Digital America interviewed Brain Gillis in April 2026 on their work This Mission Drift (2023).
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Digital America: You explain that your work is deeply rooted in systemic issues like housing, criminal justice, and mental health challenges that are ongoing, multigenerational realities within your own family and community. How do these deeply personal experiences shape your methodology when translating complex, systemic struggles into interactive art?
Brian Gillis: Having experienced personal spaces with a certain degree of precarity, desperation, and complex psycho-emotional conditions that involve reaching out for help, it’s important for me to be mindful of the different dynamics that may be present in social practice. It’s important to me that vulnerable people and groups feel served in ways where they feel ownership and that they feel collaborated with, not just given resources from high or some position of removed generosity. It’s important that a working community is first established where all members have input and agency, and that all members feel in control of their own circumstances. I try to begin by facilitating a safe and open space by doing a lot of learning and listening hoping to promote authentic exchange where the terms of engagement and the goals get established cooperatively. I think of my work as more catalytic than coming from a leadership capacity. I have become increasingly suspicious of the ways that social practice operates in the public sphere: often, first, by legitimizing itself (and related arts institutions), then, by extraction, exposure, and short-lived engagement, often leading to some degree of institutional laundering. I collaborate with communities as developers and operators, where their agency drives the work and the work ultimately gets imbedded within institutional structures that continue to function beyond original projects’ runs. In recent years, I’ve come to work under the banner “Service Works”; a semi-visible platform that partners with a range of individuals and institutions to create access to socially relevant resources. Or that which allows me to work in direct collaboration with stakeholders and beneficiaries in ways that shifts the work away from an individual artist’s authority, or cultural valuation related to an art industrial complex, in favor of meaningful service to people.
DigA: This Mission Drift (2023) allows users to manipulate institutional language through a dropdown mechanism to uncover alternative perspectives and positions. What drew you to institutional language as your primary raw material for this piece, and what kind of realization or “drift” are you hoping to provoke in the user as they manually alter these frameworks?
BG: I’ve been collecting institutional missions for a long time. In 2022, I published A Living List of Missions, Commitments, and Values through my website as a kind of public utility of sorts. I originally began collecting institutional missions when I was tasked with developing similar documents for different organizations or projects I was involved in, and it really took root once I started to work similarly on strategic plans. As I started to become more intimate with missions and strategic plans, I became more unsettled by them; seeing them largely as an alternative form of theatre or virtue signaling, and I began to see how changing key words can change the tenner of the whole statement. This Mission Drift is an opportunity to think critically about institutional language through play. I’m hoping people feel both empowered to push against seemingly monolithic organizations or ideas while beginning to feel some degree of agency in participating in these organizations on their own terms. Perhaps seeing that the things we believe have great weight can also drift and become more or less focused based on intentional or arbitrary tweaks. To see these spaces as more accessible and maybe less sacrosanct.
DigA: You describe This Mission Drift (2023) not as a static website, but as a “working seed” that changes and expands over time. How does the flexibility of the digital medium allow you to respond to real-time social or institutional shifts, and what does the ongoing maintenance of a “living” reference space look like for you as an artist?
BG: The flexibility of digital media is so multivalent. Its spectrum of possibilities, or the ways it can limit and expand, or allow for things to hang discretely in a seemingly closed system or be completely contingent, is really interesting to me. By establishing this space as “living”, or something that changes as the world changes, it feels responsive and malleable in ways that life is. I’m interested in things that can be in constant flux, moved by currents in its world, and both encouraged and limited by its own nature or capacities. Like biofeedback or evolution I suppose. In this project, the roster of missions may grow or shrink, or the dropdowns may be tweaked as the world around us presents in new or different ways. Maybe there can be awkward mutations that stall or flatten a statement or maybe an awkward mutation can open something up in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be considered.
DigA: The interactive nature of This Mission Drift (2023) requires the viewer to physically click and change the text, shifting them from a passive observer to an active participant in rewriting the narrative. When designing this interface, how did you think about the viewer’s agency, and what do you hope they take away from the physical, digital act of altering these institutional statements?
