Proposal 2020 CVAN NE Residency

R Dorey/ Uma Breakdown.

CVAN NE Creative Space Residency statement 2020




I would like to use the CVAN NE residency to make an artwork that is also a means of learning new techniques, researching existing practices outside of art, and establishing how my practice might work under the conditions of C19.

Over the past three years I have been researching the collaborative processes of storytelling in Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs), as a potential form of Écriture féminine, as understood from the theory and practice of writers like Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker.

TTRPGS, like divination practices such as tarot, involve changing frictions between structures and rules, improvisation and response, between the people and objects. This friction means that the narrative emerging from a TTRPG is always changing or breaking, and the choices made in playing it leave it clear that this is only one or many ways it could have played out, with others always implied. I’m interested in how artworks can function where uncertainty and speculation is a given, increasing the audience's agency in the process.

For the residency, I would like to research and explore the existing TTRPG platforms such as Roll20.com which allows remote players to share a virtual tabletop, as well as other platforms and means of sharing an image drawn in real time.

In the past I have made some performance works that use the systems from TTRPGs such as rolling dice or choosing from prepared cards to destabilise the process. I think that despite being more physically remote, the online platforms could make something that is far more intimate and involved. A webcam close up on hands dealing and reading specially made cards, or a screen where the artist is drawing a diagram and a member of the audience is also drawing has the potential to be a really affective experience I think.




In practical terms I have a number of things I want to try with the resources of the residency. The artwork is at its heart a story generated from prepared fragments and prompts, chance, interaction with the audience, and feedback loops between all of these. I would like time to play with the form of those different elements. For example, perhaps the setting of the story is chosen by listing numbered options and rolling a dice. Perhaps though, using an online collaborative drawing page like https://aggie.io/ could lead to something more engaged, with more options and exits. How can webcams, screen sharing, digital and analogue drawing, and greenscreen turn the home office desk into a dynamic performance space?

This residency will help me establish ways to continue to make and disseminate my practice under the current conditions. I lost the majority of my income with the outbreak, as I was about to begin a new creative role at The Centre for Life in Newcastle in March, and this employment has been cancelled while the museum is closed. I am disabled and this limits my ability to work and engage with art in general, but my plan for the CVAN NE residency is to develop a new way of working and showing my practice which will extend beyond the conditions of C19.

Examples of tarot/TTRPG performance (☚) and streaming experiments

(☛).