Cutscenes is a column exploring—and blurring—the intersection of cinema and video games.
I Can't Follow You Anymore (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2023).
A game is a series of meaningful choices.
—Sid Meier, video-game designer and creator of the Civilization series
The work of British-born, Berlin-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is unified by a consistent mission: “I create work that seeks to archive Black trans experience,” she writes in her website’s artist bio, an ethos that is applicable to all of her projects, spanning video games, digital animation, painting, sound art, installation, and performance. “I think of myself as a mediator,” she explained to Frieze in 2022. “I’m trying to build environments that can hold our words.”
Though she's best known now for video-game design, as an art student Brathwaite-Shirley was first drawn to film. She used film to create containers for the shaping of one's own world as a Black trans person. Inspired by the jaunty polygons of early computer games, these digitally animated works function more like abstract collages than linear narrative films; distinctively rendered in dark-hued, muddy palettes, they place hand-drawn characters in computer-generated, horror-inflected environments, creating fantastical scenarios with a basis in lived experience. The use of this retro aesthetic is not nostalgic, but revisionist. “I don’t see the limitation in technology at that time,” Brathwaite-Shirley noted in a 2021 interview in Feminist Review. “I see the limitation in people who were using that technology, and it was usually just white men.” She returns to old technologies in order to tell new stories in arenas where the scope of narrative imagination, and the existing frames of reference, had been limited before.
In early film works like Blackzilla (2018) and Digging for Black Trans Life (2019), made while Brathwaite-Shirley was a student at the Slade School of Fine Arts, the artist’s friends surface as characters in these stories, taking on nonhuman, avatar-like forms as they act out scenarios inspired by their own experiences. At one point in Blackzilla, in which various fantastical creatures descend on Earth to aid and uplift trans people, a “Trans Daemon” appears in a serpent-like form and speaking in a shrill voice. Ultimately, the daemon is a friendly face, offering the film’s trans subject support with their gender transition or the chance to preserve memories in a newly created archive. Digging for Black Trans Life creates exaggerated science-fiction inversions of recognizable scenarios. One segment satirizes a talk show: a host hungry for narratives of suffering and oppression grills a trans character. The interviewer is a wavy, ink-black sculptural form, grotesque and faceless, while the interviewee has two sinewy, human legs that look like action figure appendages, but nothing above the torso, save for three green stems that spike out upward like a sprouted onion. “Let’s get this trauma show on the road,” probes the host, but the interviewee refuses to oblige. “I’m a monster, and I burn you bitches with pitchforks,” they state instead, shifting the tone and reframing the conversation. In both films, the figure of the monster, something that society deems unnatural, even demonic, is reclaimed, converted from a silenced and shameful victim into a creatively unshackled and outspoken being—empowered, unbridled, and free.
From Being Lost (2021) unfurls a mysterious quest narrative in a post-apocalyptic setting, and its rough, blocky animations resemble a late ’80s or early ’90s first-person role-playing PC game. While Brathwaite-Shirley’s earlier animations addressed the audience as a collective group, mostly critiquing society as a whole, From Being Lost directly engages the individual, aided by its first-person point-of-view: only the viewer’s avatar’s arm is visible, holding a sword aloft in between text prompts that appear clickable. In one scene, a cloaked, faceless figure offers a mirror to the viewer, asking them to first take a look at themselves before wielding it to deflect the judgment of others. When the mirror flips so that the viewer can confront themselves, a dialogue text box appears: "The days of you hiding are over, and now you must live your truth [...] to resist us all being erased again."
From Being Lost (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2021).
Over the past few years, Brathwaite-Shirley has moved from creating video-game–inspired digital animations to designing playable environments. Whereas the animations repurpose memories into abstract narratives that can be passively consumed, Brathwaite-Shirley’s game-based practice draws “you,” the viewer, directly into the work, and relating “you” to the “us” or “them” whom the experience portrays. At the start of We Are Here Because of Those Who Are Not (2020), which follows a “choose your own adventure”–style narrative, a note from Brathwaite-Shirley scrolls across the title screen. “Although anyone can play,” reads the message, “this game is made to centre those who identify as Black and trans”; the prompt adds that this is not “a passive experience,” but instead something that “requires you to bring your own identity to the space.” As such, when I tell the game that I identify as cisgendered, the game lets me know that I have been “responsible for hiding our ancestors,” and that it’s unclear whether I can be trusted. My experience of the material that follows is mediated by these terms of access. To progress, I need to pass through an in-game security center that will assess my threat level, and further choices I make after this point will alter what I encounter.
