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Over the summer, Madonna rode her bike through London’s Kensington Gardens and turned up unannounced at the Serpentine Galleries to try out Massan’s video game Third World: The Bottom Dimension, which remains on view through November 26. “She was really interested in the way I developed dreamy landscapes,” Massan said. “She wanted to swim, explore, and navigate through those different worlds.”

Massan, who recently turned 27, described being “surprised,” to receive a DM on Instagram from Madonna just a few days later. “I kept very professional,” they remembered, and it wasn’t long before they were flown with their team to New York to meet the star in person. In the space of just 15 long days, filled with daily communication, the pair imagined a whole new fantastical dimension for the pop idol to inhabit on stage.

“It was really fun,” Massan said. “She has so much energy and was always thinking about how the work could evolve.”

A fixture of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s—she briefly dated Jean-Michel Basquiat—Madonna has a history of drawing on the work of visual artists.  The 1995 music video for Bedtime Story was itself inspired by painters like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Frida Kahlo, Madonna told Aperture magazine. “There’s that one shot where my hands are up in the air and stars are spinning around me,” she recalled. “And me flying through the hallway with my hair trailing behind me, the birds flying out of my open robe—all of those images were an hommage to female Surrealist painters.” Costing a whopping $5 million, it is still one of the most expensive music videos ever produced.

Fast forward to 2023, and new emerging technologies have made it possible to create something even more otherworldly. At the start of the song, Madonna steps to the front of the stage, which rises up to become a raised cube. Projectors cover each side of the cube with Massan’s mesmerizing imagery, which extends to the surrounding screens. As Madonna repeats the chorus’s refrain of “let’s get unconscious, honey,” she lies back and writhes around as though in the midst of a sleepless night. Her movements are recorded in real time and linked to a larger-than-life avatar, which represents her consciousness. It repeats the same movements as it floats through the imagined realm of her dreams.

“It’s a special moment,” Massan said. “We wanted to bring something that would connect with the memory of the music video.”

Growing up in Rio de Janeiro and later São Paulo, Massan, who now lives in Berlin, was obsessed with playing The Sims video game, and recorded their sessions to uploaded them onto YouTube. While studying video art at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, their interest gravitated towards using 3D modeling softwares to make digital sculptures, and eventually Massan turned to video game engines to build worlds for these figures to live in.

Their biggest project to date has been the solo presentation at the Serpentine, for which they built a world inspired by their own life experiences as a queer Black person living in post-colonial Brazil. “I’m really invested in understanding everything that emanates from the trauma of inequality,” Massan said. “How this system is created and how it develops and gets embraced by all the entities that are raised within the context of that inequality.”

In the single player, multi-level game, the avatars inhabit a world in which a company known as “the headquarters” exploits the land and extracts its materials, leaving the fragile ecosystem under threat. An important aspect of the game is that players can choose their own adventure, with the game splitting into multiple diverging narratives. Will the players explore or invade Massan’s imagined world?

“My main goal was to gamify a sense of responsibility, or to criticize our ways of navigating the world,” Massan said. “We are using a technology to provoke new ways of thinking and creating empathy.”

So can video games be art? Massan doesn’t believe that the practice now commonly known as “worldbuilding” is much different from the unique styles and vision that have always defined art history. “When I see a Monet, he had a context surrounding everything that he created,” they said. “I can really see the world that Monet is building.”

Madonna’s Celebration tour ends its European leg in London on December 5, before picking up in New York on December 13 and traveling across the U.S. through April 2024. Gabriel Massan’s Third World: The Bottom Dimension is on view at the Serpentine North Gallery until November 26.