Are you ready for an adventure?

Artists Petra Szemán and David Blandy’s NMN Digital Residency is now complete - with their ‘games’ now playable on your browser {LINK IN BIO}...

Their quest led to discovering many uncanny stories about County Durham’s places, cryptids and weird happenings - some first-hand experiences - some old part-remembered tales passed down through public memory over generations.

We prompted the artist: “What defines “digital” as a place and how does that relate to our physical place of County Durham, in the wider context of the world?”

Their engagement with the county started with research, then captured the strange, nostalgic and interconnected local folklore [and lesser-know history] informed by people’s collective memory through creative storytelling. This inspired the artists to make new digital artworks that map, re-tell, gamify and amplify the unusual side of our past, present and future.

“A real-life place can take on a virtual quality in multiple ways. One may see the place in a film, or know of local legends and mythologies tied to it, or a place may simply evoke a dream, or a memory of a different time. I envision these versions of ”place”, different layers of multiple parallel realities, twisting and merging together, becoming a sprawling archival output. This shared quest aims for establishing an alternative future County Durham.”

Petra Szemàn (they/them)

In 2025, when David and Petra began their investigation in to the county through community engagement sessions over a 2-days of drop-in workshops at Castle Dene Shopping Centre in Peterlee, their path ahead was totally unknown. But one story after another, one person after another, the artist gathered more and more fragments of local folklore; Some expected (ie. The Lambton Worm), some unexplained (accounts from an ex-Durham Coalfield miner about impossible lights in the dark and figures that disappeared into the walls of pits), and some unhinged (a Durham HMP inmate who was obsessed with warning staff at Durham Castle about a vampire within its walls that could devour the people of Durham).

“Working in collaboration with Petra, I tried to bring together a digital community around a shared quest, to create an online encyclopedic map of an alternative County Durham. I tried to encourage a disparate community to think about the places around them, to question the normal and to listen to diverse stories, to highlight the fact that we all inhabit different internal worlds even though we might live in the same physical space.

“We work together by sharing ideas and snippets across digital networks, through things like Discord and Whatsapp, both specific stories, but also testing approaches, seeing what feels exciting to pursue. It was great to actually share space during our time in Durham, Petra drawing as I devised new mini-games to try to inspire people to write stories, pulling on their memories and their imagination.

“We ended up talking a lot about play and nostalgia. I think that the term nostalgia is a way of belittling the pursuits of childhood, of belittling play in general. For it is through play that we imagine other worlds, other possibilities, other ways to be.

“This is dangerous, and must be repressed. In a world of constant production, the active play of the game is the waste of time, the thing you put away to conform to the adult space. But that child, those memories, are still a part of you. An intimate piece of joy, of freedom, however illusory. Nostalgia is the economy of objects feeding off this need to re-enter the joy of childhood, but to actually re-enter that space, to play again, its not nostalgia, it’s hope, hope for a better world”.

David Blandy (He/Him)

Fast forward to now - and audiences can explore two online games and download a project zine many influences can explore the fragments of “weirded maps” they have made to discover new paths across, through and underneath County Durham… with cartography less concerned with the accuracies of defining land and topography, and more with building new worlds for us to inhabit to form new communities that want to explore our places through the lense of the artists practice.