While playing the game is visually and thematically reminiscent of watching one of Brathwaite-Shirley’s films—and the content is similarly sourced from conversations the artist had with trans and nonbinary colleagues, friends, and young people—it’s an entirely different experience to be consistently asked to factor myself, my identity, and my attitudes into the gameplay. In the films, every audience member receives the same, arguably unearned, access to trans people’s stories and memories, but in Brathwaite-Shirley’s games, the content is personalized along decision-based pathways—although it’s still segmented into necessarily broad identity categories. I am no longer able to divorce myself from the experiences and ideas with which I am presented; my choices affect what I see, feel, and am told.
These ideas are further developed in Pirating Blackness and I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You (both 2021), interactive movies in which players click through forking dialogue trees, making choices that output customized animated sequences. Pirating Blackness proposes an alternative past in which a living, talking ocean resists its role in the Atlantic slave trade. The black-and-white digital waveforms of this glitchy, early-web data-sea speak to the player, interrogating their role in this alternative history; players must reveal whether their ancestors were colonizers of “those that were carried across the sea.” I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You imagines a Gothic city of the future, overrun by a Matrix-green fog that “specifically supports Black trans life.” As a white, cis player, when starting I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You I am told that even though I have been “admitted as an ally,” I will “encounter my privilege here.” Players move through the maze of the game’s world, making choices that either provide access, or block entry, to various settings. I visit a pharmacy where I can treat the “violent gaze” diagnosed within my eyes, and a temple where, prior to being admitted entry, I have to type in my privileges and how I plan to address them. Regrettable choices result in chastisement or even ejection from the game’s world—but to see all that the game has to offer, the player must try, and fail, multiple times.
On the starting screen of Brathwaite-Shirley’s latest game, I Can’t Follow You Anymore (2023), which installs the player as a leader of a fledgling vampiric cult, the player is told plainly that “failing is part of the experience.” In his 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, the philosopher Bernard Suits defines playing a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome necessary obstacles.” But we tend not to think about obstacles in video games, referring more to what games let us do (like shoot things, pilot vehicles, or travel through space and time) than what they prevent us from doing. Brathwaite-Shirley focuses instead on the form’s potential for creating resistance, inserting warnings into her games that alert the player that the experience is not going to be without friction. The player struggling to progress through I Can’t Follow You Anymore is implored not to be “scared to try again,” because “it gets easier the more you fail.” As a result, unlike mainstream games which prioritize pleasure and escapism over critical engagement, Brathwaite-Shirley’s works absolutely cannot be enjoyed passively. The player must engage with the world of the game while simultaneously reflecting on how it contends with the world outside of it. You cannot lose yourself in a game created by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, because, as she states in her bio, “this is about you. [...] How you feel is the medium I am working with.”
In December 2023, parallel to I Can’t Follow You Anymore’s (2023) online availability via Factory International, I spoke to Brathwaite-Shirley about her work, covering interactivity, subjectivity, and making games and animations in which “you” become the medium.
Pirating Blackness (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2021).
NOTEBOOK: How do you decide which medium is best for the idea that you want to explore? What initially brought you to video, and to digital animation, as the vehicle for your messages?
DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: Usually, when I have an idea it will start in the form of a very short piece of writing. It usually starts with a world. With Blackzilla, I was thinking about an environment that feels toxic to live in for certain kinds of people, and then I thought, Well, what happens if this big robot came down from space and it made a new environment in which only Black trans people could breathe? Then from that I extrapolate. I give you a vignette of a world, and then I try to fill you with as much information about that particular world as I can.
My earliest videos don't necessarily have a perfect beginning, middle, and end, but they do have the deepest possible exploration of the idea that I could create at that time. I think Blackzilla was the first or second animation I had made. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was trying to figure out how to talk about this new group of people that I had found at the time, which were Black trans people, and explore what it meant to survive as a Black trans person, because that felt very difficult. I was also trying to figure out the identity of my animation, so in these earlier works there are a lot of drawings that I would then scan, or take a photo of, and then put into the work. I would do this thing where I would be feeling a particular kind of emotion and I would try and archive it in a scene. For example, I remember telling my friend I was on hormones and them not giving a shit. It made me feel bad, so I would make a render of that moment. I'd make each scene separately and then stitch them together, which is why those early works feel sort of like a TV show. It wasn't made sequentially. It's like a diary that I turned into a film.
