Strangers decode the headlines in a Kingston churchyard

This weekend, the headlines get read like a spread of cards. Marina Zurkow and Abigail Simon are running four open sessions of The Iceberg, their self-made image deck, at the O+ Festival in Kingston, N.Y. The announcement pitches the event in apocalyptic terms: the world is "burning, melting, fighting, mortgaged to the hilt," so is it collapsing or evolving?

The deck sits, by their own description, somewhere between Tarot and a Rorschach test. A session opens on a Journey Map that poses a question, then three cards go face down on the table and turn over one at a time while everyone says what they see, repositioning the cards as the story firms up. The rulebook's best line doubles as a theory of conversation: "The game is over when the cards have stopped speaking."

Zurkow and Simon, media artists whose work has shown everywhere from MoMA to the Museum of the City of New York, call their players a hive mind decoding "the hidden systems beneath the headlines," with climate change as the tornado in the room. The deck has done street duty before, at Art in Odd Places on 14th Street in 2024; a churchyard table during a festival weekend (the full festival runs Oct. 9 to 11) suits a game whose whole mechanic is strangers agreeing to think in public.

Decks keep turning up at the edges of games, and they travel lighter than any engine. In August we covered the tarot deck that grew out of Paloma Dawkins's videogames; that one pointed inward, at the drawing hand. The Iceberg points the same grammar outward, at the front page, and asks the table to play it together.