Unbonded On A Bonded Domain
3D Animation, Digital Sculpting, color, sound, loop.
Comissioned by FACT Magazine.
Comissioned by FACT Magazine.
2023
Unbonded On A Bonded Domain
In ‘Unbonded On A Bonded Domain’, commissioned by FACT, London, UK, during their 2022-2023 online residency, Gabriel Massan seeks to align their rendering of emotional experience growing up in Rio de Janeiro, coming of age in Sao Paulo and relocating to Europe as the raw material for their work by taking cues from writer and academic Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘Critical Fabulation’, to explore a virtual ecosystem untethered both from their own identity and the physical and conceptual limitations of the human body.
Performing speculative scenarios to investigate how queer club culture, systemic violence, and virtual identities can help us map out the material world and our relationships with it—trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced small talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities questions the nature of their environment and place within it. By transplanting a familiar scenario into an entirely fictionalized context, Massan creates space for a complexity of expression without the need to offer up too much of themselves in the process.
Performing speculative scenarios to investigate how queer club culture, systemic violence, and virtual identities can help us map out the material world and our relationships with it—trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced small talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities questions the nature of their environment and place within it. By transplanting a familiar scenario into an entirely fictionalized context, Massan creates space for a complexity of expression without the need to offer up too much of themselves in the process.
Part One
“In ‘Unbonded on a Bonded Domain (Part One)’
,
the first of a three-part series Massan will present during their online residency at Fact, we find ourselves in a biomechanical nightclub, an alternate reality mutation of Cyberia, the cyberpunk haven for underage ravers and disillusioned hackers from cult 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain. Trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced small talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities question the nature of their environment and their place within it.”
Part Two
“In the second part of their online residency at Fact, the virtual entities from the first episode are reincarnated within a dream of an existential, biomecha fighting game, spectated and narrated by another character who has seemingly lost their previous identity. “The image that is generated, the sensation that is generated, is influenced by the signs stored in you,” they assert.”
Part Three
“It’s here, in a space both furtive and fertile, caught in a clash between cultures, that we find ourselves in the third and final part of Massan’s online residency at Fact. Having graduated from from the bright intimacy of the first episode’s cyberpunk bar to a darker, more cavernous spaces – from Panorama Bar down into the throng of Berghain’s main room – the artist’s virtual golems are locked into the rhythm of another party, another chance to discover themselves.”
Unbridled violence is a choice, but not in your world.
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