NOTEBOOK: How do you handle merging your own experiences with those of your friends and collaborators?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: In the early films, we were all just trying to figure out ways of remembering each other. In Digging for Black Trans Lives, I used footage of my friends and their voices. They would act, and I'd write scenes for them. I made the “let's hear a tranny talk” talk-show segment for my friend Travis because I was living with them at the time. I said to Travis: “this feels appropriate for you and your work, for how tongue-in-cheek and witty you are, so this is your scene and your character.” Or, for another scene, I filmed [my friend] Marika dancing, and then turned them into the “Pronoun Demon.” At that time we were thinking about what our pronouns were, which was all very new to me then because I hadn't grown up with the language of trans or nonbinary or anything like that. I was called trans before I knew what trans was; I had no idea what I was being identified as. I felt the need to anchor this identity somewhere, so it was with the people that were around me at the time, which were MarikIsCryCryCry, Ebun Sodipo, and Travis Alabanza. Archiving, or recording, people became a natural part of the work. It felt normal to put the people around me into the work, because the things I was trying to understand were coming from these people.
Blackzilla (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2018).
NOTEBOOK: You could have made these works with a camera but it seems that this world of animation opens up more imaginative possibilities, both visually and logistically. You can render and draw things that you couldn't create with a camera and some actors. What attracted you to digital animation and drawing, and how has your approach developed?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: Originally, I was going to study physics! When I was younger, I would make a lot of art, but I was very naive about what art was. I thought it was just painting and some sculpture. It was a very tiny, stupid mindset to have, but when I got to art school I realized that you have really got to find a medium that is yours and not someone else's. You can't really be honest in a medium that doesn't work for you. When I was younger, I used to dream inside the engines of my favorite games. I used to play Doom II on the Game Boy Advance and then dream in the graphics of the game, imagining the story I would write and the characters I would create. Later, when I was starting to look into animation, that felt like a good place to start: trying to replicate these dreams in the aesthetic that I wanted. When I started doing that, I would get this huge hit of nostalgia—essentially being able to reimagine a scene from a PS1 game that never existed. I could then texture the walls with my friend's face, or add in green-screen footage of them dancing or something.
Before making these initial animations, I was making live-action films—shit ones. They were too based in reality. I wanted something that felt absolutely magical and mystical, so far away from reality but with the subject matter in focus. I found that in 3D animation it was easier to lure the audience in with something that is beautiful and nice, maybe with a sense of relaxation or a small degree of fear, and then hit them with a really hard message. Whereas when I was using images of real people, or of myself, the focus would be on the individual rather than the actual topic of the work. Are they beautiful? What clothes are they wearing? How do they move? I found that when using 3D animation, it became impossible to avoid the work’s topic, and that's why I started loving it. This was actually one of the reasons why I evolved from animation to games. I felt that the animations were becoming very beautiful, and the audiences were finding ways to dodge the messages and only appreciate the visuals. When you are playing a game, it's much harder to do that.
NOTEBOOK: As a viewer, you can sit in front of a video work and it doesn't ask anything of you. As the artist, you don't know if the viewer is engaging as much as they could be. Whereas with these video-game–based works, it's harder to interact with them in a passive way. Can you talk about the differences between film and games, and these related ideas around passivity?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: I'm quite heavy-handed, but I feel that with the animations, even when you're very heavy-handed, people can add in their own references. Obviously, that’s what art is: everyone comes with a set of reference points, and when the art is abstract enough everyone can draw their own conclusions on what it is talking about—with their own confirmation biases, whether negative, positive, or whatever. I was beginning to find that frustrating because often the feedback I was getting—due to what was in the media at the time—was that all of the work was about death, or about how many trans women were dying every day, regardless of what I was saying. People’s limited reference points about trans people and trans experience meant that when I would mention the word trans, people would refer back to the references they knew. There was no nuance there, or room for expansion.
