Tetley Jerwood Comission

 Uma Breakdown

I got nominated to submit a thing to this. Beyond happy to be asked. Brutal word limit.

Statement For Tetley Jerwood Commission, October 2020

My practice lives in the overlap between queer feminist philosophy and theories of literature, speculative horror, and the collaborative exchange of role playing games. As a disabled artist I’m interested in how each of these areas offer their own respective languages and approaches to instability, brokenness, love, and affect.

My work asks how uncertainty and the encounter with difference can be made welcoming and empathetic. I explore this question through open and experimental practices of writing and image making that welcome the audience as collaborator. From these collaborative processes I produce texts, games, diagrams, videos, sculptures, radio plays, lectures and performances. In each instance my work centres expressions of solidarity while inviting the speculation of horror

This year I made a plant sentience RPG for KIM? In Latvia, published an article on a Russian horror game and Hélène Cixous’s writing on death, and wrote a scifi story on trauma, SSRIs and Antonin Artaud. I also finished a PhD mostly about Deleuze, The X Files, and dogs. 

Fig1: Planning Diagram for this commission proposal. 

Proposal 2020 Arcade Campfa Digital commission

“Laurie Holden’s Mansions of Mist”

Uma Breakdown

Twine is a coding language for quickly writing simple, primarily text based video games and interactive stories, which can be hosted online and played directly through a web browser on almost any computer. “Laurie Holden’s Mansions of Mist” is an artwork I would like to make in Twine, which uses the opportunities provided by the coding language (i.e. forking narrative paths, text which changes depending on previous decisions or at random, simple embedded images) to combine the Gothic Mansion (i.e. rooms for everything, hidden rooms, rooms which change, strange codes and rituals) with feminist writing strategies of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker (i.e. language that appropriates, mutates, collapses, destabilises character and voice).

The artwork takes as its source material Frank Darabont’s 2007 film “The Mist”, which concerns residents of a small town trapped in a supermarket surrounded by a thick mist full of monsters. The artwork also draws from the relationship between “The Mist” and other works by Darabont, via its cast of character-actors, who often play characters which are recycled (unacknowledged) from this film. Laurie Holden in particular is a genre star who is repeatedly cast in very similar doomed but heroic roles that begin to merge into one character across her body of work.

Following Cixous and Acker, the artwork explores how the structures and feeling of language can be destabilized through the telling of a story which itself deals with a domestic space that is unstable and strange.

Proposal 2020 Derby Artcore Error Residency

Why do you want to take part in the residency? *
Please detail the reasons for taking part in this residency and how it will benefit your practice. (up to 250 words)
I’ve spent a lot of time working around ideas of overloaded systems as creative sites, and politics of welcoming the glitch (to not support the idea of a shiny and complete object, but to acknowledge the bootstrapping in the code is waiting to be cannibalised for another project rather than cleaned up into something finished). I have an anxiety disorder (that often precludes me from things like residencies as travel and breaks in my routine are often impossible) which I have been considering as part of a glitch prone system that includes my nervous system, the econo-legal requirements of work, the weather, the animals I live with, and so on. I think of the glitch of a panic-attack as a creative event, its new which is why it’s terrifying. This is something I’d like to explore in this residency. 

The above work, due to my PhD requirements, has been mostly aimed at outputs on a printed page. I’ve made web based works like video games, images, and hypertexts as a way of researching ideas, but I’ve not had the opportunity or time to finalise these as things for an exhibition audience.
I’m really invested in the internet as a platform for art that is unstable, work can be open to adaptation, participation, and theft. More importantly, as Hito Steyrl pointed out, it's a place of “poor images”. Everything is a collaboration with artifacts and noise in the unclear overlaps between the amateur mistake, digital accident, and deliberate strategy. I want to take part in the residency to bring its themes and forms to those of my practice and research.
How do you plan to use your time in the residency space? *
Please provide a brief overview of your ideas for the residency and examples of activities you would like to undertake.
I’m interested in how art in the form of games can utilize the glitch in a manner which highlights the agency in the audience and external systems of order and control, whilst also considering how rules are often vague, ambiguous, and open to interpretation by power. Ideas for exploring this include:
The development of simple role playing games where the rules contain conflicts, holes, or other points where play might creatively degrade.
The development of simple web-hostable video games (using systems like Bitsy, Twine, Ink, and basic HTML) where rules/narrative/roles degrade.
Exploring how the collapse/glitching/overloading of information delivered through images (i.e. low resolution pixel art or “deep fried” image processing) and text (i.e. formal writing constraints or cut-ups) in such games can be used to highlight the site of rules/transgressions and the agency of the player-audience.
The playtesting of the above over streaming platforms like Twitch to make further artworks through the performance of playing/hacking/breaking the game.
Writing via the blog about how the glitch feeds into other areas such as horror cinema (see quoted footnote in the next section), lo-fi amateur video games and fanfic. 
I’d like also to take advantage of other aspects of the residency, and keeping with the theme of the project see where they can be blurred, broken, or fed back. Can the blog glitch from a report of research done, into an artwork itself? Can the catalogue be made unstable at points? So like with a tarot card reading the broken space between some elements need to be creatively activated by the reader? 




