Alam-e-Alam (The States of Worlding): Tilism Sazi is an interactive mixed reality experience that positions you, the participant, as Tilism Saz—conjurers of an enchanted world that lies beyond a veil. By tracing letters from the Arabic/Urdu alphabet, the Tilism Saz activate elemental states associated with each letter according to the 12th Century Sufi mystic-philosopher Ibn Arabi’s Science of Letters, and using their voice, the Tilism Saz animate and sustain transformations across these states to conjure up an enchanted garden, and cross the veil to finally enter the tilism.
The experience is a reflection on the creative power of language, gesture, and breath, and the worlding potentialities that emerge from an assemblage of the elemental body in performance, the conjured image of the story-world through devices of wonder, and the spirit activated within the performative space, coming together as affective media environments of wonder (ajab), relational knowledges (adab) and enchantment (tilism).
The project draws on Akram’s ongoing doctoral research-creation focus on the historical Urdu language oral storytelling tradition and performative art of Tilismi Dastan from South Asia which is uniquely coloured by Islamicate worldviews and aesthetics along with Indic performance. This work is the first in an iterative series of interactive XR experiences that reimagine the Tilismi Dastan with emergent media technologies and XR, and aim to realize its transformative, generative, and creative potential for immersive storytelling, performance, and worldbuilding in the 21st Century.
(Alam: World. Universe, Cosmos, State, Affect, Time, Worlding; Tilism: an enchantment, a nested structure of enchanted worlds within worlds in the dastan story-world, occult technology; Saz: maker, instrument, conjurer; Tilism Sazi: the act of conjuring an enchantment/enchanted worlds).
