I spoke with Yusuf Siddiquee, Abbas Rattani, & Shimul Chowdhury about New Maqam City at Tribeca Immersive 2025. See more context in the rough transcript below. (Photo by Mikhail Mishin courtesy of Onassis ONX)
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing our coverage of looking at Trimbeck Immersive 2025, today's episode is with a piece called New Macomb City, which is by a collective called Mipsters. And so It's a group of Muslim futurists who are exploring how to allow people to play with what ends up being like this DJ set where you have this instrument where there are 64 buttons. They're not really labeled in terms of the different types of sounds, but it's essentially like a series of beats that are coming from Muslim culture, Sufism, and Islam. The invitation is to start to play and try to hear different types of sounds, sounds that are inspired by this kind of Muslim futurism perspective to kind of imagine a future where Muslims are experiencing joy and flourishing and thriving. And as you're experimenting with playing with the soundboard and creating these tunes and beats, There's also projected on a two channel video installation, all this other type of imagery that is trying to get you into this mode of these altered states of this kind of train state and connected to like a higher consciousness, a God consciousness. And so I had a really fascinating conversation with the Mipster's Collective staff. including the sound designer and director Yusuf Siddiqui, as well as the executive producer Abbas Ratani and the art director Shumul Chowdhury. And so really quite interesting project that allows you to experiment and to invite you into this space to play. I certainly enjoyed experiencing it and listening to all the different tunes, but also having a chance to hear some of the deeper intention behind the project and the process under which they went through in order to create it. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Yusuf Abbas and Shamul happened on Saturday, June 7th, 2025 at Tribeca Immersive in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.800] Yusuf Siddiquee: My name is Yusuf Siddiqui. I'm a musician, sound designer. I was on the team that made Numicom City here at Tribeca Immersive.
[00:02:16.792] Abbas Rattani: My name is Abbas Rattani. I'm a process artist. We all three are part of Mipsters, which is a Muslim arts and culture collective. And my job is to help emerging Muslim artists get their ideas out into the world.
[00:02:30.779] Shimul Chowdhury: My name is Sheemal Chaudhry. I am a new media artist, also the art director for Mipsters, our collective, and I'm an assistant professor of immersive media at Chatham University.
[00:02:40.463] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you can each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:45.623] Yusuf Siddiquee: I started in rock bands and electronic music production. And that ultimately led me to, we curated a lot of performances with Mipsters, just decades of shows and exhibitions and performances. And that's how I landed in this immersive space, which we see as not just headsets, but immersive in the sense that pieces can transport you psychologically somewhere else.
[00:03:12.315] Abbas Rattani: I think being a Muslim artist back in early 2000s, when we were pejoratively called hipsters and millennials, there weren't many opportunities to experiment or think about art or even have mentors that we could look up to to create and make new things. And immersive interactive media, I think, was one of those art forms that was accessible and became vastly more accessible with time and with... improvements in technology and I just stayed in this space trying to help Muslim artists get their ideas out and obviously at some point came across immersive and interactive media as a genre, as a philosophy and as a framework and from there started helping artists build and use that genre, speaking more generally, to get their ideas out. Obviously, there are aspects of immersive and interactive media that are very pricey and expensive, but then there are also aspects that are very accessible, very cost-effective, and that's where I dabble in, or have dabbled in, just looking to help other Muslim artists get out into the world.
[00:04:24.493] Kent Bye: And just to flesh out a little bit about the different disciplines that you're bringing in, just a bit more about also your background and what kind of disciplines you are fusing into this interdisciplinary fusion.
[00:04:34.400] Abbas Rattani: Good point. So I bring in a lot of satire, comedy, which in my opinion is just an alternative way of thinking about the mundaneness of the world. And then I went into filmmaking and production. And I'm also by background a physician and being in medicine, you think about things from a systematic quantitative research side of things. So in a practical way, So you're combining the humanities and the sciences in a way to say, how can we actually get this out into the world and do it quickly, efficiently and prototype it and then study it and see if it's actually working and meeting our needs and our goals. And so that background as a doctor, I think is very helpful.
