Only Slime: Afterlife at FACT Liverpool
Johnny James, Managing EditorVisit now
Only Slime: Afterlife
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Like the rest of us, FACT Liverpool is thinking a lot about AI at the moment, hosting not one but two exhibitions prodding at an increasingly algorithmic world. While Rachel Maclean’s show looks at the instability of authorship and identity in the age of AI, Only Slime: Afterlife turns that loss of control into something you actually experience in the gallery.
Only Slime is the boundary-pushing artistic duo of Claudia Cox and Tobi Pfeil. Originally staged as a live computer-game opera, Afterlife arrives at FACT as a sprawling installation that invites you to step inside a world between life and death. You move through this layered digital realm via motion capture, embodying characters as you go. All the while your sense of agency – your capacity to control this environment – keeps changing as the power dynamics between creator, player, and avatar shift.
The work grew out of a near-death experience Claudia Cox had in 2021, and the surreal sense of bodily disconnection that followed sits at the core of Afterlife. It puts forward two different worlds that coexist: the overworld and the underworld; a neon-lit gamer bedroom and a retro dungeon. Passing through a portal into the more earthly world, we meet Axi and Zi, whose repetitive island existence begins to fracture under strange dreams and mounting dissatisfaction.
As you navigate these spaces, the familiar logic of games – progress, control, mastery – starts to feel unstable. Who is actually in charge here? The player, the avatar, or the creator? And what does control even looks like inside a system designed by someone else?
Seen alongside Maclean’s They’ve Got Your Eyes, the exhibition forms part of a wider conversation about agency and authorship in digital worlds. But where Maclean focuses on the act of creation, Afterlife is more interested in what it feels like to be inside the system once it’s already been built. Somewhere between life and death, control and its absence, you’re left navigating the digital wilderness.
