Third World: The Bottom Dimension
Gabriel Massan
Third World: The Bottom Dimension is a multi-part worldbuilding project by Gabriel Massan developed in collaboration with artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, and LYZZA. Spanning video games, moving image, sound, digital sculpture, and installation, the project explores Black Brazilian experience through the interconnected legacies of colonialism, extraction, displacement, and technological power.
Developed since 2021, Third World operates as a collaborative platform where artists, researchers, developers, animators, writers, and musicians contribute to the construction of a shared fictional universe. Drawing from decolonial thought, queerness, ecology, and decentralized knowledge systems, the project challenges dominant narratives that continue to shape both physical and digital realities. Rather than reproducing colonial frameworks of exploration and discovery, Third World proposes alternative modes of navigation, collective memory, and worldmaking.
At the center of the project is a free-to-download single-player video game commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies, which we exhibit at Transgressive Memory Festival. Set within a vast and disorienting ecosystem populated by digital beings, speculative architectures, and evolving environments, the game invites players to traverse interconnected territories while confronting the social and historical forces embedded within them. Each chapter is developed in dialogue with invited collaborators, bringing distinct perspectives, cosmologies, and forms of knowledge into the project’s expanding mythology.
Players inhabit the characters Funfun and Buburu, agents deployed by a resource extraction organization into unfamiliar territories. As they encounter new lifeforms, languages, and ways of knowing, the game gradually reveals the consequences of their presence and actions. Through play, Third World encourages forms of awareness rooted in interdependence, reciprocity, and collective transformation.
Combining worldbuilding, machinima, digital sculpture, and interactive storytelling, Third World: The Bottom Dimension positions the ecosystem itself as the central protagonist, proposing speculative futures shaped not by domination and extraction, but by coexistence, multiplicity, and emergence.