[00:05:19.062] Shimul Chowdhury: For me as an artist, I've always defined my work and my practice through the terminology behind socially engaged art and participatory art. For me, I've always been someone who tries to channel stories and memory through interaction and through immersion. And despite my training in digital fields and technology, I don't think that the running thread for immersive work necessarily has to be what is oftentimes prohibitive or difficult to access technology for us as a collective. I think, as Abbas said, we care quite a bit about accessibility of thought and of resources. You know, I think for me as a socially engaged artist, I come into spaces like this and I want to be able to critique the space that I'm in and who has access to the work that we are creating and also create work for a wide variety of different spaces. So as our art director and oftentimes as we play the role of curator as a trio, we're thinking about through like this socially engaged and participatory lens, how can we create work for a wide variety of audiences in a wide variety of spaces in collaboration with our audiences and with our community.
[00:06:29.429] Kent Bye: So is New Macomb City, is this the first collaboration for Mipsters? Or maybe you could just take me back to the origins of how it began. No, no, no, no.
[00:06:36.214] Yusuf Siddiquee: Mipsters has been working for over a decade. We've been doing shows, exhibitions, you name it. Technically, this is the second presentation of New Macomb City. We first debuted it in Colorado Springs at the Fine Arts Center there. But what I was going to, I was just going to, I was listening to Shimal and Abbas a little bit. You know, I do think we are our own role models, and I think that's baked into this piece that you can go up there and you can be your own role model. You can interact with the piece in a very unique way. Everyone has come through this past few days and everyone's created a different sound, a different mix, different environment. And that's super inspiring to us because that's what we did. That's what we did with the collective as Muslim artists for the last ten years. So I forgot what you asked.
[00:07:22.043] Kent Bye: Oh, yeah, I was just trying to get a history and kind of evolution and a bit of context for leading up to this project.
[00:07:27.447] Yusuf Siddiquee: Yeah, yeah. So leading up to this project, Mipsters curated and produced an entire traveling group show exhibition that toured the country. And that was called Alhamdul Muslim Futurism. That had over 100 pieces in it, one of which was Numakam City. And so this piece really... I think it highlights the communal nature of our work. We're all co-creators, co-curators, and we've done that with this exhibition for Muslim Futurism, we've done that with this project for New Macomb City, but we've also done that as a collective, as Mipsters. We've brought in, everyone always asks us, like, who's in the collective? Like, how many? And it's just like a pointless question, because the collective is limitless, you know?
[00:08:10.540] Abbas Rattani: You're not giving yourself that much credit. New Macomb City, I would say, was in the making over eight years. We got into an amazing artist musical residency in Oakland called Zoolabs. And we went in with the mindset of how do we create a... soundscape of the future, of a future where Muslims are flourishing, where their joy is acknowledged and recognized, given that this minority, like almost all minorities in the United States, it seems like they're living in a white utopia, but for them it's a dystopia. But if we were to imagine that world, what does that world sound like? And then also very much moved by very unique American musical genres like jazz is a very uniquely American black genre. Out of jazz, you have hip hop, R&B, etc. And I can't think of, you know, maybe a new genre in our lifetime that emerges probably like dubstep maybe in our millennial, right? Like that's a child of techno. But we were just inspired by the creation of new genres of music. And so in this music residency, Yousef, who has a great background in sound, music engineering, you're a musician yourself. led that experimentation. And then we started bringing in thinking and philosophies around what does the future look like? Would there be aspects of dystopia? Of course, you can never have a true utopia. Who are marginalized? How did that happen? Why did that happen? Et cetera, et cetera. And then he's building sounds off of that. And we started pulling in drumming from West Africa, big Muslim population in West Africa, big Muslim population in East Africa, brought in sounds, folk music from Sudan, for example, when I visited in 2016, 2017, brought in string instrumentation from South Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. you know, Central Asia, et cetera. Anyway, I don't wanna go all where Muslims are, but bringing in sounds, especially folk music, music that local indigenous populations know and created and crafted over time, North Africa, because a lot of beats from Morocco, for example, yeah. Now, put all that together and also take the more modernized sounds, synth pop, right? And creating something, this is the difficult part, was it took us several years, I guess, and Shimu's background is a very technical background, right? She's like, comes at it from an engineering angle almost. How do we create it so it's not a cacophony of sounds? And then how do we sync that with visuals so it's not a cacophony of visuals? And how does this all work together? And I think we had input from many, many Muslim artists as well. It was also important to us to focus on Muslim artists and their contributions because I remember hearing this thing by this female jazz artist. She said that she would hold these female-only jazz improvisation sessions. And she said that when it was just all women in the room, the energy was palpably different than if there was one man in the room And we built off of that and said, if we just had all Muslims in the room or all mainly Muslim contribution, what does that energy look like? And we believe that all of these experiences are human. And we knew that even if you weren't Muslim, you would resonate with it. And we found that to be the case. We don't even, we don't tell people, oh, this is a Muslim piece. But you're there, you're in the zone, you fall into this deep trance. And next thing you know, you come out of it and you're like, oh, what was that for like 20 minutes? I was locked in.
