01/12/22 - 17/12/22 |EXHIBITION
Coördinatie Centrum Charlois | Daniel Tuomey

Coördinatie Centrum Charlois by Daniel Tuomey gathers a new body of work uneasily layering roleplaying games and everyday life under statistical surveillance capitalism.

At the exhibition’s centre is the gloomy isometric computer roleplaying game Is Registration Possible?, which invites the viewer to control a digital fossil wandering through the dataswept streets of Charlois. The rest of the exhibition spreads from there on a skeletal mainframe. The space flickers between the look of a harbour control centre and a teenage gamer’s bedroom, a traditionally gendered enclave in crisis, a doomed desperate altar to the illusion of (a) man’s mastery over space.

The work documents the past few years spent living and working with a feeling of boundaries collapsing. Years of wandering round the neighbourhood seeing screens reflected in windows and windows reflected in screens, finding solace in roleplaying games with friends and despairing of the endless death-cycle roleplaying game of bureaucratic biometric capitalism. In essence psychogeographic but also something beyond psychology or geography, some kind of psychedelic fantasy, an attention-deficit hypertext for a queasy age.

Research and development on this project was kindly supported by an O&O subsidy from CBK Rotterdam. Early writing for some of the characters in the game was done during the Résidence Internationale de Fontevraud hosted by NEF Animation in l’Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, September 2021.

Daniel Tuomey was born in Dublin in 1989. He lives and works in Rotterdam.

Photography courtesy Daniel Tuomey