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Image courtesy of Mary Maggic
The Toxic Consultancy: Game Edition is a role-playing game set on a dying planet, held in the exhibition space of Gray Wielebinski’s The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low.
‘The Toxic Consultancy’ is a speculative agency that both deepens and disrupts the married relationship between taxonomies and toxicities. The etymologies of taxonomy and toxicity are derived from the Greek roots tactics and toxikon respectively, and were first invented as vocabularies of war. Today, taxonomies have categorised life itself, drawing lines between what we perceive to be toxic and pure. In this workshop, participants will engage in a non-human role-playing game situated on a dying planet.
Navigating through the binaries of self and other, competition and alliance, and pollution and purity, the Game Edition asks players to shed their current identities in favor of a new thought experiment. The Toxic Consultancy was produced in part from an intensive gathering of artists and corporate consultants called ‘What Would Artists Do?’ led by the Artist Project Group.
Schedule
2 – 2:30pm Players arrive, brief round of introductions, explanations of the rules.
2:30 – 3pm Players are assigned non-human roles, and study the rules of the game together.
3 – 6pm The game begins, each round lasting 20 minutes.
Mary Maggic (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a nonbinary Chinese-American artist and researcher working within the fuzzy intersections of body and gender politics and capitalist ecological alienations. Based in Vienna since 2017, Maggic frequently uses biohacking as a xeno-feminist practice of care that serves to demystify invisible lines of molecular biopower. After completing their Masters at MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction), their project Open Source Estrogen was awarded Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica '17 in Hybrid Arts, and in 2019 they completed a 10-month Fulbright residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia investigating the relationship between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis.
They are a current member of the online network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art, the laboratory theatre collective Aliens in Green, the Asian feminist collective Mai Ling Vienna, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the online Cyberfeminism Index.
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