The Interview | Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

The artist and videogame designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is arrestingly direct as a writer and speaker. Their exhibitions are physical and emotional experiences that engage directly with audiences through public discussion, politics, and participation. 

The London-born artist, who lives between the UK capital and Berlin, invites people to have difficult conversations, on topics including identity, privilege, and systemic oppression. The core of their practice is creating more inclusive futures for art; archiving Black Trans and Gay experiences through gaming environments; and using technology “to imagine our lives in environments that center our bodies”. They address the reader directly on their website: “You think you came here to enjoy some art / You are mistaken / This is about you / How you feel is the medium I am working with / You may feel uncomfortable / You may feel represented / But you won’t feel forgotten.”

Brathwaite-Shirley in person is inquiring and quick-witted, fizzing with ideas, and humor. They are looking — as a self-declared “nerd” — to expand their practice beyond performance and gaming. They see the attraction of working on the blockchain, they tell Right Click Save, including its potential as a home for gaming; and with artificial intelligence, which they hope to engage with in developing audio-only games, dependent on the sophisticated and imaginative use of spatial audio.

“The Delusion”

Brathwaite-Shirley’s striking new exhibition, “The Delusion”, at the Serpentine, London — a video-game commission and multiplayer immersive experience that runs on game engines to explore themes of polarization, censorship, and social connection — is both timely and designed for all, whether they have experience of video games (and video-game controllers) or not. In an era of global diplomatic, political, and social unease, the exhibition is built on the backstory of an imaginary post-apocalyptic time where, following a “Day of Division”, people live in “Peace by Isolation”. That reference to isolation, the artist says, reflects “the kind of world we’re living in where there’s a group of people that you agree with [...] and the many groups of people that you don’t agree with; and there’s not much cross-pollination [between them]”. The exhibition asks how audiences “relate, respond, and resist when faced with collapsing systems and distorted realities.” It invites them to engage in difficult questions in an unsettled time.‍

‍The exhibition came about, Brathwaite-Shirley said in a speech at the show’s press opening, from a desire “to build a space in the gallery that wasn’t just about viewing work, but was about giving people a place to speak and figure out what they feel about the world right now.” “In an age where it seems that art feels like it may become ever so apolitical in order to survive,” they said, “we need to [give audiences] spaces [where] they can figure out what they need to do in this time.” ‍

‍Speaking at the same occasion, Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine, spoke of “The Delusion” as a project that “creates what Danielle calls a ‘human engine’, where interactivity grounds us not in the virtual, but in the present moment.

The work asks the biggest questions. How do we embed soul in the digital world? (Bettina Korek, CEO, Serpentine Galleries)

“The Delusion” is the product of four years’ collaboration, with a creative sprint over the past 12 months, between the artist and the Arts Technologies team at Serpentine, for this project Tamar Clarke-Brown, Ruth Waters, Vi Trinh and Kay Watson. During those four years — when Brathwaite-Shirley made or tested several games with the Serpentine team — the artist’s work has been shown internationally, from MoMA, New York to LAS Foundation, Berlin, and from FACT, Liverpool, to Tate Modern in London.

“The Delusion” is the latest collaborative iteration from the Arts Technologies team. Working with Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the team has produced boundary-breaking exhibitions over the past decade — often working on experiments in art and gaming — with artists including Ian Cheng, Gabriel Massan, Refik Anadol and, in 2024, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. In the past five years the team has produced five Future Art Ecosystems reports — led by Victoria Ivanova and aligned with the gallery’s exhibitions programme — on Art x Advanced Technologies (2020); Art x the Metaverse (2021), Art x Decentralised Tech (2022); Art x Public AI (2024) and Art x Creative R&D (2025).

An artist at home with audience participation

Brathwaite-Shirley was trained in the rigors of interactive events and performance theater through immersion in the artistically demanding world of a burlesque club in 2010s east London. Each week she watched her friends at the club rethink their hula-hooping, singing, or dancing acts, the better to engage the audience and earn tips to live on. Brathwaite-Shirley in turn showed first video animations then video games, and finally — responding to audience reaction — video games that addressed the audience directly, inspiring both questions and answers. 

