Mohamed Chamas(VIC)
سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf)

Medium: digital virtual reality experience, inkjet prints

description:
سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) explores a Sufi meditation involving the six 'subtleties' (the 'Lataif-e-sitta'); points within the body which draw in spiritual 'energy'.
This experience takes the psychological, embodied processes required to activate each subtlety and contextualizes them through the artist's identity in virtual, imaginal space.
The semi-autobiographical piece crosses aesthetics of the Islamic, modern technological, mystical and digital (to name a few) problematizing our conceptions of each,and in turn the 'oriental other' whose status remains turbulent in current politics. سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) asks Muslim subjectivities how they interface with cyberspace, and how the Quranic 'Barzakh' (the intermediary veil between the terrestrial/celestial) may be lifted through the light of electronic technologies. It asks how to locate oneself when consigning to mystical, spiritual or religious beliefs, as we progress with human-computer interaction and technological reliance (the latter two usually understood as 'disenchanting' or sometimes de-legitimizing influences on the former). سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) re-figures the need to separate ensouled frameworks from modern technological miracles, and aims to reveal how they may shed light on one another.


Mohamed Chamas is a Lebanese-Australian, digital artist based in Melbourne. His practice approaches a heterogenous union between spiritism and the contemporary-technological. Chamas explores this through his ethno-cultural identity, interfacing the latter with Islamic cosmological concepts . His work usually takes the form of ‘artgames’ or interactive media which include digital painting, 3d modelling and elements of technical art. Recently a graduate of Honours in Media and Communications at RMIT University, his areas of interest are embodiment, mysticisms of the past, semiology and assemblage as identity. Drawing in what is often held apart helps Chamas to approach an encultured discursivity that interrogates the divine, the racialized and the ‘other’.

تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) detail from work. Image Credit: Mohamed Chamas

تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) detail from work. Image Credit: Mohamed Chamas

installation shot تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) detail from work. Image Credit: vvitchvvavve

تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) Mohamed Chamas artist talk Image Credit: Nancy Mauro-Flude