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How Do I Get There?SOLO | MIRE Public Art Program | Geneva, Switzerland
38th Panorama of Brazilian Art:
A Thousand Degrees
GROUP | Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo | São Paulo, Brazil
Black Ancient Futures
GROUP | MAAT | Lisbon, Portugal
Terceiro Mundo: A Dimensão Descoberta
SOLO | Pinacoteca de São Paulo | São Paulo, Brazil
CIRCA PRIZE: Class Of 2024
GROUP | CIRCA | London, United Kingdom
Toy Section
GROUP | Hangar Y | Meudon, France
Continuity Flaws: Rumors Of A Leak SOLO | TONO Festival, Laboratorio Arte Alameda | Mexico City, Mexico
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SOLO | Serpentine Galleries | London, United Kingdom
Continuity Flaws: The LoopholeSOLO | Outernet Arts, Outernet London | London, United Kingdom
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OMOIYARI: KEIKEN X GABRIEL MASSANDUO | The Photographers' Gallery | London, United Kingdom
“Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, the group exhibition WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age opens in Düsseldorf.
WORLDBUILDING examines the relationship between gaming and time-based media art with a journey through various ways in which artists have interacted with video games and made them into an art form. In the words of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: “In 2021 2.8 billion people—almost a third of the world’s population—played video games, making a niche pastime into the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century.”
The aesthetics of games entered artistic practice decades ago, when artists began to integrate, modify, and subvert the visual language of video games to address issues of our existence within virtual worlds. Some artists have also brought to light a critique of games from within the system itself by highlighting discriminatory and stereotypical aspects of commercial and gaming logics. More recently, artists have begun to harness the mainstream power of gaming to communicate new forms of engagement that reach the massive audience of this borderless global industry. From single-channel video works to site-specific, immersive, and interactive environments, WORLDBUILDING encompasses over thirty artworks from the mid-1990s to the present. Works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION—some of them especially adapted for the exhibition— will be joined by newly commissioned works. Including video, virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and game-based works, most of the works are interactive and openly invite visitors to immerse themselves in the multitude of alternative realities created by artists, spanning past, present, and future.”
Curatorship
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Interactive Multichannel Videogame Installation, Single-Player PC Game, 3D Animation, Digital Sculpting, color, sound.
“The work of Brazilian-born artist and digital free sculptor Gabriel Massan (b. 1996 in Rio de Janeiro; lives and works in Berlin) is shaped by dreams of free movement and a desire to decentralize. Dubbing their practice “fictional archaeology,” their work often features digital ecosystems built to house other voices or beings marked by marginalization or threatened by delimited potential.
The VR (virtual reality) experience Terraforming CIR (2022), the term Terraforming meaning “earth shaping” or “making an environment habitable,” developed by the digital collective Transmoderna, includes collaborative pieces by Massan, among others. Increasingly focused on bringing the performance of life into their work, Massan created hypnotically oscillating digital free sculptures to inhabit Terraforming’s digital-organic world, forms imbued with sensation, feeling, and experience and shaped through interaction and play. These glassmorphic flowers, insects, mush (soft, wet, pulpy masses), rocks, totems, trees, and portals, inspired by the biomes, flora, and fauna of the Global South, materialize what Massan calls a “3D Third World Imagination.”
This continues through their work THIRD WORLD (2022– ongoing), developed with Arts Technologies at Serpentine Galleries and co-commissioned by the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, with collaborators including Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, Masako Hirano, LYZZA, Carlos Minozzi, and Alexandre Pina. WORLDBUILDING exhibits THIRD WORLD: THE BOTTOM DIMENSION (2022), evolving elements of this work: a disorienting, multilevel, metaverseinspired game world spawned from lived experiences of immobility, inequality, unregulated environmental exploitation, and resource mismanagement within Black-Indigenous Latin America that instead aims to install a different mode of navigation and consciousness in the player untethered from the reverberating directives of colonialism. Generally embracing games as advanced technological mediums for communication and connection (with inspirations such as the 1990s cult anime Serial Experiments Lain), Massan asks how gaming might disturb rather than reproduce power relations, sensitively exploring their potential to subvert colonialist stratifications and structures, and help us shift our relationship and attention to the environment around us. What does it mean to outgrow a character and to shift into another way of being? Treating time and existence themselves as finite and transient, THIRD WORLD ushers a more expansive and connected wayfinding than the problematic “central protagonist” positionality, and empowers Black and Indigenous peoples by resurfacing knowledge made distant.”
Written by Tamar Clarke-Brown for the ‘ WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age booklet.
by Gabriel Massan
Lead Artist, Creative Director, 3D Sculptor, Concept
Gabriel Massan
Featured Artists
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro
Novíssimo Edgar
LYZZA
Sound Design
LYZZA
Unreal Development
Alexandre Pina
Marchino Manga
Ralph McCoy
Capture Mode Development and Unreal Consultant
Iraj Montasham
Animation, Cinematography and Film VFX
Carlos Minozzi
Additional Cinematography
Alexandre PinaGraphic
UI Design
Masako Hirano
Sweet Baby Inc
Translator
Adriana Francisco
Translation Support
Manuela Cochat
Mastering Engineer
Rainy Miller
QA Testing
Keiran Cooper
Curator
Tamar Clarke-Brown
Producer
Róisín McVeigh
Game Commissioned
in Association with Julia Stoschek