OPENING 6 September 2025 | 17.00 - 19.30H

Upstream Gallery proudly presents its second solo exhibition with Kévin Bray (1989): The Interfaced and The Compass: Playing Realities.

Structured as a fictional game inventory, the exhibition The interfaced and the compass assembles a visual archive of objects, symbols, and images across two rooms: one staging the digital versions, the other their physical counterparts. Together they expose four co-existing layers: the digital and the physical, the pre-idea and the post-idea. Each layer remains partial without the others while participating in the same reality. A floor grid operates as interface, serving as map and memory, where assets sit side by side as remnants of a game that resembles many games at once: no fixed goal, only encounters.

At the center is Oan, a protagonist who crosses thresholds rather than worlds. Moving between layers, they return with relations, tools, signs, companions that reframe both rooms, suggesting that fiction and matter co-produce reality. The exhibition proposes that our digital life, as much as fiction, is not the opposite of the real but one of its engines. Games, feeds, and stories do not merely represent the world, they organize attention, institute rules, and script action. In this sense they may not be "true," but they are real. Real in their effects on bodies, habits, and infrastructures. Each artefact functions as a "prop" that activates practices across rooms. Inventory becomes a way to read how imagination sediments into things, and how things, in turn, reactivate imagination.

After the Production Revolution, the village was only a human village in a human country, ruled by human language. Plants and nonhuman animals were mostly for eating or looking at. Still, life felt lively, filled with ordinary joys, small conflicts, doors that closed at night.

One evening, a sorcerer visited Oan. Setting a freestanding door in the middle of their room he announced, “This door lets you be anyone. Step through and leave your worries behind.”Hovering above its entrance, an eyeball watched.

“If I can be anyone,” Oan asked, “can I be myself?”

“I don’t know more than you,” the sorcerer replied and swiftly vanished.

Curiosity won. Oan stepped through. As their body stayed behind, across the door another assembled itself: mouse-feet, a keyboard skirt, a game-controller torso, cable legs, and two three-fingered hands. Grasped in one hand, they carried a stick tipped with a small flame that could wear any face.

Inside, freedom was easy. Oan tried on identities, made quick friends, did things they’d never risk at home. The flame-face spoke for them where silence would have been kinder. They borrowed, bluffed, bragged, and lied, until the sting of guilt became duller. Companionship and entertainment were everywhere. They went often.

Outside, life thinned. Friends drifted. Oan’s back bent and their eyes dulled. The door seemed to call relentlessly. Sometimes the eyeball felt present even when they stayed away.

Unexpectedly, an evening with an old friend changed the course of things. Over a game of cards, the friend admitted they had a door too.

Oan’s smile pinched as heat climbed their throat. This meant if the friend ventured through and met the sharp-joking, taking, flame-faced version of Oan, then Oan would be seen. Not just inside, but here.

Despite the hesitation, they agreed to meet across the doors. Once inside, they stood side by side, yet, they still didn’t see the same world. They pointed at “the same” thing and somehow described different ones. The mismatch allowed Oan to hide a little. It also made something painfully clear: even if the friend couldn’t see every choice Oan made, the choices still belonged to them.

Weeks later the friend arrived breathless with a message: many villagers had doors. Someone from their very own street had used their real name inside.

The room began to tilt. The taste of metal flooded Oan’s mouth, “Isn’t it a game?”he managed to ask a bit too loudly, “Isn’t it unreal?”

After the friend left, Oan sat very still. If people could be themselves there, then what Oan did inside was part of who they ‘really’ were and how they could be perceived. Not erased but added.

Oan took a step back from his regular visits. Slowly his strength began to return, his eyes brightened. They tried repairing what had frayed without letting the flame speak for them.

But the village had shifted: fewer faces, too silent, less activities, as if some pieces of life had moved elsewhere.

Oan found themselves facing the door again. The eyeball watched. Now it was clear: no one escapes reality by stepping through; new worlds don’t cancel life, they change it. The danger was never going in, but pretending it would leave nothing behind.

Eventually Oan devised a plan: visit, but do not vanish. Keep a hand on each world. Before stepping through, they named what mattered and who might need them. After returning, they proposed to notice what had changed and tend to it like a garden. And when shame pricked, treat it as a signal to repair, not as a reason to disappear.

The story is a parable about the porousness between fiction and life, about digital realms mistaken for unreality. Today, online play, social media, and augmented reality shape not just leisure but economies, ideologies, and political systems. Games appear to offer agency, but often reproduce capitalist frameworks: accumulation, domination, extraction.

Consider Pokémon Go: a game that gamifies urban movement, encouraging users to explore while simultaneously mapping physical locations for corporate interests. Players become both explorers and data points, unknowingly participating in large-scale geographic data collection. Uber, on the other hand, uses game mechanics like reward tiers, point systems, and timed challenges to push drivers to work longer hours, disguising labor exploitation behind the aesthetics of play.

Meanwhile, social media platforms like Facebook have demonstrably influenced democratic processes — from algorithmic amplification of propaganda during the 2016 U.S. election to misinformation campaigns during Brazil’s 2018 presidential race — revealing how digital fictions directly shape reality. TikTok and YouTube have created micro-celebrities who profit from viral content, while the platforms harvest attention and train AI models on the data. Amazon's Mechanical Turk breaks labor into gamified microtasks with minimal compensation. Duolingo, FitBit, and other wellness apps apply reward systems not to play but to behavior modification. Even dating apps like Tinder gamify intimacy, turning relationships into swipes, queues, and stats.

These examples illustrate how digital systems can manipulate behavior and perception while maintaining the illusion of detachment. Platforms gamify labor, identity becomes interface, and "play" becomes a mechanism of control.

In response, this exhibition reimagines the inventory not as a list of conquests, but as a carrier bag — a space for nourishment, memory, and relational depth. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and K?b? Abe’s image of the rope and the stick, it asks: what if our avatars are not warriors but bearers? Not agents of extraction, but bridges of reciprocity?

The inventory grid becomes a soft archive — not loot, but lived experience.
Wall images depict not achievements but symbols of presence, attunement, and mutuality.
The sculpture is not a hero, but a transforming being — a vessel for others, for witnessing, for response.
Here, the weapons are exchanged for containers. The rewards are not assets, but traces of meaning. The goal is not victory, but connection.

This is not a game of power. It is a practice of being with. A game of becoming rope.

Image: It is preparing the floral offensive, Kévin Bray (2025)