Net//Work Exhibition:
Uma Breakdown
Lich Way Party Train is a game by Uma Breakdown. It was presented as part of the Net//Work Exhibition 4 May - 7 June 2021.
Click here to explore the game.
It’s a game about your job, which is to say the game is concerned with the relentless moving of dead bodies along the Corpse Roads around your parish (through the rocky forests, or watery coves, the dust blown access corridors under the Hatfield Galleria), and stopping at the appropriate junctions (don’t let the coffin touch the ground, the ghost will get out, uh oh!) to sing the songs as instructed by the (beautiful, but horrifyingly large) birds that guard the junctions. Everything breaks, but everything also keeps going, a little degraded, a little more wild. The game lasts as long as the Akai MPC keeps repeating, which is to say, forever
About Uma Breakdown
Uma Breakdown is an artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer games. Last year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead,care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play. Also in 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG (with Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns,and Erik Martinson) at Kim?,Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. In 2021 they have undertaken residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude and Wysing Arts Centre, and are currently researching criminality as love/writing in the work of Genet and Cixous.
Net//Work Exhibition and Residency
The Net//Work Exhibition brought together the practices of Net//Work Residency artists Leyya Mona Tawil, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Uma Breakdown. From games to interactive audio, the exhibition will present these very different practices through the connections and reciprocity formed between the artists. Net//Work was a four-week residency 18 January - 14 February 2021 developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. Wysing worked with artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and Leyya Mona Tawil with support from David Blandy. Digital Arts Studios joined with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin to host Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.
For more information about the Net//Work Residency, click here.