“Every time I felt the audience’s response,” Brathwaite-Shirley tells Right Click Save, “I would work to do something better, get them more engaged. And I started putting questions in the game. I started putting instructions in the films. And that was my way of incrementally improving audience participation.” On the press day of “The Delusion”, on a bright morning in the center of Hyde Park, standing in the swooping embrace of Zaha Hadid’s Magazine restaurant, Brathwaite-Shirley invited an audience of a hundred curators, artists, and writers to prepare to embrace the show’s participatory nature by joining a group exercise, humming a note, any note.

Through the artist’s poised, ebullient coaxing, a set of notes from an untrained collective somehow melded into a resonant, visceral chord: at its core a euphonious, richly populated, major fifth.

Two weeks later, Brathwaite-Shirley stood at the same place, and repeated the experiment, but this time to the backing of a flat-grey London October morning with an audience twice the size — a global gathering of artists, architects, curators, gallerists, and collectors, in London for the VIP days of Frieze London fair. The artist varied the play, seemingly extempore, showing the value of that burlesque-club experience, working with an audience. They called first for closed eyes and a hummed note from all attending and — sensing the nature of the chord — asked some to go higher, if they could, and lower, if they could; before asking this art world “choir” to open eyes and engage with a neighbor. Then, perhaps detecting an interesting quality to the “hum”— the artist asked the audience to lean into dissonance and leap into a wildly different note. The two different audiences had elicited two different group exercises and two very diverse aural outputs.

The terms and conditions of play

These choral proceedings were a dry run for the participatory invitation of the exhibition proper. “The Delusion” is housed in Serpentine North Gallery, a former gunpowder store, square in plan and made up of four cloister-like long galleries that enclose two oblong cross-spaces. On entering the first of the outer galleries, the visitor faces a lateral “welcome” wall. While Refik Anadol, in “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive” (2024), used this space to display grid-like screen summaries of how the datasets for his large nature model had been assembled — the better to show his process and the ethical origin of his datasets — “The Delusion” greets the visitor with a wall of Terms and Conditions.

This wall — rich in characterful text and bordered by a collage of some of the 140 consciously “ghoul-like” characters the artist has created for the game — gives a sense of immediate recognition to followers of the artist’s origin story: of how their introduction to gaming was  studying their father’s old MS-DOS PC game boxes, attracted by the rudimentary graphics and thick instruction manuals they contained. “The books that were included in these PC game boxes had a lot of lore and story,” Brathwaite-Shirley says. “I would spend hours reading them and [they] would tell you all about every character, all the enemies in the game, what they do, why they exist. And [that] really engaged my imagination — of what this world could possibly be — before I even had the chance to play it.”

“Danielle [...] creates these new terms and conditions, protocols for entering each space,” says Tamar Clarke-Brown, curator and lead of “The Delusion” and Arts Technologies Curator at Serpentine. “This takes inspiration from computing history, but also looks at the ways in which [the artist is] able to deliver specific actions and instructions to help [audiences] navigate into a space.”

In line with the artist’s taste for gaming lore, visitors are given an engaging 12-page newsprint zine-like program for the exhibition, with reproductions of some of the artist’s 22 original drawings, created “in reaction” to news events over the past year and hung through the show and its four participatory galleries.

The artist has addressed the challenge of audience inclusion by “naturalizing” the game interfaces as household objects, rather than confronting non-gaming attendees with multi-button crablike controllers that are inviting mostly to a demographic that lives on Switch or PlayStation. In the exhibition’s three games, visitors are asked in one to open a cupboard door and in others to interact with tables or lamps in order to enter a gaming environment. These oversize interfaces allow multiple players to be involved, as hands-on players or observers, at the same time. They are also designed, Brathwaite-Shirley says, to provoke fun, a useful prerequisite — discovered in the game’s R&D sessions with psychologists — for encouraging strangers to interact.

