Artist Gabriel Massan uses video game world-building and the blockchain to rethink the meaning of the “Third World”

As a child growing up in Brazil, artist Gabriel Massan was fascinated by maps and the subtleties of cartography. “All my life I have been interested in geography,” he says The art newspaper“by studying mappa mundi, looking for capitals and financial summaries.” He became interested in the politics, economy and geography of his country and came to understand the inequality of Brazilian society, and the privilege of the upper class, which he witnessed daily in Rio de Janeiro. But he was saddened to hear Brazil – which celebrated its 200th anniversary in September – described as a “developing country”.

Massan’s cultural, national and geopolitical awareness adds a special charge to the name—Third world— he’s given to the collaborative world-building video game he’s creating, for launch in 2023, with Serpentine Artists Technologies; with a related blockchain project developed with the open source platform Tezos. The project is part of the Serpentine’s London-based Artist Worlds programme, which was set up in 2021 to explore how artists can use game engines and simulations to build new worlds, bringing audiences into an experience, streamed live. The masses see Third world as a way to offer access to his own world, to question what it is to travel, as well as the attitudes towards Brazil and Brazilians whom he has met around the world – it is part of his practice, he says, to question inequality – and to give other artists and developers a platform to explore and build upon.

Third world will be launched as an online video game, and showcased in an exhibition of Massan’s work to be held at the Serpentine, in London, in the summer of 2023. Massan is also working during Art Basel in Miami Beach with Tezo’s blockchain to issue limited edition tokens. based on Third worldat an event hosted by Tezos and Serpentine on November 30.

The Miami event coincides with the launch of Serpentine’s latest strategic report, Future Art Ecosystems: Vol 3. Art x Decentralized Tech, part of a program to bring artists into advanced technology and to involve society as a whole in the work they produce. The Serpentine’s mission is to “build new alliances,” said Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, at the report’s launch in London. “New connections between artists and society.”

For Massan, now based in Berlin, Third world has been a collaboration on a challenging scale from day one. He has been working online with the team at Serpentine Artists Technologies, a large number of developers – he brought 30 pages of notes to the first R&D discussion – and a growing team of artists from around the world, with special contributions from his Brazilian. the artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar and LYZZA. And the project has grown to become massive and detailed, with a separate narrative, built around three scenarios, at each level of the game. The Serpentine team manages to push artists, says Massan, “to create the possibility to experiment, to create a dream”.

From a producer of objects to a creator of systems

Bettina Korek, managing director of Serpentine Galleries, says the collaboration with Massan about Third world emerges from the Serpentine’s long-term project to evolve the white cube model for museums and galleries into a true user experience of art. Users will be able to meet Third world in a gallery, download it from the Steam platform, or play live on the popular game streaming site Twitch, and archive and share their experiences in third world-photos and footage from inside the game – on the Tezos blockchain. Together, these multiple points of contact create a “deep exchange,” says Korek; and allows Massan to go from being a producer of art objects to a creator of systems. (This type of artist path is the core of the new Future art ecosystems report.)

A fundamental system that Massan and Serpentine Artists Technologies have generated is a collaboration with other artists and developers. Massan sees the work as “not just me, but a group of artists and thinkers”. Live on video conferences with collaborators in Europe, Brazil and Japan, he says, “the chat was full of links, games, new ways to program the game”. At times, he says, it felt like a college study group.

An innovative system that Third world the collaboration team wants to introduce is the use of smart contracts to record the contribution of all Massan’s other creatives, and to maintain this record – as a permanent ledger – through any subsequent transactions involving NFTs produced in connection with Third world.

For Eva Jäger, Curator of Art Technologies at the Serpentine, the project addresses the challenge of using smart contracts to create a (long-promised) secondary market for art on the blockchain. An artist and their collaborative team, she says, should be written into such contracts from the beginning so that the benefit is not just for the token holder. The creative team’s initial investment in the artwork would thus be protected, and they would become part of the community that creates NFTs from the game.

Massan was familiar with Tezos prior to the start of his involvement with itThird world, and already felt at home in its open source environment. “Friends were affected [tokens] on systems based on Tezos,” he says. “It was one of the few platforms where artists were marked and gathered every day. With a huge amount of interactivity that adds value to this community. With Tezos, I started collecting work.”

A world without a map

The mass started Third world project by creating six or seven original three-dimensional sculptures, then inviting other artists and developers to collaborate. He was inspired by classic world-building games such as SIM City and Grand Theft Auto and of the advice he received about building community from the Danish New York-based artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, whose Primal tourism– a virtual multiplayer event developed with three other artists and focused on the relationship between ecology, sustainability and technological progress – was the theme of the Serpentine’s Art Worlds program in 2021.

A thoughtful speaker who takes the time to answer a question and gives a well-considered answer, Massan wants Third world to be a place where other artists and players “stop to listen, and hear to see”. To think, and then to choose. When he presented the concept in Germany, still images showed Third worldhe asked the audience to “close their minds to start” and was delighted when a young visitor told him that he had closed his eyes, after studying the stills and the concept, “to try to animate the game”.

Massan, the lifelong cartographer, has deliberately not given the game any maps for players to follow. This is “so that people will find their way,” he says. “To think about what’s there … beyond inequality. Also where [they] comes from geographical. To find another way.” And he uses Third world playing with time – always an important factor in games – and the power of memory. At any given level, he and his collaborators can create five artifacts, he says, three of which relate to the memory of that room. These items can move between levels and “bring these memories through from one level to the next”.

For Jäger, bringing an artist into a live-streamed world-building game has “potential monster appeal: with music, fashion, DJs helping to hit different audiences”. For Massan himself, the scope and variety of the game-building experience – recording audio with one artist, working one-on-one with another; in person and online – has been an intense experience. Sometimes, he says, he feels like he’s actually living in his own game. The experience has informed his discussions with other artists whose practices include the blockchain. It has also given him a different perspective on the traditional art world.

Third world is a constantly evolving world that artists and developers can add to – what Massan calls a “metaverse inside an environment that people have access to”. And when the game launches in 2023, he says, “it will only be the beginning”.

• Tokens derived from Gabriel Massans Third world will be given to guests at Tezos x Serpentine, SLS South Beach hotel, on Wednesday 30 November at 21.00-01.00

• Future Art Ecosystems: Vol 3. Art x Decentralized Tech was published by Serpentine on 25 November

• Gabriel Massan and Third world will be shown in an exhibition at the Serpentine North, London, in the summer of 2023