Our Artist Innovation Commissions support world-leading projects in technical research and development, to engage the public with art and technology in imaginative and critical ways.
Artist Gabriel Massan brings together a new interactive gaming installation and online experience, combining real-time technology with dance-led narrative and distinctive worldbuilding.
Drawing on ideas of digital embodiment and the production and performance of identity, the work places the body at its centre. Within this new work and game, players create avatars to enter into duels, becoming both participants and objects of spectatorship, while defeat carries the possibility of being absorbed and consumed by the system.
The project will premiere at Manchester International Festival in 2027, before expanding through a programme of events and further iterations in São Paulo, Brazil, later that year.
Meet the partners
About Gabriel Massan
Gabriel Massan is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working with 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound, and interactive installations. His practice, which he calls fictional archaeology, uses storytelling and worldbuilding to construct digital environments that narrate situations of inequality and displacement within the Latin American experience.
His works challenge distorted conceptions of the Global South while investigating the possibilities of subversive otherness. By merging technological experimentation with political imagination, his practice frames the digital realm as a space for both critique and the creation of alternative futures.
About Factory International
Factory International is the organisation behind Manchester International Festival and the city’s landmark cultural space, Aviva Studios.
Factory International commissions, produces and presents a year-round programme of original creative work and special events at Aviva Studios, online, and internationally through its network of co-commissioners and partners. It also stages the city-wide Manchester International Festival (MIF) every other year.
Factory International builds on the legacy of Manchester International Festival, one of the world’s leading arts festivals, and the first to be entirely focused on the commissioning and producing of ambitious new work. Staged every two years in Manchester since 2007, world-renowned artists from different art forms and backgrounds create dynamic, innovative and forward-thinking new work in venues and spaces across Greater Manchester.
Factory International is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.