Relevant previous experience *
Please tell us about any relevant experience
For a number of years I have been making art through and about “being broken” with particular attention to politics of this. This is in no small part informed by my being a queer disabled artists, and an engagement with the queer poltics of “failure” and crip politics of being “less than”. But I mainly draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of Desire in their book “Anti-Oedipus” as a process of production which is always breaking-down in new creative ways, creating new unexpected results as its mechanisms degrade. 

I’ve made a lot of artworks which are someone on a line between a diagram and a fragmenting text, and a few of these have been exhibited or published. I’m interested in forms of writing where there are gaps, like the found pieces in an epistolary novel like Dracula, or the processes that Kathy Acker described as taking a text “passed failure”, or any kind of unreliable narrator. 

A couple of years ago I did a performance at the Whitechapel gallery in London that tied the glitches and gaps in (the english translation of) the Japanese horror film Ring into an approach to making/viewing art that focused on where it collapses/mutates. 


In March 2020, via remote conferencing at the beginning of Corona lockdown,  I passed the viva exam for my art practice PhD entitled "Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self and play in this chaotic situation."  My PhD research took the form of a toolkit (based in part on the system of manuals for Tabletop Role playing Games (TTRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons)  to look at art practice as an unstable process which continues beyond the artist studio in one direction and the audiences encounter in the other. The toolkit considers art practice from three overlapping points of view: as overwhelming sensation, as systems always creatively breaking down, and as an unseen space which can only be seen through how it transforms things that pass through it.  

The “glitch” appears in all of points of view, and is considered through outside disciplines which already have language for dealing with overload, collapse, and the unknown. These discipines include feminist writing strategies, the collaboarative storytelling of TTRPGs, indie vieo games primairy concerned with trans* identity, fan fiction, horror film and television studies. Through this research I have been developing tools for thinking about creative practice as something always incomplete, and always in collaboration with some kind of disorder outside itself. The proposal for this residency has its basis in a footnote from my thesis which pointed to a pathway I was unable to pursue due to the requirements of that project. 

“12. The ellipses in Aperitif along with its other instances of expressive
absences or damaged/lo definition information and therefore could be further
examined in terms of writer and curator Legacy Russell’s theory regarding
glitches and “sliding between identifications” (Russell, 2012, 2013). This
line of inquiry could be then further pursued via artist Hito Steyerl’s concept
of the “poor image” which can create “disruptive movements of thought and
affect” (Steyerl, 2009). Likewise theorist Steven Shaviro’s text on the titular
“found-footage” horror film “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity
and the Technologies of Vision”, presents another point of departure via
the deployment of absence and noise in horror cinema (Shaviro, 2017).
Shaviro’s analysis that “We are affected (and oppressed) as much by their
glitches, gaps and limitations as we are by their successful operations”
(Shaviro, 2017, p. 331), like those of Russell and Steyerl open up the breaks
in digital images as a site of both politics and affect.” 

Proposal 2020 New Bridge Project Dungeons & Disaster

Uma Breakdown

Proposal: Dungeons & Disaster

A tool-kit to introduce artists to techniques of Role Playing Games (RPGs) as a means toward both artworks in the form of games, and as tools for developing creative practice. Drawing from the history of both forms I will show how the mechanisms of collaborative storytelling in RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons resonates with the creative provocations of artworks like Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit”.

RPGs are both systems in which to improvise, and provocations to adapt or create new systems. I provide sources and links for artist to explore further, focusing on the genre of the “one page RPG” where there entire game is outlined on a single side of A4.

Finally I conclude by proposing that RPGs provide a framework to think about art practice as a continual process rather than one that resolves into outputs. This process is considered as a dialectical one between our active decisions and the friction of things outside us and our control, whether these be limits of clay or a dice roll.

My PhD looks at art practice through the overlaps of RPG manuals and feminist writing techniques. This PmP opportunity would allow me to share part of this research in a non-academic context, make contacts with other artists interested in similar practices, and develop further projects.

This project could be expanded into an event through conversation/play with invited artist/game designers such as Aido Wall, (http://rottedcavern.com/), Felix Kawitzky, (https://www.felixkawitzky.net/), or Allan Hughes & Mark Jackson (http://arcturusgames.com/).

Proposal 2019 Revenant Journal "Twyre is pain of the Steppe"

Twyre is pain of the Steppe: death, dying, and the player as writer in Pathologic.

