Digital witness: the artists making virtual realms from lived experience - The Guardian

Can exertion beryllium harnessed to assistance liberate alternatively than oppress us? Corporations are improbable to beryllium overmuch usage – but creation might.

It is this anticipation that underpins Radical Ancestry, a 16-month-long programme of residencies, events and exhibitions astatine Fact Liverpool, an organisation that supports artists and film-makers. With a bid of commissions by emerging and established figures, the programme asks however we mightiness “reimagine notions of belonging” to forge caller identities and communities.

This month, Radical Ancestry brings 2 artists successful dialogue: Josèfa Ntjam, who lives successful the French metropolis of Saint-Étienne, and the London-based Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.

Both Ntjam, 30, and Brathwaite-Shirley, 27, nutrient enactment that spans the carnal and the virtual. In Ntjam’s case, this includes integer collages, films, augmented-reality experiences and 3D-modelled sculptures often brought unneurotic successful surreal, quasi-futuristic installations that conjure underwater civilisations oregon intergalactic vistas. Brathwaite-Shirley is champion known for her interactive video games that tin beryllium played some online and successful assemblage installations.

The artists besides spot their art-making arsenic a mode of “archiving” marginalised stories and experiences. Ntjam’s absorption is connected the civilization and mythology of Africa and its diaspora, which look arsenic references – some overt and oblique – crossed her work. Brathwaite-Shirley is peculiarly acrophobic with Black trans people. For projects specified arsenic blacktransarchive.com (2020), the creator works with chap members of the Black and trans communities, embedding images of them – and their memories – successful her animated games.

At Fact, visitors are invited to participate 2 elaborately realised worlds that determination freely betwixt world and imagination. Ntjam’s publication centres connected a sci-fi-esque film, Dislocation, which follows a quality named Persona – “looking,” says the artist, “for archives and memories of the Cameroonian warfare of independence”. (Ntjam’s begetter is from Cameroon: she interviewed respective household members erstwhile researching the film.) In the assemblage space, Ntjam has besides constructed a subterranean cave filled with mushrooms and plankton successful pools of water.

Ntjam’s cave, modelled utilizing photogrammetry of a existent cave successful the southbound of France, was inspired by the hideouts utilized by French communist absorption fighters during the 2nd satellite warfare (the Communist enactment aboriginal supported the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon during its conflict for independence). It is besides a notation to Underground Resistance, a euphony corporate from Detroit. “I’m funny successful however the layers of stone enactment arsenic a metaphor: for colonisation and the compressing of history,” she says.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Photograph: Courtesy Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Brathwaite-Shirley’s contribution, a crippled called When Our Worlds Meet, is made successful collaboration with a radical of young radical successful Liverpool. “We talked astir what benignant of environments they would request to enactment themselves and their communities that they don’t spot successful Liverpool. Then we constructed worlds astir these conversations,” she says. Each fantastical satellite represents the “dreams and wishes” of the radical – from places wherever they tin conscionable and enactment with their friends to much in-depth acquisition astir the past of Liverpool and its enslaved routes.

For Brathwaite-Shirley, portion mundane exertion – similar apps connected our phones – is made simply to “serve us”, exertion astatine its champion “can beryllium a mode to question who we are and however we’ve go the nine that we unrecorded in”. In her game, players are asked to marque decisions that volition impact the eventual outcome. This interactivity is important due to the fact that it “allows you to consciousness liable for what you’re seeing”.

“The travel isn’t conscionable the story, but besides the choices you marque on the way, and however you consciousness due to the fact that of those choices.” And if you don’t similar wherever the crippled ends up, well, you tin ever spell backmost to the beginning.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley & Josèfa Ntjam is astatine Fact Liverpool to 9 April. Radical Ancestry runs to 5 February