210 x 110mm, 44 pages, Risograph printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, 2024

This selection of images is from a series called ‘Non-Player Character (NPC)’and was inspired by my experiences during the recent Covid19 Pandemic and the long hours I spent gaming in isolation during periods of prolonged lockdown. During the first year of the outbreak, I was barely able to leave my house and like many other people, gaming became my only way of engaging with the outside world. During this period, my opportunities to make real photographs became almost impossible, so I used my real-world observational skills to instead observe the landscape and people in the games I played. I recorded what I saw with screenshots, as if I had recorded the moment with a camera. Latterly I would combine some images together and others I would re-photograph with my camera. My images are unclear, blurred and distorted, deliberately fragmentary, an amalgam of my day-to-day life, memories and perhaps my state of mind. A Non-Player Character (NPC) in a role-playing game is not controlled by the player, they are a non-protagonist side character and are used by the player to interact with the game. The NPCs’ reactions are determined by a pre-programmed plot, controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence. In my real world life, I too felt like an NPC, my life was being controlled by others, my liberty taken away, I had no agency and like my images my digital and real experiences merged like a weird dystopian plot twist.

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