art
Egypt's ancient zar ritual
At Cairo's Makan Cultural Centre, the Mazaher ensemble performs a lighter version of "zar", an music and dance ritual with centuries-old roots, that aims to ward off or exorcise jinn, or evil spirits.
Vimeo
This work engages with the ways video games represent (and misrepresent) the female body. The avatars in AntiBodies are pro-Anorexic yogis, cyber-Hysterics, and rubber-boned ragdolls. These young ladies are Frankenstein-like ready-mades concocted from a vast library of modular assets shared and created by the video game community. These assets can be transformed easily to fit within any video game, a treasure trove that makes video game developing cheaper, faster, and easier. I hack presets: characters, voices, motion capture data, and scripts. I remix the digital bones, the elastic skins, and electronic musculature. In this world, body dysmorphia is an artificial intelligence deciding how the body moves, collides, and interferes with others.