Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility.
The first exhibition of its kind, it highlights the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow-travellers in the field of critical art practice.
Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe, this experimental exhibition reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab – a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors are invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that highlight questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.
…reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.
Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play.
Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling. Archival vitrines illustrate Nottingham’s essential role in the development of gaming history.
…archival vitrines illustrate Nottingham’s essential role in the development of gaming history.
An original essay-film by the curators, produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, explores the shared experience of game space as a site of hallucinatory possibility.
Reactor Halls, an experimental programme of live performance, film and music events curated by Reactor, are a supporting partner of this exhibition.
Angela Washko is an artist, filmmaker, and experimental game developer who creates new forums for discussions about feminism in spaces frequently hostile towards it. Her practice spans interventions in virtual environments, performance art, media installation, documentary film, and video games. A recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Franklin Furnace Performance Fund, Impact Award at Indiecade, and Jury Awards for Best Documentary at the American Film Festival, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, and Buffalo International Film Festival, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, and the Shenzhen Animation Biennial.
Angela Washko is the Catherine B. Heller Collegiate Professor of Art & Design at University of Michigan where she founded the Roleplaying Realities Lab. This is a space for performers, creative technologists, game developers, writers, and grassroots activists to come together and simulate more inclusive, visionary, and radical prospective worlds through socially and politically engaged tabletop roleplaying projects made for and by those who have been historically marginalised from the mainstream games industry.
Andrew Walter is an illustrator and writer in the field of indie tabletop roleplaying games, primarily within the science fiction and fantasy genres. He graduated with a BA in Illustration from Kingston in 2007 and has lived and worked in London since. The majority of his work is in physical media such as pencil, inks and watercolour, a consequence of inspiration drawn from the rugged worlds of pulp fantasy paperbacks, classic RPG and computer game art, and underground death metal artwork.
His best known illustrated works include covers and illustrations for B/X Essentials (later to become Old School Essentials), the original Dolmenwood setting zines, Fever Swamp, and Slate and Chalcedony. Some of his published writing for RPGs includes Fronds of Benevolence, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse and Slipgate Chokepoint all of which are also illustrated by the author. He was listed as an Artist of Note in Stu Horvath’s acclaimed 2023 survey of independent roleplaying games Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground.
Amanda Lee Franck is an artist and writer living in Chicago. She studied painting and natural history illustration and has spent many hours drawing the dinosaur bones at the Field Museum of Natural History. The first RPG she ever ran (and first zine she ever published) was You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge. She has written and illustrated books for Games Omnivorous, Gauntlet RPG, Exalted Funeral Press, Mausritter, and many others.
Chris Bissette is an award-winning multidisciplinary creative whose practice encompasses writing, music, and graphic design. Although they primarily work within the field of tabletop role-playing games his career has seen them produce music videos and score films, and in 2025 they will be composing music for the upcoming Mörk Borg video game.
In 2024 Chris was commissioned to write an adventure for Paizo’s Pathfinder Society line and provided the score for the short horror film One Star Review. In 2023 they helped facilitate the Storytelling Collective’s TTRPG Reading Club. They have written adventures and supplements for Pathfinder 2, Fallout: The Roleplaying Game, Hunter: The Reckoning, and many more, and contributed two albums of original music to SoulMuppet’s Orbital Blues and its expansion Orbital Blues: Afterburn. In 2020 his solo journaling game The Wretched was released to popular and critical acclaim, appearing on multiple end-of-year lists and spawning hundreds of new games based on its Wretched & Alone engine. In the same year he was chosen as one of the Storytelling Collective’s inaugural Creative Laureates, and was asked to write a set of lessons about adventure design for their students.
Chris’ work has been shortlisted for the Origins Awards and nominated for the ENnie Awards. They are a member of the SFWA, where he is an active member of the Game Writing Committee.
David Blandy (he / him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.
Blandy searches for meaning in cultural life, through an expanded form of auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, weaving poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.
Represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London.
He has exhibited and 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 Serpentine Gallery, London; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; & MoMA PS1, New York. Alongside writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe and curator Rebecca Edwards, Blandy curated Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries, a symposium and live play session at Arebyte London. He also has a collaborative joint practice with artist Larry Achiampong. Genetic Automata, at Wellcome Collection was their first museum exhibition as a duo.
