Interview #195 — Mohamed Chamas

by Hasib Hourani

Mohamed Chamas is an artist, game developer and poet based in Narrm (melbourne) who channels the 'dijital djinni'; a rewiring agent for practice-based research. Chamas' work evokes ancient mysticism to fuse and synergize with emerging technologies. This diffractively interfaces with religious studies, ludology, and critical theory.

Chamas's Virtual Reality works exist as unsurveilled sites of healing for orientalised bodies; namely سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) 2018. Chamas has exhibited at Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Trocadero Arts Space and Incinerator Gallery.

Mohamed spoke to Hasib Hourani about mysticism, fear, trust, and codes.

What comes first when you’re coming up with an artwork, is it the idea, or do you think about what you want to build and adapt the idea to that?

I would say it’s ideas and feelings that lead my artwork development process. For instance, a recent project centred around two unseemly feelings.

What were they?

Horror and wonder.

I was trying to think of when I felt those two at the same time. I've always had a fascination with bridges. That to me is the best and the strongest combination of both of those feelings. I have an anxiety that they’re going to collapse. But I’m obsessed with the idea of hovering over a plane, and also of being between two things at the same time.

I really resonate with that. There’s a bridge on Hoddle street with a spiral ramp on each side. I used to go to counselling nearby. My counsellor once suggested I take some time for myself after our session together. I decided to stand in the middle of that bridge for a while, to challenge the fear I had of being so high on something so fragile-looking. It’s narrowness also made me quite uncomfortable. But that hovering feeling you mentioned, I felt that, and it was so worth it.

I know that bridge. I’m also very familiar with it. And when I think back, it’s very much made of concrete so there’s a lot of structural integrity to it. But when I’m on it I completely disregard that. I see myself as this structurally sound being, and the bridge is flimsy, as opposed to the other way around.

Talking about bridges is actually quite organic. Because I wanted to ask about the transportative nature of your work. Portals are pretty front and centre in your practice, and there’s this motion between different planes. You’re asking the viewer to trust you and move with you from one thing to another. And so maybe your artwork functions as a bridge.

When I think of a bridge I see a sort of semi-circle or arched shape. I think that particular type of bridge(/ gesture) bears the most significance to my work. You’re only elevated to a certain height, but as you continue, you have to come back down, finishing at the same level you started.

I think it’s tempting to consider VR as something completely transportative. I think VR available to the public has a long way to go in that regard. I try to keep in mind that this motion between planes, as you put it, happens mostly at an ocularcentric level. To harness the full potential of VR’s ocularcentrism, I have tried to highlight embodiment in my work. That's taken the form mostly of deliberate disorientation, playing with mind-body dissonance, tricking one’s proprioception. This is actually an important thing to avoid in commercial VR works. A rule which two out of the three of my VR works break by having no virtual floor!

What you said about starting and ending at the same place. Reaching a peak and then coming back down. It’s not that you’re taking your viewer somewhere and then leaving them there. It’s more that you’re asking them to trust you, to set out on an excursion, see some things, and then re-engage with where they left off, having had these new experiences. Maybe it’s about reframing the way that we see things when we’ve come back.

Definitely! To witness, to be changed, to dive, and surface with a new way of seeing. I want people to be touched by my work. To trust the device, the experience that I have crafted. But always honour the context of using the device; the world itself. In other words, VR is put on, and (at this point in time), it always comes off, eventually.

Speaking of disorientation, it would be really unnerving to start off on a VR experience and have it end in a different place to where you started. You’re making sure that the viewer was correct to trust you. You’re leaning into the fact that sight and the body are parting from one another. But you bring them back in the end.
That would be so freaky. Displacement on a different level for sure. I reckon you could play with that distrust in an interesting way, but yeah, my works start and end in the same place (for now).

Yeah. You’re always returning the spirit to the body in the end.

Hmm, yeah in a way. For me that feeling is related to expansion, maybe? I don't think I can ever separate them, not alive! If we get into what is the spirit and what is the soul, then I could change my answer, but personally I see leaving earth/the body as approaching hubris.

Some have come to me mentioning they had a feeling of transcendence during my VR work, which I want to honour and acknowledge. If it’s possible to do that for someone, that’s very flattering, and not an incorrect way to experience the work at all. My personal reflections, however, highlight the embodied nature of our spirituality (and the ensouled nature of our bodies).

