“I’m much more interested in how tech can hold a part of someone’s soul, than in how accurate can we get it.” Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on artistic practices and archiving the unarchived

Danielle, let’s start with a couple of questions on artistic practice. What’s your starting point? And how does that develop?

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Usually, it starts from something very not creative, which is a conversation. I usually speak to a few people that I’m interested in. That could be from any walk of life, but they are usually someone that in some way I think has not been archived. So I want to hear that conversation firsthand.

Do you seek them out?

Danielle: Yes, I’ll seek them out. I’ll set up a space where they can talk. I’ll record what they say, and I’ll just listen. Sometimes, if there is more than one person, I don’t even ask questions. I just let them speak and see what comes out. And then from there, I usually write. My brain works like this, that I’ll just have an idea. It’ll just come from listening to that conversation. It’ll be tangential, but it will just be ignited from that conversation. And I’ll just spend maybe an hour just writing out whatever’s in my body and my soul.

And then from that, I try and figure out how to place that person in an environment or work. And it doesn’t work very well often. So usually, I will spend 20 minutes, let’s say, modelling an image of this person. And then, whatever I’ve done has to go in the work. And the process is additive. So that means if it’s wrong and it doesn’t represent them at all, I can’t delete it. I have to add something else.

So you never discard?

Danielle: I don’t like discarding. Instead of having one representative of a person, you have an entire world, a setting, that is made of complete failures of trying to represent this person or emotional thing. And when I have that, I then go back to the story and figure out how I can shoot that story in that environment.

Once you’ve done an interview, is that the only source you’re using?

Danielle: It depends. Sometimes we interview different people. I want to keep it as natural, as non-curated, as possible. I’m much more interested in how tech can hold a part of someone’s soul, than actually how accurate can we get it. I’m allowing that conversation to be the little bit that I have, but I’m seeing how far I can draw it out. What I’ll do is, I’ll go to another group of people that I think may need to be archived, and maybe they’ll be included in, and then another group. And so sometimes we’ll have 20 people that we’ve spoken to, all coming from very different points of view, all thinking about very different things when they come in. Our job is to try and get the world to hold all of them in one, which is really difficult.

All the people you talk to – do you mainly see their story or them as a person?

Danielle: It’s more “them”. Sometimes I don’t know their story. It’s more the intrigue of that I don’t know anything about them, that I don’t know their story. And I’m not exactly trying to get that story. I don’t work in a traditional archive, not trying to record where they come from or things like this. My idea of what is important in this is that the way in which someone talks about something and the way in which they’ll tell a story will hold something of their soul. And that’s what I want.

When you archive the unarchived person, do you also look at what these people are not saying and not telling, at the blanks in their story?

Danielle: Yes, that’s why I’m much more of a mediator in the space of this conversation instead of a director, I become a director much later. At first, I’m interested in what subjects they would bring up, what they would leave out. I’m not trying to then fill in the blanks for them. The best is when I’m almost just a fly on the wall and the conversation is just taking place and I just happen to be recording it. That’s the best example. Because it just archives a moment in time, there’s a massive amount missing, but it’s just about what they cared about in that moment. My job is just to listen and just to try and figure out a way I can build an environment that could hold that conversation and make that hour, two hours of conversation an entire experience that you can step into.

Do you think that is a good thing that everyone has a different approach to certain similar topics?

Danielle: It’s a good thing that they can in the room and talk to each other. Not everyone has a good opinion. But for me, it’s good that they’re all in the room and talking to each other rather than feeling too scared to say the opinion.

And when you say they don’t have a good opinion, do you also still use that material?

Danielle: Yes, absolutely. Because I’m not trying to get them to reflect my point of view. I think sometimes they do, because of the people I have been speaking to, which is why recently we’re trying to branch out of that, to get people’s views that maybe I just don’t agree with at all.

Because right now, I just feel like we don’t really have spaces where we have difficult conversations, where we have to sit down and disagree with each other. So I’m trying to figure out how to facilitate that and how the work later on can also facilitate that, which is a nightmare. But that’s now the aim. The aim shifted from it being an experience that you come in and you play through the work. Even though it’s based on someone’s experience, you often think about what you are, who you are, and what you’ve done. And now the games are becoming a lot more about going into the space and having to look at the stranger next to you and try and connect with them in order to complete anything in there because I just think it’s necessary.

If you insert yourself into the final artwork, do you think that creates a different situation, because you are the final curator of all the different voices?

Danielle: That’s hard to say. I feel because I’m acting more as a director, it definitely skews to whatever I’m thinking about or care about. It’s not a neutral work in the slightest.

I do these emotional flowcharts of how I want the audience to feel at a certain point. When do I want them to be scared? Do I want them to have a very difficult decision on this choice? Do I want the choice to be very easy? How do I get them in? How do I get them to care first and then really hit them hard later? I’m trying to get you to feel things because of the decisions that you’ve made. That’s why I’m making the game around that. You might come in and answer a question like, “Have you ever hurt someone”? And you say, “Yes”. And then time gets removed for everyone. And then you go, “What? Shit.” And it’s about that reverberation that you’ve made a choice, and now you see that you’re responsible for something happening for everyone. That’s what the work is about, where my voice comes more in, because you’ll be able to see what I think is negative and positive by the time being up or down or something like this.

