Explore the intersection of art and video games in this highly engaging DLD25 session with artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Leo Castañeda, moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of London’s Serpentine Galleries.
The session explores both artists’ inspirations, current projects, and ambitions in using gaming technology to create immersive artistic experiences. It also illuminates how video games are becoming the defining medium of the 21st century.
Noting that around 3 billion people “interact one way or the other with video games” today, Obrist suggests that “video games might be to the 21st century what movies were to the 20th century, and maybe the novel to the 19th century.”
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley emphasizes that the main purpose of her work “is to get people to connect to other people. it’s not about what’s on screen.”
She sees her form of art as the result of interactivity and building spaces that offer unique experiences. “The main artwork is not what you see on screen, it’s the journey you took, it’s the decisions you made”, she says. “If you leave thinking, ‘This was good art’, I have failed.”
Leo Castañeda presents his ongoing project Camoflux: Levels and Bosses, a “stealth exploration game where bodies, technology, and landscapes fuse.” Central to Castañeda’s work is the concept of “exponential reciprocity”, which can be seen as a “metaphor for nature, or like a future being that one becomes, when one becomes nature”, the artist explains.
His installations bring together paintings, sculptures, and digital interfaces to create comprehensive mixed-reality experiences.
Watch the video to learn more about both artists’ inspirations, their current projects and unrealized ideas.
