After the Maestro w/ Xenogothic and Wyrd Signal: Episode 1/2

After the Maestro is a prototype tabletop RPG by artist Tom K Kemp. The game is set within an ‘anthropomorphised anatomy’ as seen in animations like ‘Once Upon a Time.. Life’, ‘Osmosis Jones’ and ‘Cells at Work!’, which depict the inner human body as a vast industrialised city, sustained by microscopic workers analogous to cells and microbes. In the game, players take on the role of groups of labourers during the aftermath of a successful labour emancipation within the inner body, where the ‘Maestro’, or centralised vital force of the body, has been removed.
Through collaborative storytelling and ludic mechanics, each session of the game generates a new narrative of anatomical and social re-organisation, complicating and estranging common body-politic metaphors into a tale of emancipatory body-horror.

In these broadcasts Tom is joined in a playsession of After the Maestro by Matt Colquhoun aka Xenogothic, and Lucy and Sean of the horror philosophy podcast Wyrd Signal and Deleuze and Guattari podcast Buddies Without Organs. Over these 2 episodes, Tom, Matt, Lucy and Sean use the game to tell a semi-improvised story incorporating biological fact, phenomenology, political analogy and ‘the body without organs’. How might toxiplasmosis parasites articulate their desires? What responsibility does spermatazoa have to its origin body? What lies beneath the ruins of a stopped heart?

In Episode 1, we meet the emancipated coalition of the Pineal Gland, Toxiplasma-gondii, Spermatazoa and Heart, and are introduced to the challenges of the post-Maestro City. Radical actions are taken, agency is questioned, and biological, social and physical laws are re-written.

About the cast:

Matt Colquhoun, AKA Xenogothic, is a blogger and author of Egress: On Melancholy, Mourning and Mark Fisher & editor of Postcapitalist Desire, and co-host of the Deleuze and Guattari podcast Buddies Without Organs.
twitter: https://twitter.com/xenogothic
https://xenogothic.com/
insta: instagram.com/xenogothic

Lucy and Sean host the horror/philosophy/queer theory podcast Wyrd Signal, with Sean also appearing on Buddies Without Organs with Matt
Wyrd Signal:
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/wyrdsignalpodcast
Instagram: instagram.com/wyrdsignalpod
Twitter: twitter.com/wyrd_signal
Buddies Without Organs:
https://buddieswithout.org/
Twitter: twitter.com/bwo_pod

Tom K Kemp is an artist that uses RPG design, improvised filmmaking and animation to parse the eerie consequences of global bureaucratic and economic systems on intimate and immediate human relations. His works generate semi-autonomous Weird fictions, where gamification and collaborative storytelling are combined into a deviated method of complexity modelling.
www.tomkkemp.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AftertheMaestro
Instagram: instagram.com/tom_kkemp

Music for the episodes - Legal and General Life Solutions, kindly provided by Percival Pembroke - https://percivalpembroke.bandcamp.com/

Cover art designed with Oort
https://oort.network/

These episodes are hosted by Fanfare Amsterdam, recorded at Rupert Residency, Vilnius, and supported by Radio Orsimanirana at MKG Hamburg. The After the Maestro project is supported by the Stimuleringsfonds.