If you could experience your work in an ideal way, what would that look like?

Ideally, my work feels familiar in a subtle way, a scent in the fog, something quiet and ominously comforting. To find a gate or door at the heart of a cavern, which causes you fear to observe, but you are compelled to enter, as if by an inexplicable greater purpose.

I would love for my work to feel like something that is not a coincidence to experience. That some sort of contingent meaning is derived from the abstract and sometimes randomised elements present. A meaning which speaks directly to something sleeping in the heart.

What you mentioned about the viewer entering a cave and coming upon an opening. That’s indicative of what you’re trying to achieve. You’re acknowledging that we do, as viewers, bring our own contexts and projections into work we encounter. And so you’re almost giving them that negative space and saying, ‘Okay, make this into what you want.’ You’ve obviously built something with your intentions, but you’re still leaving leeway in the margins for the viewer to put themselves in it too. Which feels collaborative and brings back those tones of trust that I mentioned earlier. It’s not just about the viewer trusting you, it’s also you trusting them with your work and it becomes twofold.

I love that. That negative space, as you put it, feels like a large part of experiencing VR. The simultaneous illumination and blindfold reconfigure one’s sense of space. The mind naturally fills in that uncertainty, and my images hopefully caress and steer that process, without asserting a singular intention or way of experiencing. The idea of trust has come up a bit, and I’m thinking more and more about it. It’s something I’ve never really considered, but I can see its place in the work.

I think the reason trust as a concept came up for me was because when I think of VR, it does feel like something a lot of people might be apprehensive to engage with. And what you said about two of the three works literally not having floors, you’re almost overtly asking the viewer to jump. There’s no floor and you’re holding their hand, but not in a patronising way.

Wow, I hadn’t really thought about it like that! It’s interesting guiding someone into VR for the first time. There's a moment when I know to let go of their hand, proverbially or literally. Some can handle the full experience just fine, others I’ve seen remove the device after ten seconds.

With my first VR work, cyber tasawwuf (2018), I didn’t think extensively about users feeling dizzy or unstable. There's even a moment where you virtually fall into something directly underneath you. Perhaps just rookie negligence? Alhamdullilah no one has actually fallen or hurt themselves using my work.

For my second VR work Baab al Qareen (2020), a gothic archway sits on the floor where you perform sujuud (prostration) while using the VR device. You stare down into the floor in that position , so your arms and legs are pressed onto the ground, you’re a lot more fixed. That was a very conscious decision after cyber tasawwuf; for people to usher themselves in without too much disorientation.

Hearing you talk about asking people to practice sujuud through VR. I thought back to that combination of wonder and fear. That to me is such a prominent combination in Islam when I think about our relationship to Allah. Based off of my upbringing and Islamic Studies classes, I was always told that no matter how excited we are by Allah’s existence, we should never stop fearing it. Even when you feel that wonder and spectacle and euphoria, we must keep fear in mind because we’re in the presence of something that’s so powerful. I wanted to know whether that element of Islam is worked into your practice because you talk about religious mysticism through Muslim lenses.

The wonder and fear of Allah is there for sure. Some other fears come into it too, offering confrontation to the fear-holders. Like fear of the ‘mystic East’; mysterious and magical connotations the middle east has to outliers, as well as its so-called ‘backward’ societies and the orientalist fear projected onto these.

My VR works are titled in Arabic, and then transliterated with modern English characters in brackets. While that is inaccessible to non-Arabic speakers who could appreciate the work, it speaks to Anglo-nationalist fears of the Arabic Language.

Similarly, fear of unorthodox Folk Islam—which is mainly instanced by my Shi’a roots—is involved too. Which gestures to those with a rigid lens of Islam, who hold fear about mysticism/mystics. These all act as either a ward for the unwilling (fear-in-action), or an invitation for the curious (fear-as-gift).

It references back to what you said earlier. You want people to bring something to the work. And so, people who had Muslim upbringings understand that fear, that informed fear of Islam or fear of Allah and are going to be receiving the work in a very different way to Anglo Australia, and their notions of fear around Islam that are guided by dangerous stereotypes. And the fact that you’re doing both at the same time is quite clever. People can take from it what they need to take from it. People who have fear of Islam can sit with that and question it, and be uncomfortable. And then people who have fear of Allah can feel the wonder of that.