In the two galleries leading off the entrance space, each labelled The Border, the audience is asked to open glazed cabinets where they meet one of four on-screen “Callings”, ghoulish interlocutory figures that issue calls to action and set the mood of the space as one of three emotional “delusion loops” based on hope, fear, and hate. The “Callings”, Clarke-Brown said, “talk about things that you might recognize in yourself, things that might make you feel uncomfortable, things that you might resonate with. And it’s not about judging, it’s really about you having a one-on-one moment with different things that come up, with different conversations.”

The two other games are contained in the cross-galleries. In one, The Meeting Room, a group of four players lay their hands on a table and tilt it to control the gaming action in front of them, a play on the historic fascination in the UK with table-tilting and Ouija boards to commune with the spirits of the dead.

The players tilt the table to steer an on-screen boulder in gameplay — a reference to the classic  “marble-platformer” game Monkey Ball (2001), which popularized the gaming idiom of tilting a level to control a ball. In the other, The Democratic Room, four users use gun-controllers disguised as table lamps — known as “validators” — to play the game by answering on-screen questions.

This game references one of Brathwaite-Shirley’s favourites, Doom (1993) — a point-and-shoot game that caused moral panic, and outrage in the US Congress, on its release. As a child she read the game’s instructions so much (before she got to play the game) that she used to dream in Doom’s graphics.

At the back of the gallery is the Safe Room where the audience is invited to take a break and contribute to a book called I thought I’d Let You Know How I Feel, “a collective, intimate and growing record of public opinion”. To visit “The Delusion” is to witness how all three interactive game environments attract groups to gather round, standing in “multiplayer” huddles, whether listening, playing, or observing. All are designed to end on a collective exercise and then a collective conversation. The artist sees the experience as “a community center in which art is your mediator”.

A champion of women in games and tech

A monograph of Brathwaite-Shirley’s work, edited by Clarke-Brown and Cairo Clarke (as managing editor), is to be published by Archive Books to accompany the exhibition. It includes a conversation between Brathwaite-Shirley, Obrist, Watson, and the digital art pioneer Rebecca Allen, in which Brathwaite-Shirley talks about her earliest experiences in gaming, her work in burlesque clubs and the role of women in tech.

Brathwaite-Shirley tells Right Click Save that Allen — whose work with Nam June Paik and Kraftwerk has had such a profound effect on video art and pop cultural history — is one of their artistic inspirations along with Muriel Tramis, the maker of games such as Willow and Freedom. Brathwaite-Shirley also mentions being given her first exhibition by Helen Starr — the curator, producer, and founder of The Mechatronic Library that gives artists access to new media. “Helen is the underground connector of tech,” Brathwaite-Shirley says.

The inspiration Brathwaite-Shirley has felt from gaming, especially retro games, has necessarily been from the experiences themselves, made by huge teams, rather than individual artists. They cite the 1987 Apple release HyperCard stacks as an example. “If you go back and look at the HyperCard games,” they say, “you see [early] internet art. All you had to do was use a paint program and then one line of code to make the screen change. And so a lot of people made art games.” They also mention games such as Museum of Anything Goes (1995) or Enter the Matrix (Atari, 2003) as “massive inspirations […] that really excited me.”

Brathwaite-Shirley also names Hideo Kojima for showing “how games can start becoming meta narratives. They comment on who you are, what you’re doing in the game, your morals, your lack of morals within a space you think doesn’t exist.”

Asked about visual artists that have shown them the way, Brathwaite-Shirley mentions Francis Bacon, “a big inspiration […] because I like horror.” From younger generations they list Evan Ifekoya, David Blandy, Sondra Perry, Jacob V. Joyce, Travis Alabanza, and Evan Sudeepo. As well as the Cocoa Butter Club, run by Sadie Sinner where they discovered burlesque and audience interaction. They also point to Marina Abramović “because we’re using the audience as the main medium, so we’re looking quite deeply at her.”

The aesthetic of their work, Brathwaite-Shirley says, is largely inspired by old games, but when learning from visual artists, they look at “how they move the audience around the space, what their work [does] to the audience, how that benefits the kind of space [because we are presenting] a game with an installation. And so the installation [work] is very much inspired by other artists like RIP Jermain or Carrie Mae Weems.”

