Greetings!

After opening my little webshop of handmade things in the summertime, I started on my next cryptoart piece and collaboration with friend and fellow cohort, cryptopoet, Pierre Gervois. Pierre and I met through the VerticalCrypto Art Residency and we wanted to make something fun! 

We played around the idea of a future-like picture book sharing the stories of this crew of grifters and/or their ancestors in the years to come. An animated short telling the galactic epic of space grifters governed by extreme socioeconomic regulations in a post-Earth future. We wanted to have fun with this idea of ridiculous, space future propaganda art, and this would be a story families or space units would have to mandatory read aboard this ship as protocol. Doing a superficial study of spaceship design (which involved a movie marathon of the Alien and original Star Trek series) I really enjoyed drawing the wires and switch boards amongst the plants and trying to recreate this kind of absurd, visually warped perspective of how I imagined living on a spacecraft in the future would be like. And maybe how I would potentially want it to be (despite the psychological implications). Living a rationed-life in a container floating in the abyss for years sounds frightening and we had fun showcasing that in this unrefined, chaotic manner when the astronauts observe monoliths that dictate their livelihoods, potentially generations to come. There was also this immediacy to see the visual juxtaposition of these hands-on techniques —stop-motion and drawing— alongside the Ai diffusion render.

It was fun collaborating on this piece, because Pierre and I are so different and that's where I feel really cool, unexpected things can be made making it all the more interesting and rewarding of an experience!
This work is currently available on OBJKT and can be viewed by clicking the image below. 

Around this time I also received news my work was selected in the 5th edition of CADAF NYC curated by Elena Zavelev and Andrea Steuer. My first time showing at CADAF alongside many names I've come to admire since entering the space.

I attended school in NYC and fell in love with the magic of the city most nights, but left feeling lost --so, I am very happy for the chance to reflect a part I was out of touch with from that time. And even more to do so with Mohammad Muneem of the music group Alif in 007 and Kashmiri Rabab player, Ali Shabir in 005, two of the selected works I had the joy of creating.

In the meantime, my fingers have been itching to create another "machine" and to share more of my process intimately with those who may want to follow along!

Hopefully, more on this in the future. Fingers crossed.

zareen