Tribe series – ‘Tribe – City’

‘Tribe – City’: programmed to follow the crowd

‘Tribe – City’ is a 7 minute video in which SMACK’s Tribe characters populate a grey landscape dominated by a central pillar. Developed as a generative work within a game engine, ‘Tribe – City’ is built of individually programmed characters, which react to each other according to established parameters. Members of the crowd initially avoid each other, then opt to walk around and later worship the totem, before panicking and running away.

The pulsating centre point and robot guards raise questions about the characters’ autonomy, while sudden changes of pace seem to reflect the unexpected and often explosive nature of group behaviour. The crowd’s circular procession, meanwhile, is viewed by SMACK as a metaphor of herd culture and builds on previous iterations in ‘Witch Doctor’ (2015) and the middle scene of SPECULUM (Paradise, 2016).

→ About Tribe series: The Power of the Group Before the Mirror

For Tribe, SMACK developed a population of approximately 300 digitally animated characters, ranging from walking periscopes and swastika-wearing bugs to multi-headed aristocrats and muscle-bound machos. Each allows for variations in texture and colour, enabling the artists to deploy customised versions in different scenarios including ‘Tribe – City’, ‘Tribe – War’, ‘Tribe – Apex’ or ‘Tribe – Tower’, while individual portraits are brought together in collections such as ‘Tribe: Golden Circle Characters’.

Many of these characters were developed during the COVID pandemic and reflect behavioural tropes associated with this time. “People were living in their own safety bubbles,” explains Ton Meijdam. “A lot have suits on because they’re afraid to interact with other people,” while others are walking hand-sanitisers, robot cleaning products and super-hero medics.

Various characters are recurring favourites, already present in ‘SPECULUM’. These include an oversized head with robot legs and SMACK’s updated version of the Venus of Willendorf, created by blending images of the Palaeolithic fertility figure with footage of Kim Kardashian. What they all have in common, says Meijdam, is an inflated ego: “They carry this message saying, “Look at me! I’m very important.”