At the press opening, Brathwaite-Shirley spoke of Allen as “an amazing example of an artist that has literally changed generations of people’s lives and not got the credit for it. And she is now getting the credit.” They also referred to the women in the Serpentine team:

I don’t think we give enough credit to women in tech as literal pioneers of new ideas and pioneers of new spaces and new ways to use it […] women are driving tech in art and they’re just not getting the recognition for it right now. (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley)

The importance of community

Brathwaite-Shirley’s championing of women in tech is part of their overriding concern for community. They created their first substantial artistic expression of community with the Black Trans Archive (2020), a game-based art work commissioned by Science Gallery, London. Brathwaite-Shirley’s archival research into the Black Trans community up to that time had turned up only Mary Jones and a poster that called Jones “the man monster”, along with her arrest warrant. Brathwaite-Shirley wanted to see “if we could make a better archive of the people around us at the time” while resisting what they call “trans tourism”.

They wanted instead to establish how their community could, without looking like “a normal person”, still feel powerful and respected. They interviewed 12 Black Trans people for that archive and reduced those interviews to the “essence and souls” of the interviewees.

They made an untraditional archive, filled with nonsense, fiction, and magic, and built a game with a simple controller, with just three buttons, so that all demographics could play.

The Black Trans Archive, they say, is “about dreams and fantasy and what people want rather than their identity [...] I’ve moved more and more away from that. The choices that you make in [“The Delusion”] are a reflection of you rather than an entering or a teaching of someone else. Because I find it a lot more interesting if the audience comes out with an “I” statement, for example, “I made the wrong decision” or “I hated this” rather than, “I didn’t know this about X, Y, Z” [...]. Especially in a world where we are evermore polarized and evermore not having spaces to think about what you want and what you think about a particular subject.”

In creating “The Delusion” Brathwaite-Shirley addressed the needs of another community: the gaming community that loved the gaming engine Blender, which had ceased development in 2002 and was later renamed UPBGE before a community of Blender lovers built a replacement. The community base of this replacement — open source, free, and maintained by its community — appeals to Braithwaite-Shirley, and the Serpentine team agreed to use the software in the exhibition’s development. 

“When I told them I wanted to use a broken engine, a game engine that is not finished, which we essentially wrote more of for the project,” Brathwaite-Shirley says of the Serpentine team, “they said, yes, go for it.”

“The Delusion” is my Community Center in which games help mediate difficult conversations and help you get to why you’re thinking the way you do and what your opinion might be. It’s not a place to tell you what’s right or wrong. It’s not a place to judge you. (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley)

At the opening of the “The Delusion”, Brathwaite-Shirley spoke of humor in the show: “because it’s very difficult to talk about these [existential] topics straight up. You need some humor in order to get people to lower their boundaries, in order to get them to look at each other, laugh about particular subjects, to open up so that they communicate.” Another technique for getting visitors to drop their guard — something that emerged during the R&D phase — was to suggest a very challenging action such as “talk to this person next to you about dehumanization” followed by a very undemanding one such as “hold your hands up in the air.”

Viewing “The Delusion”, with its fantastical characters and game controllers, and hearing Brathwaite-Shirley speak of retro video games and of how the artist created the imaginative soul of Black Trans Archive, is to sense a strong connection in their work not just to gaming history, contemporary installation, and the spirit of burlesque, but also to a grand tradition of satirical humorous 19th-century fiction — the Alice novels by Lewis Carroll, the nonsense verse of Edward Lear — as well as to the unbounded 18th-century visual satire of James Gillray or Thomas Rowlandson.

At the same opening event, Brathwaite-Shirley had addressed the question of what art and participatory, inclusive art, is for. “There’s not enough art that breaks open the audience’s barriers and asks them really tough questions and lets them sit in that discomfort and tell them it’s OK. People say, does art change the world? Look at propaganda, it definitely does change the world. But now, in a space like this, [you can] give someone an opportunity [to find] something in themselves. So it might change them, not in a way that you’ve planned, where you’ve given them the space for that to happen. So let’s give them more spaces for that rather than tell them how to feel.”