Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Endgame), David Blandy and Petra Szemán
Curated by Rebecca Edwards
Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Endgame) concludes a year-long collaborative project by Petra Szemán and David Blandy bridging the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation, and experience and fantasy.
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 nostalgia, self-construction, and the negotiation lived experiences that often remain unsaid.
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.
“I’m already mildly exhausted from my 24/7 LARP as a human.”
First premiered at seventeen, London, in conjunction with works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and John Powell-Jones, Our Ghosts, Our Shells (part 1) positioned gameplay as a radical tool for rethinking action in embodied engagement, and uncovered shared imaginaries that transcend cultures and generations. Players inhabited Blandy’s character Lone as they traversed references from childhood gaming experiences, nostalgia-seeped corridors filled with game-play artefacts and memories; a survey of his “virtual life”. Adopting Szemán’s Yourself, players then found themselves arriving via train to a railway labyrinth, with dead ends and mysterious signposts. Entering a cavity in the game landscape, Yourself and Lone finally meet and wonder who else they might meet in the gameplay landscape they’ve found themselves in.
“You’ve reached the end of this way. But you know that there’s so much further to go.”
In the second iteration Our Ghosts, Our Shells (enhanced) presented at FACT, Liverpool, players find Lone and Yourself as they discover an abandoned art school. Filled with subtle in-jokes about institutional bureaucracy and NPCs designed to instill exasperation, this level spans three floors: a lobby area with an inviting indoor pond, an upper floor currently out of bounds from a sleeping Snorlax, and a basement filled with studios and unreachable rooms. Set to a soundtrack of nostalgic gameplay muzak, players are required to unlock a series of encounters unfolding in the non-linear narrative before they can level up.
“There’s a safety in the digital, that even death can be overcome.”
Within the final iteration of Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Endgame) players guide Lone and Yourself as they enter the space of avatar heaven; a gathering of characters forgotten or left behind on the way. Referencing gaming imaginaries, Endgame reflects on the nature of digital afterlives, the persistence of memory within code, and the emotional residue left in obsolete worlds no longer visited by players. Finding themselves in an inception-esque remake of the gallery space, players in the final level become the game as the game becomes them in a feedback-looped rumination on endings: of games, of selves, and of the identities we build and abandon.
Bios:
David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through 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. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play. https://davidblandy.co.uk/
Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of the cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons. https://www.petraszeman.com/
Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, new forms of cultural production and artistic development, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/