Do you think that there are patterns in your work where you always use a particular visualisation for example?

Danielle: At the beginning, I’m finding it very difficult to find a visual language to express a conversation. I’ll usually just start with something simple, picking the engine, the video game engine we work in. I won’t decide that before I’ve heard the conversation. Then I’ll hear the conversation and say, which one would be best to do this one in? What would be the most respectful one to do it for the people in the conversation. And then we’ll pick that engine, and then that will give us some parameters for what we’ve been able to do. If it’s a very high-fidelity engine, we can do all 3D stuff. And if it’s very low and can only use videos, everything has to be rendered into videos beforehand, which has pros and cons. Or if it’s really bad, it can only be images. And then from that, I usually have pictures of people. So usually, we’ll take some photos when we’re talking. And then I use those to texture or build characters from. And then the visual language just slowly comes together.

What does archiving mean to you?

Danielle: I would say I’m always trying to find a new way to archive every conversation. And I think I resist the more traditional way of archiving, because it only works in certain settings in a certain way. And the way you access it is also very limited. Archives have amazing things, but it’s very hard to find them. It’s also very hard to access them naturally in a non-academic searching for a way. And so for me, I’m trying just to archive the essence, the soul of something. So it’s much more vague, but it allows you to soak inside of it. And you’re feeling it rather than learning from it.

It’s basically a moment that lets you bathe in it. And then when you get out the water, you see what you’ve done. And that’s what it is. It’s definitely not “this is a historic archive of X, Y, Z.” It’s more that this is what the water feels like, this is what the temperature is. And you can get inside of it and move it around. And then everyone looks at what you’ve done to the water.

Do you want something from your audience?

Danielle: I think about the audience a lot. I think they’re pretty much the main medium. And although there’s all this tech and all these methods and ways of doing stuff, the thing we agonise over is the choices that are made, what can be effective, what can’t be affected, what happens when you do something, like how big the reverberation is, does it last the entire game or just the beginning? For me, it is really important that it feels that you come out of the experience thinking about what you did or what you didn’t do or if you were anxious or whatever. Just trying to get back to those root feelings that you have and be thinking about those rather than be thinking, “wow, the work’s beautiful”. Because I always say, if the work is beautiful, it’s a failure.

It’s beautiful, but that’s not interesting. It’s better if you come in and you think, “I’ve done this when I was younger.” That’s much more interesting. Or “I used to be like that.” Or “How did I change?” Or “I’ve done that and I feel bad.” I think that’s where the actual artwork really lies, in how people are feeling afterwards and how long they carry it, which I’m assuming isn’t very long right now. But we’re trying to figure out how we can make that last a little bit longer.

Coming back to the format of the artwork, do you think that digital art is uniquely good for an attempt to draw the audience in and make them participate?

Danielle: I wouldn’t say it’s uniquely good at it because there is a lot of digital art that focuses on beauty, because of how amazing the engines are. I’m not knocking those artists. But there’s a lot of very beautiful digital art that may be interactive, but isn’t introspective. For me, when you implement the digital and performance, I think then something really magical happens. So I don’t think digital art is uniquely good at it. But I do think digital art has the unique talent of being able to do a lot more with it, but that often is not being done.

Sometimes we’ve noticed that a lot of what is sold as digital art is a sort of “technology porn”. What do you think is that?

Danielle: I feel like it’s interesting in the tech world, because sometimes the computational wizardry behind it sells the image. So behind it it’s very complicated. It’s the first use of XYZ. The image you see is a lovely background and it’s nice. Kids love it. It’s beautiful. It’s technically beautiful. But then it’s awe inspiring. You say, “wow.” But then that’s it. That’s the point of it, and that’s it. Then the tech behind it is very easy to sell at a market for the institutions.

I think I can see that the market’s there, because everyone’s talking about it. But I find a lot of the work very dead. It feels soulless and empty. And apart from being awe inspiringly gorgeous, they don’t feel like they have a purpose or a stance on anything. And that’s why I think I take a very different approach to it, because I’m just careful of not stepping into that.

I feel that we need a very different approach to tech art, just to explore the breadth of what it can actually do. Just like I think what happened in the 70s and 80s with performance art. I think we need to do the same with tech art because otherwise it’s just going to be another stale very expensive money environment to showcase new screens rather than actually to see if it can do things to people.

You’re not shying away from the really deep questions of death and soul and resurrection. Your art seems slightly spiritual in a way. Is that intended or are these just the big topics of life?

Danielle: I think it wasn’t intended. I can’t explain that bit to you, because I’m actively not very spiritual, but clearly I do think about spirituality a lot. And literally, later on this month, I’m speaking to a multi faith group about archiving them. So I think I’m accepting a bit more in trying to see why that’s there. But none of that was planned. I think that to make the experiences to feel spiritual, that’s more planned, because I think it’s important that that happens in a tech environment. But the content of that was not planned at all. It just happens. And I think maybe it happens because most of the work, I follow my intuition. I just let it lead. And if something affects me or knocks me, that goes in. And so often it’s quite honest and revealing and also not clean. It’s not like a clean showcase or something. It’s like this is art, pain, death. So I feel like that’s just come out just intuitively, rather than a sought spirituality that’s placed in the work.

Thank you so much!