British curator Tamar Clarke-Brown began working with Serpentine in 2017, and with new media at Serpentine in 2020. With a background in literature and language, she is interested in everything to do with storytelling, translation, relationships and collaboration, on which she bases her research in the Arts Technologies department: “It’s about relationships, really. It’s about how everyone relates to each other and how we can all understand each other’s language,” she tells seLecT_ceLesTe.

With this antenna, she reached the work of Brazilian digital artist Gabriel Massan, based in Berlin, Germany. “When we met, they described themselves as a digital sculptor, with a practice they called free-sculpting”, bringing together their background in the underground noise scene, performance, video and “all the digital tools they could embrace”.

Clarke-Brown defines Massan’s sculptures as archives. From these, they began, two years ago, to develop together Third World: The Bottom Dimension, a project consisting of a multi-level video game, web3 tokens and an exhibition. On view until 11/26, at the Serpentine North Gallery, in London, the exhibition offers visitors the experience of the game in a hybrid physical-virtual environment. Without exploring violence as a language, common in the video games of Massan’s youth, the game is conceptualized as a “consciousness-raising tool” that aims to navigate the black and Afro-indigenous Brazilian experience, as it encounters the ramifications of colonialism in physical and digital realities.

The project, signed by Gabriel Massan and Collaborators, has the participation of Brazilian artists Jota Mombaça; Ventura Profana; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, collaborator in creating the Igba Tingbo environment, Level 1 of the game; Novíssimo Edgar, co-author of the second environment, Sòfo, and vocalist and music producer LYZZA, who created the game’s soundtrack.
Tamar Clarke-Brown spoke to seLecT_ceLesTe during her trip to Brazil,
last September, when she was talking to institutions about the exhibition
traveling to Brazil in 2024.

I’m always researching, but originally I was looking for the next artist for a commissionseries called ‘Artist Worlds, which focuses on virtual environments, simulated worlds and digital worldbuilding. The first edition, with Jakob, was also trying to make people realize that, within digital workyou can’t do anything on your own. It’s all about collaboration and all these voices coming in to create a reality.  So, with Jakob, we translated an existing VR work into a multiplayer VR game and then we did a live broadcast where the characters were running around in it and talking and having lectures and conversations and poetry and it was incredible. For the second edition, I was looking and looking and looking.  I was very open to who I might find, doing a lot of studio visits, and I stumbled across Gabriel. I think I found them through an article in a magazine called Stir World. Something I often feel with technological work is that I’ve seen the work, or rather the aesthetics, many times before. But I’d never seen anything like Gabriel’s sculptures.  At the time, he used to make very glassmorphic sculptures. And he’d been making NFT’s as well. And I was very interested in the way that he was describing his work, as ‘decentralised life forms’. I didn’t really understand what that meant and I was kind of curious.

Gabriel is a philosopher, they’re amazing, the sweetest person, but also they’re a Libra; everything is about justice for them. They’re so concerned with everything, with everyone they bring into a conversation, with every part of the process. I’ve learned so much about collaboration and how to do multi-part projects by working with them.  What was originally a six month project has became a two-year project and we’re now working on bringing it to Brazil next year. We’re very excited.

What does the work consist of?

One part of the project is the game itself. This is powered by Tezos,  an energy-efficient blockchain company. Speaking to Gabriel, they were really interested in what experimenting with Blockchain  could do for them in terms of stability. The NFT boom encouraged  a lot of artists to start making and distributing parts of their work as NFT’s.  This means that they could sell a small part or fragment of their work, that would keep circulating and keep earning them income. With NFT’s, every time someone exchanges it, the artist also receives money. This is a core difference to the traditional art market, where the artist doesn’t receive any money or returns from secondary market activity.

So they managed to create a new system of art circulation?

They didn’t create the system, but they were a very early adopter.  I truly believe Gabriel’s a genius. They understand things in a second and immediately go to: what’s the best potential for that? So, originally, they were using NFT’s and creating them as a kind of financial backing system for themselves, because they were really tired of having to do commercial work and make things they didn’t want to create, because they needed money to make what they did want to create. You know, everyone’s problem, a lot of artists obviously have the same issue. So, they were experimenting in that area, but also thinking:  What does it mean to have a safety net? What does it mean to exit a cycle of precarity? One of the key references for Gabriel is Denise Ferreira da Silva, who talks about negative accumulation and this cycle of precarity for black individuals and the impossibility of kind of reaching a stable growth.

So they were thinking a lot about how do we not repeat the same cycles. At the time, there was the fire of the Natural History Museum [Museu Nacional], in Rio, in 2018, and in general, memory is something that’s very important for them. We spent a lot of time talking about the violences of forgetting, of the importance of recirculating and helping things to emerge and not enter the same cycle of loss. Why do we have to lose again? Can’t we stop that cycle?

Or Global Majority… I think, for Gabriel, and it was definitely a question when they decided that the game was going to be called Third World – I said it’s OK, this is contentious. So we had to have a lot of conversations. Some of the earliest conversations we had were about stratification and the unequal distribution of resources. So, again with NFT’s, with Web3, they’re interested in getting involved in that space because they’re interested in how that can also – maybe economically or in terms of access or visibility for different people – provide another bridge or another window. For them, Third World points to a very vernacular, colloquial phrase. They said, you know, it’s been outlawed in the Academy, no one uses it anymore, but my friends use it, my parents use it. We still internalize that phrase. So they wanted to use that to draw attention to the fact that’s the way people feel and the very real limitations that those structures of feeling enact on people’s lives and imaginations.