Absolutely! There is a supposedly dangerous and evil figure called the Qareen. People are like ‘don’t speak with your Qareen!’ talking about how only the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was able to overcome it’s evil by converting it to Islam. In hadith they say, ‘there are none of you who do not have a companion among the djinn’. The Qareen is a way to annex all of these fears; personal, socio-political etc. This is similar perhaps to a Jungian Shadow-self (which the Qareen has been compared to); a sort of psycho-construct of the unconscious.

I think when you don’t know what you’re meant to be fearing, you’re just fearing the consequences (social, familial etc), which is one of the more toxic parts of religion. Maybe shedding light on the Qareen is a way to negate that. Instead, the fear is of not doing right by yourself. To me, that’s also what fear of Allah is. It acts as a way to identify what I’ve not yet integrated, what fears are projected on me.

Posing it that way, it’s like a loving fear—akin to bell hooks’ loving justice—that comes through my work.

I agree. When my dad was here, we had a lot of conversations about this stuff. We have very similar views on radical Islam, or maybe not so radical, maybe it’s quite old-school if you trace it back to the beginnings of Islam. But we were talking about Yom al Qiyama. And he was like, ‘that’s the one thing I can’t reconcile. Islam is all about love. Why is Yom al Qiyama so full of catastrophe?’ and I explained to him how I interpret Yom al Qiyama, which is less about catastrophe and more so about entropy. That everything, in terms of energy, is where it needs to be. All spiritual charges are exactly where they’ve been assigned and intended by Allah. So we have a duty to be what we need to be, and to distribute the energy where it needs to go. And that’s us doing what we can to get us to Yom al Qiyama. It’s not this dreaded thing, it’s something we’re collectively working towards as a service to our spirituality. What you were saying about beloved fear reminded me of that. Of loving Yom al QIyama enough to strive for it.

A beautiful understanding of Yom al Qiyama. It’s grim, but I think destruction/decay is an understated part of the life cycle. As you said; all in perfect balance. As our times and histories change—it could help to reframe the Qur’an to be better understood. As long as we retain the sacred principles and teachings within it.

I see interest growing in modern versions of myths and legends. It’s quite visible in pop culture, but there's perhaps something more important occurring than just entertainment. These stories all started somewhere in truth, so reviving myths anew helps us retain those truths that—in the next millennia—humans will regard with that same nostalgia and fascination we have now for antiquity.

The smartphone for instance, is a vital part of capturing the essence of the time we’re in. So I love to see iPhones in rewritings of older stories, I feel like that's doing something really interesting. From emerald tablets to electronic ones.

There’s a layered process of engaging with the Quran in a contemporary way. How do we bring iPhones into that narrative when they wouldn’t have been written in there?

There is still a lot of mystery in the Quran that I think when people talk about it being perfect, they neglect how many unknowns there are in it, still today. I think so often about Yaseen and Alif Lam Meem. The fact that we’ve had centuries and thousands of scholars and still no one’s been able to figure out what those letters are alluding to. So to be okay with that mystery and that unknownness feels like our duty as Muslims. That brings us back to what you’d said earlier about beloved fear. Fear of the unknown, and not associating negative feelings with that unknownness.

My dad and I have spoken about something similar. We were like ‘Allah (swt) knew and knows the lengths of technological advancement humans will achieve’. They are all knowing after all! Smartphones are already quite entangled with religious practice today. Our devices are so closely connected to us. How we might write them into Quranic stories is probably a task beyond me. Allowing things to be mysterious and unclear feels like a part of my faith. Things don’t need to be completely known to be valuable or precious. Maybe fear is what makes us question otherwise.

And that mysticism is maybe an inherent part of Islam. Maybe we’re never supposed to know what Alif Lam Meem means.

I’m thinking about how your practice incorporates that same mysticism, not necessarily with an intention of decoding it. Just sitting next to it and living within it.

