Digital artist Gabriel Massan checksout queer club culture, societies of violence and virtual communities throughout their online residency at Fact.
Gabriel Massan explains themselves as a ‘3RD WORLDBUILDER’, however actually, we puton’t have a name for the kinds of worlds they desire to develop. Over the last coupleof years the artist hasactually specified a discipline of CGI sculpture, illustration from a huge, digitally-mediated latticework of video videogame and anime recommendations to produce visceral work with a physicality that shows their experiences growing up in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as well as their immersion in the queer club culture of the latter and in their existing bases of Berlin and Paris.
Driven by a desire to map their psychological experiences of systemic political and cultural structures onto environments untethered from physical representation and the body, these digital sculptures have progressed into a fully-fledged world structure practice, work which the artist hasactually revealed at the X Museum in Beijing and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Dusseldorf. Their technique culminates in the upcoming Third World, a “consciousness-raising videogame that checksout Black-indigenous Brazilian experience,” commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies and including Web3 combinations constructed on the Tezos Blockchain.
In ‘Unbonded on a Bonded Domain (Part One),’ the veryfirst of a three-part series Massan will present throughout their online residency at Fact, we discover ourselves in a biomechanical club, an alternate truth anomaly of Cyberia, the cyberpunk sanctuary for underage ravers and disillusioned hackers from cult 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain. Trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced little talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities concern the nature of their environment and their location within it.
By transplanting a familiar circumstance into an totally fictionalised context, Massan produces area for a intricacy of expression without the requirement to deal up too much of themselves in the procedure. “Dismembering my body from my mind offers those bodies and those various identities a method of flirting with my ideas without actually providing them any traces of me,” they describe. “Imagine if I was able to provide those various identities a voice, if they might speak, how would they sp