So I was trying to put these choices into the games to make people stop and think, Okay, what would I do here? Instead of them thinking, I'm looking at a trans person's artwork and this trans identity that has nothing to do with me, the reaction would be more like, Oh, I also have a stake in this world. The thinking becomes this idea of: If I was there, I would have made this choice. This all came to a head when I made this one work, and I was in the room with the work. I would be in the room eight hours a day, because I was crazy. It was obvious to visitors that I was the artist, but I was just there invigilating, really.
NOTEBOOK: It wasn’t a performance piece, then?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: No, but people felt comfortable asking me very inappropriate questions all the time. One thing that has stuck with me until now was that someone told me: “I love your work because I can just look at the visuals and ignore what you're saying.” And then from that point, I thought: I do not want to make a film anymore. I need you to activate the work yourself, and then, depending on what you do or choose, you see something.
That’s where the impulse came from for We Are Here Because of Those Who Are Not. I worked with a bunch of different people because I didn't really know how to make a game at all. I did know how to work with people, talk to them, build a scene for them, and put them in it. As I had conversations with the ten or twelve Black trans people I was working with, we started to think about who was going to play this game. If everyone is going to play this game, what happens if you're Black and trans and you play it? Maybe we should have a section for that. Okay, well, if you're not Black and trans? We should have a section for that, too. What if you're trans but not Black? There’s a section for that, too. What happens if I want to do this? We would ask various questions, and those became the choices in the game. I had over two hours of footage in that game, and it all came from these constant questions. I built scenes featuring these Black trans people first, and then built a world that would contain them.
At the time, I was really concerned about trans tourism, and the idea that you could come to the gallery and step into someone's shoes, have a surface-level reaction, and then leave. That's not very interesting. The focus was no longer on us, but on the audience. Who are you? What are you doing? What things are you interested in? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? That's when the medium shifted from something that you can see toward being more about your internal dialogue or a choice that happens to you and that could make you feel XYZ. The medium shifted from animation to you. I would actually say that my main medium is not animation, or even video games, but you. All of that is just a trick. It's just you. I want you to think and feel something, and so I'm trying everything I can do to trick you into feeling a bit more relaxed in order to face up to choices that feel a little uncomfortable—or even unfair.
We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2020).
NOTEBOOK: When you are conceiving these works that segment audiences and force them to make decisions, which player groups were you imagining?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: People often ask why there aren’t five billion choices of identity at the beginning of the games. I'm very cynical about all the words we're using, because I think they can never really encapsulate any of us. So these choices are supposed to be annoying. I remember someone asking why there is no nonbinary choice, and at the time there was a conversation about why nonbinary people had separated themselves from the trans umbrella, and how sometimes that was bad and sometimes that was good, depending on the person and why they had done it. Usually what I do is I write down all the “you’s” I can think of—cis guy, cis woman, trans person, this, that, everything—and I'll do a dialogue tree for them. That dialogue may not make it to the game, but it allows me to consider who the players are. I can never encapsulate everyone, but I do think a lot about different people.
There will always be an audience that I'm making the work for, which informs the content of the work. We Are Here Because of Those Who Are Not, for example, was made for Black trans people, so the [game’s] rules might be to have no recreation of trauma, and to make it a nice experience for Black trans people where it should feel like it’s their world. Then I might think, if you are trans but not Black, how should it feel? Maybe similar, but you have a few more hoops to jump through so that you understand that while this is not exactly your world it is one that you could possibly exist in. Cis people playing this game and encountering the choices will understand that this may actually be the only work in the show that is not for them. This is not their work, and there's finally an art piece that isn't neutral on that. Actually, they might even feel uncomfortable, as I do most of the time when I'm looking at paintings.
Also, my testing pool is not an art pool. It’s made of regular people. I send the games to everyone, regardless of who they are, and their feedback changes them. My mum gives the best feedback, because she's like, “What the fuck is this?”
NOTEBOOK: Yeah, mums are good for a sense check.
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: Exactly, because at the time a lot of my artist friends were like: “this is about the hypothetical realism of these squares within the deeper meanings of Baroque painting.” Yes, but no one cares about that unless they are in the art world. Testing the art with a non-art audience is maybe why these choices do have some effect on some people. Dudebros give really funny feedback. They don't really give a fuck about the content but they’re invested in the mechanical decisions. So when the mechanics switch in my games that can reach them, and suddenly they'll feel more strongly about the story. While a Black trans person who is probably already going to be on my side politically is going to pay more attention to the game’s words because they are looking for affirmation.
