Zombies of Persia
A theoretical art project in the year 2033.
As part of a creative collective we are curating vintage zombie and post-apocalypse movies from 1990-2013 and using them as source material for design of an immersive three-dimensional animatronic and interactive landscape.
The piece is an in-real-life (IRL) game for a wedding party. It will be 3D printed in Pakistan and installed and hand-detailed in Iran. Costumes are being made in Jogjakarta. An Iranian movie star, Kam has ordered the work for the marriage with his third wife, Jodie.
(Download PDFs of the full presentation after the break. )
Jodie is an avid retro-post-apocalypse movie fan. Jodie coordinates post-disaster emergency shelter response. To relax and bond she loves the held space and adrenalin of IRL games. The vintage-post-apocalypse culture movement is huge, an aesthetic from nostalgia for the naive and innocent times before we experienced and accepted how unimaginably climate change altered our world, civilisations and cultures.
The wedding is located in Isfahan city, Iran. The wedding party will play the game in a secure, gated, custom-landscaped environment for as long as they want (commonly around 2-3 weeks). Output from embedded video cameras will be combined to create a series of short stories based on the outcomes.
Kam paid a premium to have the original digital designs destroyed after the work is printed, giving some assurance of a unique piece. All the core software and hardware is open source, so updates and innovation are DRM free and open. This model provides profit for purpose alongside maintenance to core infrastructure.
My role spans relationship management, performance facilitation, curation, site-specific art direction, world building and user experience (UX).
Societies that do this kind of widely distributed, cultural practice art, blurring experience, event, ritual and relationship building, trauma-processing and creative recovery have thrived in the past 20 years.
Fictional Fact Sheet Design: Miriam Steenhaur
Download a PDF of this handout: Zombies of persia PDF
Download a PDF of the presentation here: Zombies of Persia, an art project 20 years in the future PDF
Zombie Image: Polymu.smugmug.com
