Sam is a London-based digital artist and crafts-person whose work orbits ideas of storytelling, moving between the real and unreal. the physical and digital.
Inspired by the pagan mysticism and coastal landscape of their hometown, they navigate the relationships and sensuality's between nature and magic, the virtual and the cosmos.
As a means to unravel the multiplicity of their trans identity and how it intersects with the digital world, Sam manoeuvres between technological interfaces, video game experiences and A.I systems, myth, folklore, and ancient crafts. All the while weaving their own queer landscape.
Digital_Mysticism
For of all technologies, it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self: The analog soul runs on the analogies between things; the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information.
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, Erik Davis
Digital Mysticism represents the intersection between ancient mythologies and future coded worlds. Drawing on powerful energies found within the physical world, ritual and spiritual practises. Sensuous connections between a shared genealogical past and embodied experiences within the virtual, existing as sympoiesis between the past and future, speculating a narrative that sees data and code inextricably linked with the earth around us. Ancient sites of stone age monuments have a power that permeates through time and space, existing within the digital image. Collaborations between human and non-human, nature and A.I weaving an entangled webwork containing virtual worlds, augmented reality, performance, poetry, video games and fashion.
[A.I poetry extract]
i am the object of my own desires
non-existent are my attractions
and i am all of a sudden a great painter
i painted my windows in all the colors
and i saw, i saw my ten sisters
and my eleven brothers
a full symphony of dioramas
all of them contained within
life eternal in the center of them
after the wars of justice
and after the arid glitter of weeks
we reach for the old things
for love, for the blade of a knife
for the comfort of our frail flesh
those very things that might keep us warm
they set us on fire.
Reclaiming the body as a site of desire and sensuality, strands of identities woven together constructing THEM. Innate and tacit, the self is marked with the stains of the past, real and the un-real, binary and the non-binary.
Woven through time, materials retain ancestral traces. Myths + folklore, seaside town, digital crafts person.
A chimeric construction of gender, craft and digital they re-shape the design landscape. Analogue hands and digital minds, together, ruptures the seamlessness of the technological present.
At the Sea's Edge is an immersive digital performance piece, merging the realms of fashion, video games and folklore, creating a dynamic new practise called Digital Mysticism.
[A.I poetry extract]
That diffuse the radiation waves
through which the wave flows.
The wave.
Fields of the self-created wave
collected in the reflector
are constantly drawn by the
new particles that they
encounter through the reflector.
Utilizing this fast evolving collaboration between fashion and video game technologies, I hope to tell authentic stories of trans and queer identities through interactive enchanting narratives.
My cyber world is just at its beginning, a space to develop into a shared collective ecosystem filled with other designers, peers, mentors whose voices share a common thread. A universe that spills out of the digital into physical performances, woven sculptures and interactive experiences.