Laurie O’Connel of Twelve Pins Press is a London-based writer who writes fiction and game texts about broken systems, adaptation and resistance. You can find Laurie online or follow him on Bluesky.
With a loose, haphazard, gestural style often veering on the edge of self destruction, recognizable as it is metamorphic, Scrap has inflicted this approach on everything from stages, carparks, junk materials, clothing, tape recordings and human skin.
Gamebooks, specifically the broke and baroque scenes of DIY rpgs, have been a viable substrate for Scrap, and he’s now drawn in several books. More than several even. Several several.
Shuyi Zhang is an artist, exhibition designer, and bookshop owner who has accidentally become intimately familiar with every process in the life of a book. He began his education in architecture where he explored his passion for design and drawing, but once he stepped into the fantasy world he found he could explore a lot more than buildings. A mixed use of media with pencil, ink, and watercolour is his main preference, creating a soft fantasy world of his own.
His best known work is Fungi of the Far Realms, a book about a fantasy mushroom world. He has also worked on a variety of books published by Melsonian Arts Council, including Troika! RPG. He is currently working on a comic series Stay!.
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 and speculative analysis into semi-improvised group storytelling, participants are invited to parse systems, complicate common narratives, and synthesise an array of knowledges into plot, dialogue, diagram and performance.
By conflating global systems, political metaphor and organisational infrastructure with genre fiction, players’ personal experience and ludic tangents, his works attempt an evocation of the emancipatory weirdness of group agency and the unintended consequences of making models of the world.
He has exhibited at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, Quad, Derby and the MKG Hamburg. He has attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Triangle-Astérides Marseille, Cité International des Arts, Paris and Rupert, Vilnius.
Zedeck Siew is a writer, translator, and game designer based in Port Dickson, Malaysia. With visual artist Sharon Chin, he created Creatures of Near Kingdoms, an illustrated guide to imaginary Malaysian animals and plants. He writes adventure texts for tabletop roleplaying games – most notably Lorn Song of the Bachelor (2019); Spy in the House of Eth (2020); Reach of the Roach God (2023), and To Put Away A Sword (2024). He is slowly being poisoned by a petroleum refinery 200m from his garden, and worries often about family ghosts.
David Blandy (he / him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.
Blandy searches for meaning in cultural life, through an expanded form of auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, weaving poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.
Represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London.
He has exhibited and 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 Serpentine Gallery, London; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; & MoMA PS1, New York. Alongside writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe and curator Rebecca Edwards, Blandy curated Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries, a symposium and live play session at Arebyte London. He also has a collaborative joint practice with artist Larry Achiampong. Genetic Automata, at Wellcome Collection was their first museum exhibition as a duo.
Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. Rebecca was the curator at arebyte Gallery from 2017 – 2024.
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press.
His work explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, and the persistence of myth, all understood as technologies of selfhood.
His essays, interviews and reviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly, Art Review, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, Rhizome and The White Review.
He is the editor of Documents Of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, and co-editor of Weeb Theory, a collection of theoretical resources for artists encountering the intermedial fan cultures of animation.
Adam Sinclair has specialised in 3D modelling and animation for real time environments and video work since 2007. He has worked in close collaboration with some of the UK’s most prominent artists. These include Ed Atkins, Helen Marten (2016 Turner prize winner), Elizabeth Price (2012 Turner prize winner) and Tai Shani (2019 Turner Prize Winner). Adam’s collaborative work has been displayed in many locations around the world including the museum of modern art – New York, the Venice Biennale, and Palais de Tokyo – Paris. He has helped artists use new technology to create interactive and immersive experiences.
Lotti V Closs (B. Whitstable 1987) lives and works in Manchester, UK.
She studied MFA Sculpture at West Dean College graduating in 2014, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her multi-disciplinary sculptural practice has a core of intuitive, introspective making, working closely by hand with elements of intimate scale. Her work reflects key themes of complexities of play and relationship through material conversation which often straddle both the domestic and the theatrical.
Image: Andrew Walter, courtesy the artist.
