While Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s artistic practice sprawls across animation, sound, video game development, and performance, one could argue that their true medium is morality. Brathwaite-Shirley isn’t afraid to implicate their audience—in fact, they often lure you into implicating yourself. In the artist’s latest exhibition with Serpentine in London, THE DELUSION, they present a series of literal video games and immersive installations, using interactive mediums to bypass the traditional passivity of art appreciation. There, participatory environments function as a living archive of the lives of the Black trans and Queer community. 

In THE DELUSION, curated by Tamar Clarke-Brown and produced by Serpentine’s Arts technologies, the goal is not to simply create a beautiful space, but instead to challenge participants through gameplay with rules that are deceptively simple: talk, collaborate, be messy, challenge your assumptions. “We’d prefer that you come and have an emotional, strong resonance with the world [of THE DELUSION], then leave saying, What a beautiful show,” they tell me. 

Brathwaite-Shirley’s work resists the myth of the solitary artist-genius, instead rooting itself in community—both in its making and in the way it is played. “[The game] is set up like a house,” they tell me. “So when you want to play the game, you have to move a literal table to play, and you can’t really do it alone, it’s impossible to.” In this way, THE DELUSION engineers situations where players must engage with one another, navigate shared obstacles, and confront fears collectively.

Through confronting moral challenges, charged prompts, and uncomfortable questions woven into the gameplay, THE DELUSION is not about “winning,” but about discovering who you are when the stakes are personal. “We thought it would be really difficult to get [the participants] to communicate with each other, but actually, that was the bit that was working best—this idea that [participants] could take a topic together and decide how they want to attack it,” Brathwaite-Shirley recalls of the playtesting process. “Basically, any kind of interaction [in the game] is very much encouraging this kind of conversational aspect to happen, which does not usually happen in the gallery.”

This game was more than a year in the making, created alongside a team that included Black trans collaborators (whose memories and words are intentionally and reverently woven into the fabric of the experience) as well as psychologists who consulted on how the exhibit could catalyze reflection, discomfort, and emotional complexity in those who engage with it. The result is an exhibition unlike any others. Brathwaite-Shirley challenges the accepted meaning of “the gallery,” and instead creates a space for a collective moral and social accounting to occur. 

In THE DELUSION, the game functions as an archive, but not in the traditional sense of static records or artifacts. “I use pictures of people to make the image for the grass, for example,” Brathwaite-Shirley explains. “So if something looks green, it might be made from your eye. A lot of the world has this strange feeling and that’s because it’s made from a lot of human elements.” 

The game becomes a layered text constructed with the memories and words of collaborators, a diary, almost, of lived experiences. As Brathwaite-Shirley puts it, “I consider an archive of someone trying to record how a person thinks. For me, [how a person thinks] harbors more of the hopes and dreams and essence and soul of the individual, rather than just who they were—because that’s what I’m going to archive: the soul, rather than just the presence of them.”

Morality, collaboration, and memory form the core materials of THE DELUSION. They’re woven into the game itself, and sculpted and reshaped in real time by the decisions players make and the lens through which they view others. The game, the artist tells me, begins with a set of Terms & Conditions. Not dissimilarly, the artist constructed the game according to a set of their own Terms & Conditions as well. While developing The Delusion, Brathwaite-Shirley had to include everything they made. They allowed themselves only 15 minutes per rendering while they animated—and no matter what, the product is included in the final show. The iterative process they describe is essential to achieving the emotionality embedded in the game. Their 3D models are not trying to convey things, rather, Brathwaite-Shirley says, “Let me make a model that represents the fear of getting home.” Their refusal to erase or perfect reflects both the urgency of the work and a trust in the process. “And so by the end of the time that you’re doing all these 15-minute models, you have an entire environment based on all your failed attempts of trying to catch just this one sentence.”

When I ask the artist about their decision to reimagine the space of the gallery, they explain, “I basically asked around if people had spaces that they felt they could freely have conversations that were difficult and not have a fully formed answer yet—essentially have a more messy conversation without fears of repercussions.” Concerningly, most people didn’t. Unlike Brathwaite-Shirley, who pointed to their adolescence spent in community centers, churches, and sports clubs, most people they spoke to lacked a safe, consistent community space that encouraged tough conversations and personal reflection. “It feels like we’ve lost quite a lot of those,” they shared, with a genuine concern lacing their expression. 

This space, however, is not a consequence-less haven in which participants may finally be liberated from the digital panopticon that so constrains them in their daily lives. No, in THE DELUSION, surveillance isn’t subtle or covert—it’s overtly staged, almost theatrical. The game’s characters and mechanics watch you as intently as you watch them, almost as if they’re a schoolyard monitor overseeing the courtyard’s fraught interactions and small rebellions. “There’s this omnipresent feeling that something, some entity, is there, kind of guiding you through and also watching what you do,” Brathwaite-Shirley tells me, adding, “and the gallery itself kind of talks to you directly, to tell you what to do, at which moment. So you’re led by this voice throughout it.” 

Despite the fact that participants will feel watched as they play, the inventor admits, “We don’t really know what people are going to do in the gallery, so that’s maybe not so fun for the gallery, but super exciting for me.” The unknown, and the innate liability that comes with that, is what excites the artist the most. The potential energy of a space where improvisation and instinct are the only currencies are clearest in the “moments that we know no one will interact with, but we know that the tension in the room will be there, because you’ve got the possibility of interacting with it.” 

That possibility, even unrealized, hums in the air. Tragically, it’s that hum of unpredictability that’s been lowered to a whisper in our everyday lives where social friction has all but disappeared. We forget that unpredictability and accidents are not failures to be smoothed away, but some of the only observable objective truths in our world.

Without spaces like the one created by Brathwaite-Shirley and their team in THE DELUSION, we tend to move through the world unchallenged, admiring those who never stumble—people who navigate social interactions without friction, who never make the wrong joke or tell too long a story or offend someone. But what does all that perfection cost us? It’s a kind of social corset, cinching human connection into something narrow and shallow. With THE DELUSION, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley tears the laces out. In their game, there’s no time to rehearse. And there, elegance is useless. Survival belongs to those willing to be messy, to flail, to risk looking foolish. Because the ones who let themselves fall apart are the ones who come out the other side remade.