an array of knowledge into plot, dialogue, diagram and performance.
By conflating global systems, political metaphor and organisational infrastructure with genre fiction, players’ personal experience and ludic tangents, Tom’s works attempt an evocation of the emancipatory weirdness of group agency and the unintended consequences of making models of the world.
Tom’s residency is part of the ongoing research Il/legal Fictions
‘After the Maestro’
by Tom K.Kemp
3rd December, 15:00 - 18:00
7 & 13 December, 18:00 - 21:00
Storytelling game
The game sessions are free of entrance and no previous experience is needed. Food and drinks are provided. We advise you to join for all three sessions. Limited places available only.
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After the Maestro is a storytelling game that explores body-politic metaphors, self governance and radical transformation.
The game is set within an ‘anthropomorphised anatomy’ - a depiction of the inner human body as a vast industrialised city sustained by microscopic workers, as seen in animations like Once Upon a Time.. Life, Osmosis Jones and Cells at Work!. Players take on the role of different anatomical political groups during the aftermath of a successful emancipation of the anatomy, where the ‘Maestro’, or organising, vital force of the anatomy, has been removed. In this new era, the body’s organs must navigate their newfound agency, negotiate their needs and desires, and collectively address a series of existential crises.
Through collaborative storytelling and ludic mechanics, each session of the game generates a new narrative of physical and social re-organisation, complicating and estranging common body-politic metaphors into an unpredictable tale of emancipatory body horror.
At Au Jus, we will run a series of consecutive sessions of After the Maestro that tell a continuous story, generating a longer and more developed history of the emancipated body/city. Reflecting the Il/legal Fictions program, there will be a focus on developing what hypothetical legal structures the different components of the body/city requires, and playing to find out the consequences of these laws.
