Tamar Clarke-Brown

SA: Similar to Artur, Gabriel Massan wanted to build a collaborative or collective process with other artists for Third World: The Bottom Dimension. I'm curious about how you used a decentralized private network to develop the collaboration, game, and exhibit.

TCB: There's something about informality. As an institution, a lot of things need to be set and nothing goes undone in that sense. But at the same time, the quickest way to develop relationships with people is to establish a safe space. Establish informality for people to be able to send a gift, stickers, communicate however they feel comfortable…because everything is going to be formalized eventually!

It's like the phrase 'attitudes into form.' It's about what it means to have a space where people can unfurl, and then to form that into something and create structures from the mess itself.

I found out about Discord through the Art Technologies team. We'd been investigating games, and artists using games, for a while, but also alternative social spaces. It is a really nice space and quite a good organizational tool. It was actually an incredible space for conversation, visualizing, and having a social zone where we could simply chat. We really needed that: to have a cozy space.

I did a studio visit with the incredible Brazilian artist Vitória Cribb the other day. We were talking about how she feels about Internet spaces and digital technologies. She said that, despite any hesitation about them, it's important that they're there. Her practice focuses on surveillance…intimate surveillance, and she creates these characters called vigilantes who have eyes all over them. She still uses the word cozy. I thought it was an apt term to describe Discord and these kinds of spaces.

In our Discord for Third World we had a couple of channels. As the project grew and we needed different lines of organization, we could create new channels. You can bring the different people that you want into those spaces. We had channels for music, the Unreal Engine development team, animation, and play testers. We'd send the play testers early releases to get their feedback about technical, aesthetic, and frustrating things in terms of usability or playability, and Discord was our forum for receiving and working through their feedback.

I started off producing and curating the project, but as it grew Róisín McVeigh, who's incredible, came on as the producer. Gabriel Massan is a Brazilian artist based in Berlin. We had all of the developers, three based in Brazil and one based in the Arab Emirates. We had an animator who's based in Berlin. We had all the artists who were predominantly based in Brazil, one in Amsterdam. We needed a space that felt like it was ongoing but private and just for us, where we could convene everyone and share new ideas remotely. I could post a picture and say, Hey, look how it's developing, and someone would comment. Someone would say look at what happened in São Paulo today. It became not only a hub for the project: over the production period there was a huge shift in the government, so it became a space for a lot of political and social conversation.

It's been amazing. It became a space where we felt safe to share, make mistakes, and be very honest if something needed to change. Crucially, it became a space where everyone felt ownership over it. Also, everyone was able to see the development of other members of the team. People developing their own practices were doing so in the context of collaboration and sociality.

SA: There's this trending phrase in computation, 'digital twin.' What are your thoughts about the Discord process as a kind of digital twin of dialogue in the art world, where art world structures are replicated on digital platforms and in networks?

TCB: I need a bit more. When I think of digital twins, I think of, for example, making a digital twin of a gallery by reconstructing the gallery as a digital version.

SA: In my architecture graduate program, people would use technical and/or trending terms from computer technologies as tropes or analogies in the service of more abstract theory, theoretical architectures, and/or history writing. A kind of perverse biomimicry.

By 'digital twin,' I do mean, exactly, a digital replication of a structure, in this case a structure of communications and language, but with the added wrinkle that, in Discord, what may happen in a production conversation in an office blends with a more informal, private way of talking like in an office common area or at a bar or a party.

I'm also remembering Zoom happy hours and family holidays like Passover in the height of the pandemic. It wasn't a great replica, but it helped soften the blow of isolation. In the case of bringing together professional and social conversations into the same online space, what's lost is supplemented with the limitless potential of being able to bring in anyone around the world through remote project development.

TCB: My urge is to take it towards infrastructures and how gallery structures are changing to echo the sociality of the world, which is the thing itself. The ideal is when people can come to a space and express themselves, where the artist may also express whatever deconstruction of the white cube.

This is something that Art Technologies has explored through structures like Future Art Ecosystems, which is a publication series that began with the person that started the Arts Tech department, Ben Viickers. Every year it's a set of provocations looking at how artists work with technologies, the structures that they're building, the ways that they're working, the multi-collaborative sense in which you have to build, the fact that you are not always a sole developer and that you have to build teams.

So what do all of these new structures or expansive structures mean for the way that art develops? How can those structures also feed back into art infrastructures as a whole? How can that inform the way that we decentralize things, the way that we reconstitute an institution to make it more accessible, more available, more reflective of the people that want to engage with it? That's a huge part of our mission. And that is why we do things like launching a Twitch Channel in 2021.

SA: Amazing, how's that going?

TCB: It's super fun. This project marks the tenth anniversary of Art Technologies. One part of it was to share a lot of the back end conversations that don't always surface, bringing it together from conception, from R&D, which is what the department is founded on.

We like to ask artists what their wildest dreams are, but also figure out how we can build a team around that to make it happen. Gabriel's game began as an R&D project for six months, and it was going to be the second edition of the Artist Worlds project which was looking at virtual environments, simulated environments and how those spaces can share and support more voices than the one artist exhibition model.

For us, this project has been a huge learning experience in terms of workflows. What does it mean to build a game and take those learnings and apply them to the institution? It's part of a longer project where we try to see how prototyping and building things can also feed back into the wider cultural industry, proving by example other ways we could do things.

A lot of that as well is being taken on by people like Victoria Ivanova, who's our R&D strategic lead, and the Arts Tech Curator Eva Jäger, for developing strong partnerships with other institutions, and figuring out how we can better support each other, and build the needed infrastructures. How can everyone have a voice and have it be more informal, but the informality leads into formal structures that support everyone?

SA: I look forward to witnessing more of this positive feedback loop, through future games that are built on these changed institutional structures, and so create even more critical structures to work from.

TCB: It's a utopic line of thinking that's very intoxicating, but, at the same time, we have to be attuned to the implications of an increasing lack of separation between our lives online and off. My niece, who's 16, does digital detoxes. There's a consciousness that you can go offline, but how realistic actually is this proposition? There's not the same line around anything as there used to be.

So we have to be very conscious and ears to the ground in terms of what kind of engagement people are expecting and excited about. We have to attend to how they're engaging. We were working with an incredible artist named Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, for example, who really loved it when people would troll her posts. As an institution we had to navigate that because someone might say something incredibly transphobic, and Danielle's a black trans artist. Our instinct might be to pull that down, but for Danielle, she loved seeing all the comments, and actually it was a really important part of the practice.

Not to say that there do not need to be protections around things at all, but in that case we see a very different relationship to feedback, or to open structures that we're trying to embrace and experiment with.

Sharing the way that we build things is also a means to empower people to play with things themselves, whether or not we're making an actual open source game like Hive Minds. An open source open space is part of the volatility of the world that we are now in. It's exciting that we can play with that and see how the feedback can make things better.