I made something with Factory Liverpool recently, working with young people to create a world that listens to them, because no one was listening. Their feedback was the only thing that mattered because it was about them feeling like someone cared about what they said. The funny thing with feedback is that when you set up feedback rooms, it becomes very clinical and work-like. But I want the nonsense, negative internet troll feedback. It's important to know what a right-winger says about this work, or to hear what an incel has to say. If you're getting feedback just from galleries, the work is not gonna hit in the way you want it to. It may hit in a more cerebral, poetic way, but you also want it to hit in all of the nonsense ways. A lot of the work is about the internet, so you need the internet crowd.
I Can't Follow You Anymore (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: On the topic of accessibility, I wanted to ask whether making games that can be played on any computer is important to you?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: I have so many feelings around this. We Are There Because of Those Who Are Not was the first piece I put online, and I put it online purely because most of the people I was speaking with for it were not going to galleries. If we're trying to make a Black trans archive, it would be insane if we just had it in a gallery because many of the people we would want to see it never would. When you put work in a gallery it gets this reverence, or this distance and respect, and it starts becoming more about who's made it—which is bullshit. Galleries intellectualize things in their writing that are very real and grounded. If the people who I made the work for read that text, they wouldn't be able to recognize themselves within it.
So we designed the game to be online as well. It’s important to have a space outside of the gallery that gives people unfiltered, completely free access. We don't have a lineage of Black trans people making games, and when they do make them, they have not always been able to access them. A lot of them are made in older engines that have not been maintained or updated. When I was growing up, the only sites that were archiving us online were Facebook and Instagram: services that may not keep your pictures forever, or could change their terms and conditions at any time. That was where a lot of us found each other, but that is not where history is going to remember us. You can be shadowbanned for a reason that you may not even understand. I had a deep distrust of these places and the mechanics behind them, so I wanted to build these spaces online that you would be able to find without needing to leave your house.
There's another aspect. The reason all my games have URLs that include the words “Black trans” is because when you type “Black trans archive” into a search engine, my game comes up. If you type in “Black trans revolution,” my game comes up. You can’t just expect someone to arrive at your website. The internet is an ocean that has these massive tankers on it that will try and cover you up. It’s about trying to game that internet real estate. There's a million interesting art pieces online, and I have seen maybe ten of them because people just expect to be found. That's the environment that has been curated for us. You either market yourself and people come to your website or you don't and you're buried.
NOTEBOOK: I’m also interested in the way that you're thinking about confrontation and soliciting reactions; the difference between thought and action. How do you encourage people to think about what they are doing, or not doing, as opposed to only consuming these works?
BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: When most people look at an artwork, they look at it once. I love the idea that you can look at an artwork and miss a lot. In an art piece that is interactive, you have to activate the thing in the first place or else nothing happens. And then if you die in five minutes, you might think, This is rubbish. Then someone else might tell you, “Well, I played it for twenty minutes and finished the whole level.” I like this idea that people have completely different experiences because of how they treated the work. Often, I feel like there is this idea that the artist puts in all the work and then the audience sits back and sucks it all in like a consumer in this capitalist little bubble we've made for ourselves. The more time you put into my art, the more it gives you [in return], because in my games, you can't go back and it takes a long time to move forwards. You may need to see things multiple times. It's annoying, but the point is that I'm wanting you to have to slog through [it], or to have to go all the way to the end and then try again on the next go, just so you have to put in the energy and effort rather than it just be given to you.
Right now we have an environment in art which is all about giving. It's all about aesthetic beauty and it's so easy a transaction. We are so kind to the audience, and I don't want to be kind. I think it should be hard. I think it should be controversial. I think it should be painful sometimes, even for the people that I’m making the work for. This is especially true with my more recent works, like I Can’t Follow You Anymore, which is about fascism. I've also been making this game about canceling yourself, and another game about burning bodies. A lot of the work should be harder to consume. I hate the idea that someone would come and see a piece [of mine] and they would say, “This is my favorite show, it was beautiful!” That would be tragic. My work is not just an experience where the artist gives and you take. You give, the art gives; you take, the art takes. It should be like that: a conversation between people.