Do you think you have the power to protect others?
What gives you this power?
Are you excited to hold the gun?
Will the gun make you feel powerful?
All they do is let you take power from others…

Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s exhibition, SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, uses the artist’s recent series of DOTCOM works, blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and blacktranssea.com as a starting point for furthering research on Archiving the black trans experience via interactivity and storytelling. The exhibition encompasses a new body of work that positions gaming at the forefront of ideas surrounding action, inaction, relation and archiving experience.

In SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, this methodology takes shape as an immersive point-and-shoot style arcade game asking visitors to question how their choices and actions (or inactions) affect others directly. The game uses the interactions of those who play it to recentre their understanding of responsibility; challenging them to see if their sense of when to act and when not to act is sustainable for black trans people.

The exhibition positions the audience at the heart of a situation demanding a reflection, an action and ultimately a stance to protect the lives of Black Trans people. By taking part in the game the player also participates in forwarding the ideologies of the Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matters movements that took precedence worldwide during the pandemic. They speak of solidarity, honouring lives lost, and creating spaces where it is “easier for us to breathe” amongst many other aims are repeated in Danielle’s work.

Upon entering the gallery space, visitors are confronted with a how-to-play guide that asks them “can you protect black trans people with a gun?” and requests that they don't “SHOOT BLACK TRANS PEOPLE”. This call to action is often prevalent in Danielle’s work and is part of a larger framework of promoting accountability and action surrounding the black trans community and beyond.

Once inside the live streamed gameplay area, visitors are handed a custom 3D moulded gun, to “shoot” at the projection screen, using light-gun technology prevalent in old-school arcade gameplay. Inspired by first-person-rail-shooter games like The House of The Dead, SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE takes low-poly, technicolour landscapes and suggests an alternative history of what arcade games could have been: an anti-violent gun game that questions the use of guns to prevent harm.

With four live cameras watching their every move, players are live-streamed to other visitors in the gallery space and Twitch (a streaming platform primarily used for gamers) which heightens the exchange of power through observation and accountability. Each player experiences a unique set of obstacles in their given quest to protect Black Trans lives in three separate levels; water, city and dungeon. Present throughout all levels are gyrating bodies in need of protection, shown as digitally rendered motion-captured members of the two black trans artists Ebun Sodipo and Markiscrycrycry, and obstacles to destroy which appear as frightening, looming figures, text pop-ups and objects.

The peripheries around the curtained-off gameplay arena become the place for additional content that encourages visitors to further explore the characters and landscapes as video snippets and large scale printed material. The game provides another level of responsibility of action via the presence of a live feed of others playing the game. This, in addition to the ghostly figures clothed in custom-printed fabric, means that those who are in the gallery de-facto become lookouts, or guards, of the black trans bodies in need of safeguarding.

Similar to Danielle’s work with hypertext fiction, the three-level game is dependent upon player interaction with the immediate narrative but with a broader narrative too. Completing their chosen level in the game depends on the identity the player chooses to assume at the beginning as well as what they choose to fire at or interact with during their playthrough. This question of choice is one steeped in privilege through the position of distance - from the distance of playing the game itself and the distance from the artist’s personal experience - and forces each player to take ownership of their situation, whether they have the awareness to play as a protector or their lack of inference casts them as a villain.

Your action determines who you are.

Did you know who to shoot?