How do artists detourn the inner mechanics of contemporary digital tools, AR and game worlds? How are LGBTQI+ artists using animation tools to assert community and imagine new futures? What are the possibilities of the body in digital space?
CIRCUIT and Te Uru present /drive-thru, play-thru/ — an online screening and Zoom conversation with artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (UK) and Ary Jansen (NZ), moderated by Tendai Mutambu.
In this Zoom conversation with Otherwise-image-worlds curator Tendai Mutambu, the artists take us on a journey through their recent animated and interactive works, offering commentary on their use of animation as a tool for emancipation and play.
In the second half of the event, audience members are invited to be part of an online Interactive Playthrough Performance, in which Brathwaite-Shirley will act as ‘dungeon-master’ and you and the other players will venture into a story-based game space that engages systems of power and expanded ideas of player agency.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Ary Jansen are two artists whose work embraces animation and interactivity. They were recently commissioned to create new works for Otherwise-image-worlds, an exhibition of five artist works at Te Uru which addressed the emancipatory potential of digital space.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist working predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people and intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record a "history of Trans people both living and past," their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future.
Ary Jansen is a visual artist, musician, event organiser and youth worker. His work across this broad range of disciplines and fields overlap, each nourishing and supporting the other. Much of his work in art and music is informed by critical, autobiographical reflections on how capitalist logics increasingly dictate social relations, senses of self, and how the world itself appears.
