Whitehack in Art Gallery!

Whitehack in Art Gallery!

If you happen to be in proximity of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, be sure to drop by Ejecta Projects. It is an art gallery founded by artist Anthony Cervino and art historian Shannon Egan. In their current exhibition ART -- N -- STUFF, Whitehack Notebook 2e is displayed together with art by Joy Drury Cox.

I think it is fantastic that a swedish DIY game printed on demand without illustrations can make it into an american art gallery. I didn't know any of the involved parties before. One day I woke up and there was an e-mail :). I am super proud!

I've always enjoyed the images of Whitehack-in-use that you've posted, so I wanted to share this.

Best,

C

https://www.ejectaprojects.com/
https://whitehackrpg.wordpress.com/

Ejecta Project's Presentation (the paper on the wall):

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Untitled (Line Studies)

Joy Drury Cox

collaged paper
2015

$400



Whitehack

Christian Mehrstam

second edition includes 64-page instruction book with an additional 192-page blank notebook

2015

$30

Designed by Christian Mehrstam, Whitehack is a complete fantasy role-playing game. With a campaign setting and two adventures provided, the game provides an introduction for new players as well as challenges for more experienced role-playing gamers. The rules are a mix of old and new school mechanics, built into a solid whole that can meet the demands of long campaigns. This special edition of this game not only provides the content of the game, but also includes 192 blank pages for players’ own campaign notes, adventures or hacks. These pages are dotted and have page numbers, all in a discrete gray, so as to support but not disturb. One does not have to be a role-playing gamer to use this book as simply a beautifully crafted blank journal. The notebook provides a place for recording thoughts, notes, lists, and drawings that may resonate with the game’s narrative. The role-playing game is short, but complete, and there when the owner of the journal desires an escape, or an alternative story to one’s lived and recorded reality.

As seen in the elegantly simple design of Whitehack, role-playing games are rooted in charts and tables. Players fill in character sheets with fields for numbers that correspond to physical and temperamental traits. When the adventures are told, gamers use gridded paper for mapping and charting their course. With this game in mind, Joy Drury Cox’s collage can similarly be seen as a kind of map, a place where players imaginatively travel, inscribe their statistics for battle, and plan for new adventures. Grids, charts, and linear measurements in Cox’s works are then seen as simultaneously sensible and as a folly. The seeming logic and order of Cox's composition mirrors the players/viewers’ desires to control their circumstances, but slight variations in the patchwork of her paper allude to the unpredictable trajectories of the Whitehack adventure. The grids and lines in Cox’s collage, like the majority of the pages in Whitehack, are left intentionally blank. The viewer, reader, and/or player must record the statistics, answer the questions, and complete the narrative.

Joy Drury Cox is an artist and educator living in Durham, NC. She is the author of three artist books, and has most recently, with husband, Ben Alper collaborated on the exhibition of landscape photography at Ejecta Projects titled Hard Places. She works in a variety of media including drawing, collage, textiles and photography and teaches in the Art Department at UNC Chapel Hill.

Christian Mehrstam is a scholar of comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He traded a wobbler bait for his first role-playing game in 1979 and has been hooked ever since. He made the Whitehack Notebook to be able to keep rules and game notes in one place.