0UR 6H05T5, 0UR 5H3115 (Our Ghosts, Our Shells)
(2025-26)
David Blandy and Petra Szemán
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In an era when identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, Our Ghosts, Our Shells questions how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s techno-political milieu. By opening and mending the cracks between player/world and character/creator, the work challenges the nature of agency and identity across platforms of existence. In a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace, how we become entangled with alter-egos, doppelgängers, and second-selves reveals the porous boundaries of how we perform, remember, and relate while inhabiting multiple versions of self, both on- and off-screen.
Alter egos are often used to describe a concealed or contrasting side of a person's personality, but in the case of playable characters in Our Ghosts, Our Shells, these alter egos are imbued with a sense of sincerity. Existing in a state of perpetual becoming — both ghost and vessel — they’re never fully whole but never entirely detached. Departing from a strictly biographical narrative, the game probes sentimentality, self-construction, and the online lived experiences that often remain suppressed. Acting as a non-linear exploration game, players aren’t given the opportunity to collect assets, engage in fight scenes, or increase their HP. Instead, the avatars Lone and Yourself operate as extensions of the players’ inner states. Drifting through shifting environments that mirror memory, loss, and the quiet absurdity of persistence, their movements trace emotional rather than strategic maps. The game unfolds less as a quest for victory than as an act of witnessing: two figures navigating the liminal spaces between avatar and player, asking where the self ends and the character begins, and what gets left behind. Exhibition schedule: Seventeen, London FACT, Liverpool Two Queens, Leicester Chemist, London London Games Festival, London Curated and produced by Rebecca Edwards
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