This web-based videogame artwork, which follows the form of a ‘choose your own adventure games’, builds on Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s already extensive oeuvre of animation, installation, performance, and videogames that deal with exploring, archiving, recording, and championing Black Trans history and identity. From late 2020, and at the time of acquisition, it was available to play online via the blacktransair website.

In a society where so often throughout history these voices have been erased or not recorded at all, Blacktransair.com / I CANT REMEMBER A TIME I DIDN’T NEED YOU forces the player to confront the tension between voyeurism, spectacle and participation both within and outside the game. Moving through multiple spaces and depending on your own life experiences and identity, each outcome is different and personal.

The artist references the aesthetics of pre-rendered videogames from the late 1990s and 2000s most often seen in the early iterations of videogame consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and other console brands. Brathwaite-Shirley was inspired by the fog in Spider-Man for Playstation (2000), in which the player’s gameplay ends if you touch it while travelling, going on to imagine the city underneath, with the fog supporting the inhabitants instead.

Each scene of the game is created in the landscape of Brathwaite-Shirley’s city, itself both a character and tribute to a friend of the artist, created in computer graphics software Blender. These scenes are then captured and processed through a gif-maker to create a choose-your-own adventure web-based game using Twine, a tool used to create interactive fiction. The textures of the characters, buildings and cityscapes that build Brathwaite-Shirley’s worlds are created from the artist’s body and numerous black trans people in the artist’s life, a practice of archiving black trans experience.

Blacktransair.com / I CANT REMEMBER A TIME I DIDN’T NEED YOU won an Honorary Mention in the 2021 Ars Electronica Awards for Computer Animation.

The artist

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995) is an artist that seeks to archive black trans experience, working in animation, sound, performance and videogames. Danielle graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2019, and lives and works in London.

In 2022, Brathwaite-Shirley held a major solo show at FACT Liverpool. In 2021 premiered a major new installation work SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE at Arebyte in London and works by the artist featured in major group shows at Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist) and the Albright-Knox, Buffalo (curated by Tina Rivers Ryan).

In 2020, Brathwaite-Shirley produced solo performance work at Tate Modern, London. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Arebyte, London (2021), Anna Kultys Gallery, London (2021), Focal Point Gallery, London (2020); Science Gallery, London (2020), and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020). Group exhibitions include transmediale, Berlin (2021), Re$$urection Lands, Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); BBZ GRADUATE SHOW, Copeland Gallery, London (2019), and Transpose: The Future, Barbican, London (2018).