R. Dorey


Pathologic offers a dying city. [...]. A pustule encrusted town where events carry on regardless of your presence, slowly wasting away despite you. This is a fascinating game. And a very broken one (Walker, 2006).

The 2005 survival horror video game ‘Pathologic’ sees the player take control of one of three characters (‘the Thanatologist’, ‘the Haruspex’, and ‘the Changeling’) attempting to prevent, manage, cure, and explain the outbreak of a plague. The game’s manual describes it as a ‘“simulator of human behavior in the condition of pandemic”: it purports to test the user’s ability to make right decisions in times of crisis’ (Harrist, 2012).

The setting is an unspecified town bordered by a steppe, with an economy based around a huge slaughterhouse, and culture based on complex hierarchies and laws around death. The majority of a typical playthrough sees the player constantly on the verge of dying as they seek to understand the local cultures, navigate the conflicting narratives of the inhabitants, and acquire the knowledge, materials and permissions to stop the plague. Pathologic is offers a survival which is always a choice between ruinous or debasing options, searching waste bins for junk to trade with children or dissecting corpses for organs to sell to the doctor forms the game’s economy which never allows the player to accrue the capital to surpass this struggle. Outside of this, the game itself is a struggle to play, even in its 2015 HD remaster it uses deliberately limited graphics, awkward mechanics and restricted information, deploying the qualities of a broken game to further its exploration of apocalyptic crisis.

From Quintin Smith’s trilogy of articles (Smith, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) which popularised Pathologic to English speaking audiences, to Harris ‘Hbomberguy’ Brewis’s 2 hour video analysis (Brewis, 2019) the common tension around the game is that it is both a work of art, and ‘agonizing to play’ (Harrist, 2012). I will argue that the latter is a feature of the former.

The developers ‘deliberately refuse to create a comfortable environment for the gamer. The addressee is not the consumer. [They are] the coauthor. Passing the deep game is a creative process’ (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2001). I analyze this player-role through game theorist Mary Flanagan’s concepts of ‘hyperknowledge’ and ‘rendition’, aligning the player’s navigation of game space from multiple irreconcilable points of view from a feminist philosophy of embodiment (Flanagan, 2002).

The player experience of difficulty, unreliable information, and constant proximity to death is theorised through the feminist writing practices of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker. Acker has conceptualised writing as dying ‘while remaining alive’ (Acker, 1990, p. 174) while Cixous approaches writing as ‘learning to die’ (Cixous, 2005, p. 10) and both offer ways of thinking of writing through its points of collapse and divergence. These writers offer a framework to examine the player-as-author while recontextualization the trauma of playing, the game’s collapsing and unreliable narratives, and the meaning of death and survival within such a creative process.

In conclusion, I argue that more than just being a game set within a nightmare space, where the environmental collapsed with the social and economic order, Pathologic demands active and complicit investment in these from the player. Pathologic is ‘hypo-ludic’ (Conway, 2012), as the game restricts conventional enjoyment through its mechanics, graphics, and morally compromising choices. The player of Pathologic is forced to engage in the creative process of roleplay in this apocalyptic waste, and in doing so both engages with feminist writing techniques and uses what game theorist Jesper Juul has identified as the unique capacity of games to make an audience complict in tragedy (Juul, 2013).

Acker, K. (1990). In memoriam to identity (1st ed). Grove Weidenfeld.

Brewis, H. (2019, November 21). Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsNm2YLrk30

Cixous, H. (2005). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Conway, S. (2012). We Used to Win, We Used to Lose, We Used to Play: Simulacra, Hypo-Ludicity and the Lost Art of Losing. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 9(1), 27. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.147

Dybovsky, N. (2005). On the Threshold of the Bone House, or as Game Becomes Art. (2005). I C E - P I C K. http://old.ice-pick.com/ore9_eng.htm

Dybowski, N. (2015). Pathologic Classic HD [Microsoft Windows]. G2 Games, Ice-Pick Lodge.

Flanagan, M. (2002). Hyperbodies Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk and Strategies of Resistance. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (Eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture. MIT Press.

Goodman, P. (2014, December 1). Pathologic Interview. The Escapist. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/12333-Pathologic-Interview#&gid=gallery_3295&pid=1

Harrist, J. (2012, April 30). Infected Zones. Kill Screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20140815022720/http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/infected-zones/

Hiller, B. (2016, December 1). The new Pathologic is still one of the best games it’s no fun to actually play. VG247. https://www.vg247.com/2016/12/01/the-new-pathologic-is-still-one-of-the-best-games-its-no-fun-to-actually-play/

Hitorin, V. (2014, November 3). Pathologic: Saving the virtual world from a Russian plague. https://www.rbth.com/science_and_tech/2014/11/03/pathologic_saving_the_virtual_world_from_a_russian_plague_41037.html

Ice-Pick Lodge. (2001, March 18). Manifesto 2001. Ice-Pick Lodge. https://ice-pick.com/en/manifesto-2001/

Ilukhin, K. (2015, February 13). Pathologic: Interview with game creators. Sci-Fi and Fantasy Network. http://www.scififantasynetwork.com/pathologic-interview-with-game-creators/

Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure: An essay on the pain of playing video games. MIT Press.