BG: Maybe there’s something really satisfying in the ability to change these statements but frustrating that it’s kind of impermanent or Sisyphean. I hope it offers the opportunity to get close to the work that these institutions do, or feel like they’re close, or maybe they can occupy a temporary position of authority while being forced to see how tenuous and impermanent authority may be. Or, maybe, just be a little more aware of all the ways this language could really matter, or just be complete bullshit.
DigA: This Mission Drift (2023) is framed as a space that provides access to alternative “projections” alongside perspectives and positions. As this project continues to grow from its working seed, what future projections or emerging social realities are you most focused on integrating next into the site’s expanding structure?
BG: If possible, it would be great if This Mission Drift always carries the energy of a nascent seed, or that which is always becoming. Something that’s ultimately incomplete or truly indiscriminate, as though anything can be pulled into into it. In many ways the site is only the work when it’s being used. As we become so firmly planted in a “post truth” reality, it almost seems like language is both less and less meaningful and more and more important. It’s less meaningful because language only needs to yield the most superficial understanding of a thing but more important because in many ways the language is becoming the thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between “authenticity” and “profilcity”. Or how the philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller describes “authenticity” as the pursuit of a “true”, unique inner self that is kind of a circumstantial manifestation of a series of real experiences, verses “profilicity”, which can be thought of as a curated set of identities or a series of public facing castings of a superficial representation that may not need to be the manifestations of real experiences. I think of this site as a palimpsest of sorts that may allow a body to move between “authenticity” and “profilicity”, and in doing that they may think about or experience the spectrum of possibilities between the two.
DigA: Much of your work relies on forming partnerships with various institutions to address systemic inequities and provide support. For example, projects like “Made In… (2025)” and “The Alberta Abbey (2022-Present)”. Could you walk us through how you approach building these institutional relationships, and how you ensure the resulting artwork remains authentic to the community’s immediate needs?
BG: Usually, these projects start with a relationship to a person or community. Sometimes they start with an opportunity I see from the outside or an issue I’m connected to through my family. A lot of time, projects don’t begin as projects but just kind of percolate out of relationships or me serving in a volunteer capacity related to something. Once a project presents, I connect with folks who can help me understand if the idea is even relevant or could have meaningful impacts, and then, through these relationships, I establish a cooperative community to do the work. Work, where I may be a catalyst, but it’s ultimately owned and occupied by the community. The work that is most successful to me are those projects that have continued to make impacts beyond the project’s run. Like a long-term or sustainable resource that’s somehow permanently embedded within an institution.
DigA: Can you talk to us a little bit more about what you are working on now?
BG: One of the projects I’m working on now has the working title “Cha-Uihi”, meaning “A Place to Grow” in the Kalapuya Language. This is a percent-for-art project at the University of Oregon that physicalizes the school’s land acknowledgement through visible and nonvisible elements. One, a prominently sited, sculptural marker that welcomes people to the campus while providing some information about the Chifin Kalapuya people, who have lived in the area for millennia. The other element is a $100,000 endowment that is held by Native people for use at their discretion on their terms. This project came from a deep belief in acknowledging an institution’s first people, and a growing discomfort with the ways that these acknowledgements become a form of institutional laundering or virtue signaling that often allows institutions to less urgently address histories and their consequent social outcomes. The artist’s fee for this project has gone to a group of Native stakeholders (elders and students, university officials, and representatives of tribal governments) with whom I have been developing the sculptural marker’s form and the endowment’s structure. My role is as a group facilitator, project manager, and the group’s artist, designer, and research assistant, among other things. At the project’s conclusion, no individual or individuals will be acknowledged as the maker of the work.
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Check out Brain Gillis’ work This Mission Drift (2023).
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Brian Gillis’s work is rooted in service related to social equity and access. By using platforms, approaches, and points of exchange in art, he creates opportunities for access to socially valuable information and support. Much of this work involves institutional partnerships that connect individuals and communities to resources associated with food insecurity, housing, mental health, substance abuse, criminal justice, and violence.