I’m glad you get that sense of mystery. A few years ago, I began to take interest in the geometric and repetitive elements that appear in Islamic art. There's quite a bit of math to it as you’d imagine. I was really intrigued by mathematics, something considered sterile and logical in the west, being held in regard to divinity, and its representation. That got me reading more about the numerical correspondence of letters in Arabic. (a practice widely known as Gematria). And that naturally led to reading on Ilm-Al-Huruf and theurgy with divine letters. These are of course more mystical practices than religious ones.
One of the first things that stayed with me during this research was the number 786, which is the equation of values in the holy phrase Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim. It’s a pretty set of numbers and could be found on talismans in Islamicate regions.

Even the arrangement of those numbers, 786 feels quite cyclical. You start with one number, you go higher, then you go lower again. It’s repetitive, and infinite, which I love.

This is a really good opportunity for me to ask this question before I lose it. I know that your favourite letter is ق , the Qaaf or Arabic equivalent to the letter Q in English. What is the numerical value of that, do you know?

I don’t remember because I was really upset that it was a number that didn’t speak to me! Let me try to find it. Yeah, it’s value is 100. I guess I like 100, but I was hoping it was twelve. I just thought 100 was a bit boring. I really like ش (Sheen) and its value, which is 300!

ش feels like it would be 300. Maybe because of the three dots.

Yes, it feels so right!

The codes in your work now make a lot of sense. The fact that you’ve been using geometry but also labelling them with different numbers. I had wanted to ask what was informing the codification of those shapes.

Both scripting languages for games or software, and a more conventional idea of language (like English or Arabic ) are codes. Even what’s known as regular numbers in the English-speaking world were derived from Arabic, and now Arabic numbers are used in the Arabic Chat Alphabet (a form of Arabic using English letters and numbers. Also known as ‘Arabeezi’). It’s messy, and I can’t give a whole history of how we’ve come to this point, but I think some of those convolutions help to loosen our idea of language. Not to mention the Gematria stuff I was talking about before!

Keeping this in mind, all 3D objects are just a big net of X, Y and Z positions in a simulated space. It feels talismanic when something like that comes together and you can recognise it. Even just a simple shape. I think the codification of the geometry I use in my work really harkens to these entanglements!

Just writing code is so magical to me. In game development, magic is quite popular when it comes to art-style. There are so many fantasy games with that same medieval Anglo-Celtic aesthetic. Some folks working in a more tech-y discipline might self-describe as some sort of mage, which I love. I think magic is considered acceptable only to a certain point though, (perhaps only through an implied irony?).
Considering code to actually be magic would be thought of as naive. I think folks have a ‘we’re dealing with science and logic here and magic isn’t involved in that’ take on things. That is something probably unquestionable to many. I reckon it’s a Western thing to disenchant sequences of numbers though. They are quite magical if you consider what we’ve discussed here.

There’s now a segregation between ‘logical thought’ and spirituality, ‘logical thought’ very much in quotation marks. The two are so intertwined and I don’t think you can fully understand one without the other.

Yes! ‘Logical thought’ or post-enlightenment rationality is so young compared to the spiritual traditions and ways of being that the global majority have practiced, developed, expanded, studied and embodied for millennia. There can be a sort of gatekeeping or discouragement towards introducing spirituality into tech. It’s almost like a personal attack! (Joking.)

That’s my entire secret evil agenda; I make the work I do in order to combat needless disenchantments. So much of history shows how the things we’re capable of now could be considered as myth becoming realised. That’s just as powerful now, no? Let’s re-enchant the world!

I also feel personally attacked, and even belittled when I talk about spirituality in specific spaces. I start to see myself through the majority’s gaze, and that’s when the humiliation kicks in.

It can be so humiliating, I’ve definitely felt the same.

I wanted to ask if you had a favourite shape, which is such a trivial question, but I was thinking a lot about favourite letters and codes and the way things correspond to one another.

Just a straight vertical line is very beautiful to me. But for a shape, I’d say a circle, like a perfect circle. Like a one and a zero. I feel like those are universal shapes that appear everywhere. Timeless.

I have a lot of stars in my work, the heptagram, the octagram, the hexagram (7,8,6). I think I deconstruct those mentally, as a number of straight lines, before I see the star overall.

And ا (Aleph, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet) has the numerical value of one, which is so obvious, and feels so right. We’re all just little ones sitting on a big zero.

And also the world being made up of that circle and that straight line. The same could go for code, it is quite literally binary.

Exactly. If you unpack any digital thing, it’s just a series of ones and zeroes. Sort of like atoms comprising matter.