recede };{ for balgham
by Mohamed Chamas
*(best viewed on desktop)
An endless moment of projection is offered by recede };{ for balgham.
Through the aesthetics of videogame load screens and gamified narrative techniques, this piece identifies sanctuary in the place that we can never reach. It finds itself docked somewhere between an envisioned resting place of abject fluids and the glistening insides of a hydrological fiction. Generative poetry is spat out with each new inclusion, mirroring our ongoing slimy and slippery bodily processes, as well as our precarious hydrosphere over time.
As consistent throughout the artist’s work, odes to cybernetic technicity appear, making sparks in the water.
Mohamed Chamas is an artist, independent game developer and poet based in Naarm (Melbourne). Mohamed’s work holds magical, spiritual and mystic practices in both friction and synergy to emerging technological phenomena. Naturally, in this unseemly tension, the border between heresy and divine convolution is aberrated. Such entanglements are framed by religious and occult studies, language, ludology, gamification, and the military-entertainment complex. Mohamed’s illusory workings emerge as image, sound, writing, utterance, interaction, virtual reality (VR), installation, art/games, and performance. Mohamed’s location-based VR altars are made for the healing of orientalised (and otherwise marked) bodies. Namely,’سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf)’ (2018), which received two Freeplay Independent Game Festival nominations in 2019.
Mohamed has exhibited at Siteworks, Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Trocadero Arts Space, Incinerator Gallery and MARS Gallery. And Mohamed's literary work has appeared in Co-, The Lifted Brow, Liminal Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Running Dog.