And how do you think the game reflects the reality of Massan’s native Rio de Janeiro?
We were thinking of it almost as a kind of mapping of Brazil. They grew up interested in cartography. We spoke a lot about the violence, the drugs wars there. They were very interested in communicating the difficulty of crossing, difficulty of movement, but also the way that Brazil itself is such a continental country, it has so many different areas, biomes and each speaks a slightly different language. You have completely different worlds, which also feeds into this feeling of disorientation. They are really interested in looking at this idea also of stratification and vantage points;  wherever you are standing, it’s a completely different world.

But their most important urge is to connect with people, to connect and collaborate across different experiences. The game is about the ramifications of colonialism and capitalism within Brazil. That was kind of the starting point.  How has this shaped worlds, shaped experiences? How has this changed the way you navigate? How has this changed the way people are able to or have to move?

For Massan, moving to Berlin, partly in order to pursue Digital Arts, was a big culture shock, in terms of realizing that a lot of the myths, and stories they had been told about Europe were simply not true. That actually, a lot of things are more developed in Brazil or in the previously assigned ‘Third world’, for instance with regards to affective relationships. They really wanted to bring attention to the fact that we always need to look from different perspectives.This is why they invited a number of artists to give their perspective on the world. So, Castiel Vitorino Brasilero is one of the stars in the project constellation.Similarly, Novíssimo Edgar; LYZZA; Venturaas does Jota Mombaça. All of these people that have these incredible world building practices; that are kind of undoing, helping to undo the mapping, the internal mapping of how we relate to the world, to language, to matter, to ourselves.

Castiel’s practice is about transmutation mostly and memory. Her level began almost as a writing-back to the original Portuguese arrival in Brazil. She reimagines that moment and asks; what would it be like if the modus operandis wasn’t extractive? What would it be if you were able to speak with people that you encountered and had conversations and listened to this other knowledge. What would it be like if you learned to form your own body in a different way? So, Castiel developed this level and worked together with Gabriel to develop scripts, a storyline and in-game films which carry a lot of the narrative. But also Castiel developed three artifacts-as-memories that the player has to collect as transformational experiences to remember and return to.

How does the player enter the game?

A unique part of the exhibition is that people are able to ‘mint their memory’ on the Tezos blockchain. Within the game there’s a feature called ‘Capture Mode’ where you can record videos and photos that becomes almost like… a souvenir, but it’s about you. Gabriel calls this ability ‘minting intentions and minting understandings’. For them, at that moment, the player becomes part of a ‘community of understanding’ having gone through the experience of gameplay. Other people can go online and look at this collection on Objkt.com. We’re also interested in how the audience is developing: what do they expect or how has engagement changed? How can people really internalize this experience and can it help them to change?

Kind of. This is what we hope to do next. We’ve developed two big levels and each level has three different environments or terrains to navigate through. Originally, Gabriel wanted to develop an Open World Game, which means you can take a left, you can take a right, and the story develops depending on how you interact with the space. Ultimately, the game blends several different genres; it’s a simulation game, in a sense, but it’s also a walking simulator, it’s also an art game, it’s kind of noncategorizable.  Growing up Massan was very interested in simulation games like The Sims, TV series and content with episodic structures, and it sparked their interest inexploring how alternative storytelling could emerge through these kinds of simulated worlds. And simulation is a lot about, I suppose, mapping, programming and watching activity unfold, the behaviors of life forms and seeing what develops from those original states and inputs.

Gabriel’s also very influenced by Fluxus and Nam June Paik, for example; the different ways that media can travel and how to represent multiple perspectives all at once. Again, kind of going back to this ecosystemic thinking. Gabriel talks a lot about something called ‘the plenum’, which has multiple meanings. There’s a physics meaning to it, but my favorite meaning is that it’s like a full council, a council in a political sense, a body that is fully represented. This understanding is something that’s very central to their practice. This fact that there can never be a single perspective – it’s a radical impossibility. On any issue, from wherever you stand, there are a million perspectives to be seen, heard and understood. This project contains  so much research,  so much socio-political consciousness, so many references. Gabriel describes themselves as a maximalist. We joke about it a lot because when we first met – I’m a Virgo – I was like I’m a minimalist.

So, you’re also a star of this constellation. Was the project also built on dialogue with you?

We have many many conversations and of course all of these feed into the work in some way or another. The project actually began with a six month R&D and prototype-development period which also included conversations with myself and external advisors like Meghna Jayanth.

A lot of the things we do at Serpentine Arts Technologies, we think of as prototypes. So we have a number of research labs, not physical, but kind of a collection of thinkers, researchers, practitioners and possibilities. One in blockchain, one in AI, one in synthetic ecologies, one in Legal issues. Everything we do is kind of underpinned by this R&D platform. Then, a commission will arise out of research or out of thinking or conversations. Sometimes that takes the form of a small project, a performance, a book, a publication. We’re now two years from the starting point of Third World, we’ve made the game, and we’ve released the game on Steam, which is the biggest gaming distribution platform – it’s really quite crazy – and then we turned the project into an exhibition. And now we are looking at touring the show… I can’t describe how much investment, support and hunger there has been for this project –, so it’s continued to grow.