Hey Danielle! Firstly, let’s unpack the central game in the exhibition SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE. Can you take us through the three levels, the aims of the players and the overarching themes?

SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE is a lightgun shooter in which the audience has to shoot their way through levels. This is a PRO BLACK AND PRO TRANS game which means your actions demand close examination and determine how the world of each level treats you.

There are 3 levels in the game. Level One enters you into a water level in which your aims are to rid the ocean floor of Evil remnants of ships. In the second level, you go into a Black Trans Spiritual dungeon in order to help with a ceremony taking place. And finally, a city that you need to rid of white supremacy.

At each level you need to determine who to shoot and when to not shoot anything at all. It’s a game that hates violence and judges you when you decide to take action

There are many characters in the game, some to shoot and some to protect. Can you take me through the design of a couple of them?

You are not told who to shoot at, and who not to shoot at, but listening and observing to how the characters interact can give you an idea of who shouldn't be here. Your decision has to be based on what you can decipher. The reason is to make it as hard as possible to know when to shoot because it should take a lot of energy to take an action.

You also initiated collaborations with the black trans community in the archiving of movement to implement into the game with motion capture technology. Can you talk a little about this process and the care needed to extract this kind of human-centred data?

So all the movement of everything within the world is taken from mocap data of the movement of two black trans artists: MarikisCryCryCry and Ebun Sodipo. In our collaboration, they devised dance which can be seen isolated in certain character movements. How we did this was after filming the movement of both dancers we used a motion capture ai (deepmotion) to extract the movement data from the videos. We then placed this motion on the characters designed for the game. Alot of the characters use images of these two artists as textures across their body. Together these meovements evolve into dancing landscapes of black trans joy that require your action to keep it that way.

Can you tell me a little about the arcade experience and why it’s so central in SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE?

I like experimenting with different ways that an audience can interact with the work. The thought of using a GUN as a controller came to me as I played through House of the Dead 2 and 3 on the Nintendo Wii. I found it amazing how people gravitate to using a controller as a gun was such an accessible way people understood games. The idea that people get excited when they see guns as a controller made me think how we could combat violence within a game using the same controller these arcade games had.

The result is a game that is scary to play. You don't know when to shoot and what it will do.

Upon entering, visitors are first confronted with a how-to-play guide that asks them a series of questions and takes them through the game. I feel this automatically places the overarching concept of the exhibition at the heart of their experience; protection of black trans lives. Why was it important to have this video at the front of the exhibition entrance?

Health and Safety is a video made around the GUN that is used to control the game/archive. The video is supposed to resemble an air plane safety video or one you would see at a theme park. Its supposed to inform you of how you can keep yourself safe but instead it informs you how who you shoot should keep black trans people safe. The video builds us the eagerness to hold the gun. But also places doubt that you will use it right.

A lot of your work contains “calls to action” or questions that feel like they need urgent answers. Can you expand on this methodology within your practice?

For me my audience is Black Trans People. Everything is built with them in mind. But that has also made us consider when non-black trans people enter the work. What should they get. Often the game holds the choices of the viewer against them so that they will witness their own actions and judge themselves. This is in the hopes that when they see their own choices they may reflect on why they chose those actions. Hopefully this would last after the exhibition.

Your work highlights the importance of archiving the black trans experience. We spoke a little about this in the archiving of movement earlier. But can you tell me where this research has taken you so far and how you see the future of archiving in this way?

This eventually lead to the levels too which were designed for the characters.

This for me is the way I archive. I am trying to build upon something real and expand it so that it could never be forgotten. Thats the attempt away.

For me I see archiving as a way of story a person in the present so that future generations have something to look back on. Traditional Archives forgot our existence so we need to build our own techniques to store bodies like ours. These have to come from us and be done by us. This work tried to archive using motion from black trans movers and using it as the foundation to build this work on top of. So the motion came first and we built characters to encompass each sequence of movement.

There are cameras in the game-play space recording every visitor playing the game and streaming it back to other people in the gallery as well as globally to Twitch. We spoke about this relating back to the accountability of actions and how important it is for people playing the game to understand what they’re being asked to do. Can you elaborate on the decision-making process of this element?

I want people to feel uncomfortable about using a gun as a controller, feeling as though the choice you make cannot be hidden from the world but instead must be made in public for all to watch. It is about showing you care or lack of care so everyone knows who you are. Its about taking action publicly.