Tom K Kemp

GB, 1988
  • resident
    • 2021 – 2023

Tom K Kemp (GB, 1989) employs roleplaying game design to tell collaborative ghost stories about the relationship between complex systems and their human constituents. They work with specific participants through the semi-improvised group storytelling of roleplaying games to parse complexity, complicate common narratives, and synthesise an array of knowledges.

Plots, dialogue, and performances are generated for film works which mix genre fiction with simulation, often exploring notions of self-organisation, problems of scale, and political metaphor. These narratives veer rapidly between the structural and the intimate, developing over multiple scales; intimate, immediate human relations and bodily conditions are conflated with state policy, planetary processes or deep timeframes. Incorporating post-production and animated entities, Kemp's films strive for a vertiginous, disorienting affect that is inspired by Weird fiction, in which the reader and protagonist are subject to the consequences of supernatural phenomena without ever fully comprehending them.

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