Kate Frances Lingard is the 2020 finalist from the gallery’s annual young artist development programme, hotel generation. The programme mentors the next generation of UK digital artists, based outside of London, during the critical early stages of establishing a career in the arts.

tender spots in hard code... emerges from the fraught and complex convergence of social, economic and technological space. In trying to navigate this pervasive architecture of power, decentralised and distributed systems hold the potential as organisational tools in the digital commons. They can allow us to rethink the kinds of social relations that structure this space, to prioritise an ethics of care.

What relations do these systems need to be formed upon to create technological infrastructures that support collective welfare?

Turning to games as a means of centering the value forms and architectures of choice that distributed systems produce, play is used as an active discursive form that invites visitors to consider how the game structures they play within engender priorities of attention and relation.  

The exhibition involves an illustrated set of standard playing cards, offering the visitor different modes of participation. Through playing a variation of the game Whist (a trick-taking game of bidding) selected and altered by the artist, visitors are invited to play either competitively or cooperatively. Both modes of engagement with the cards provide thought experiments for ways of thinking differently around relationships of people, object and ideology.

The images on the cards use metaphors of the body as portals to the digital commons, blockchain systems and the social relations formed within them; using renders by the artist, alongside commissioned models by Siri Black, ‎Ariel Helyes, Jake Major and India Stanbra. The altered suits – hearts, vessels, tools and coins – gesture towards ideas of relation, bodies, technology and economics. The cards are backed with drawings by Emelia Kerr Beale which respond to the suits, and together with the images on the cards allude to desires of interdependence.