Novitz, J. (2017). Scarcity and Survival Horror Trade as an Instrument of Terror in Pathologic. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2(1), 63–88.

Smith, Q. (2008a, April 10). Butchering Pathologic – Part 1: The Body. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/

Smith, Q. (2008b, April 11). Butchering Pathologic – Part 2: The Mind. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/11/butchering-pathologic-part-2-the-mind/

Smith, Q. (2008c, April 12). Butchering Pathologic – Part 3: The Soul. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/12/butchering-pathologic-part-3-the-soul/

Proposal 2020, FACT Together, Animal Agency

Artist: Uma Breakdown

Title: “Animal Agency”

The Fact Together scheme, and the context of “The Living Planet” is a really timely opportunity for me to develop a project from a number of strands of my recent research and practice.

Patricia MacCormack’s concept of the “Ahuman” (MacCormack, 2012, 2014, 2018) extends across the philosopher’s interests in both art, and the duty of care for the non-human inhabitants of the planet. MacCormack uses the Ahuman to propose animals can be recognised and given ethical consideration not in their relationships-to, or differences-from Human, but as beings in their own right who are never knowable to humans. They have a right to exist not because of what they are, but simply because they are.

MacCormack also uses the same term to propose “Becoming Ahuman”, whereby the experience of encountering art can briefly break the audience’s concept of themselves as human as they negotiate their orientation to new ideas and affects. Both uses of the term Ahuman reshape the encounter (with art, with non-human perspectives) as something not about translation or interpretation, but as something of value that is always incomplete, hidden, or overwhelming. To use the language of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this shifts from the paranoid position of suspicion to the reparative position of care and love. The default position becomes permeability, community, and interconnected networks and processes.

I’m interested in how queer and feminist experimental literature and theory, speculative fiction, and text based video and role playing games all in their own ways and terms engage at points with what MacCormack calls the Ahuman. Each finds ways for language, meaning to come loose, opening up different ways of seeing and communicating outside of the category human.

I have just finished a PhD that used the concept of the Ahuman; the practice of artists like Tai Shani and Porpentine Charity Heartscape; the theory of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker; to propose an approach to art practice which normalises the incomplete, unknown, or collapsing, through the prioritising of care. During the PhD I made small online works, around a very similar area to “The Living Planet”, using simple games design systems (Bitsy, Twine, RPGM), video streaming, and other techniques (TTRPG systems, Diagrams, Cutups), to explore ideas of care for the non-human. These works were part of my methodology of research into art practice and as such are mainly experiments. I would very much like to use the time, support, and resources of Fact Together to develop a new game that exists as a fully resolved artwork on the internet.

I will use GameMaker Studio (GMS) to produce this artwork for HTML5 so that it can be played directly in a browser. The artwork begins as an interactive fiction, but uses the expanded capacity of GMS to destabilise this experience in the way that the techniques of Acker, Antonin Artaud and William Burroughs do for text. I have already done work with the limits of game structure (whether the rules for pen and paper TTRPGs, or image and coding language systems of Twine and RPGM) and how these can be broken to approach Becoming Ahuman. GMS will allow me to push this further, creating a browser embedded game where the player navigates a space that breaks or folds into text, and shifts register and relationship to the audience.

Something that's interesting about the concept of the Ahuman and its relationship to care and alienation is that it refuses to see these as mutually exclusive. The experience of playing a game/artwork that breaks down is one of alienation because it makes things new and strange, but the ethical proposal of Ahuman is that care still exists across this breach. This is what I want to focus on for Fact Together, the idea of emotional connection without needing constant intellectual connection.



Acker, K. (1990). In memoriam to identity (1st ed). Grove Weidenfeld.

Acker, K. (1991). Devoured by Myths. In Hannibal Lecter, my father (pp. 1–24). Semiotext(e).

Acker, K. (2006). Bodies of work: Essays. Serpent’s Tail.

Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(4), 875–893.

Cixous, H. (2005). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2014). The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory. A&C Black.MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). Bloomsbury.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2004). Tendencies. Taylor & Francis e-Library. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=6801

Sellers, S. (2002). ‘Writing is learning to die’: Hélène Cixous and the School of the Dead. Oxford Literary Review, 24, 97–111. JSTOR.