[00:11:43.421] Yusuf Siddiquee: No, I think that's totally true. Folks want to, they keep asking me about like, what is... they want to name the region they want to name it it's like what's the background and the point is to experience something that is heavily informed years were decades centuries were informed by muslim practices muslim sounds and i think without naming without naming and i think you're right you know i think i just forgot this has been embedded we have been working on these sounds for seven eight years and i think one thing i'll bring out from those sessions in oakland shout out to vanita and dave at zoo labs was we had non-muslims just saying Alhamdulillah like screaming it and almost like reveling in the joy and the community that we created in the studio and I think we've seen that Alhamdulillah being praises to the most high Allah you know which is something you say during positive and negative times and for non-muslims to embrace that concept in their fiber like they felt it in their fiber
[00:12:44.955] Abbas Rattani: was powerful.
[00:12:45.636] Yusuf Siddiquee: And we've seen that across our projects as well. People have been brought to tears, been brought to their knees, non-Muslims. So I think, you know, the labels and the identification is not so important when you can create something truly beautiful and compelling.
[00:12:59.813] Kent Bye: I'd love to get your journey into the project and your perspective on all of that.
[00:13:03.035] Shimul Chowdhury: Yeah, I mean, for us, as I said, a lot of our focus is about creating a collaborative experience with our artists and our audiences. So we knew, and I think from the very start, Yousef, your direction was, I want people to play in a space where they're typically expected to just passively consume. And obviously, you know, in a space like this where everything is immersive, that's not quite the case, but You know, typically the work that we do as artists, we're often asked to just produce something that can just be put up on a wall. And, you know, not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but I think what draws us as people who are practice artists and who are also thinking of the work that we do as a collective, as a form of organizing and meeting our community and their needs, I think it's important for us to be able to create opportunities for creation and for the joy that we feel as artists and creatives. So the development of this piece was primarily focused, I mean, on blending these sounds and referencing these traditions of music and music making, collaborative and collective music making over centuries, but also being something that's accessible and welcoming to all sorts of audiences, no matter, as Yusuf said, no matter what their proximity to Islam or Muslimness is. So, you know, that's why there isn't really an objective here. there's no narrative, there's no string to follow other than the layering of these sounds and these visuals, which are collectively representations of Muslim thriving and joy, things that you're not often being exposed to in the West or that are often being smothered or erased in the West. So we're centering the joyous, vibrant, loud, in-your-face elements of our cultures and our traditions and welcoming people into them and also hopefully getting them to realize that they do have an influence and they they are a part of this culture even if they don't identify with it they are actively shaping what this collective sound and look is so for me that was a really crucial part of the development of this particular piece but also all of our work we don't just want to create work for a silo we want to take what we know to be really meaningful and important to us in our community and make it for that community but also show other people that they can be a part of that community too
[00:15:15.436] Kent Bye: And so the setup for this piece is that you have like a DJ booth where you have like an Ableton Live controller where there's like 80 buttons that you can start to press and have the looped either rhythms or melodies start to play. There's like a two channel video installation. And then there's some dials that you can start to turn. As you turn them, it either changes some of the speed or the modulation of the sound, but also sometimes it changes the projection map lighting that's happening on the DJ booth. It's essentially for one person to stand up and start to play the music, but then have an audience that is also observing and watching. I found that when I was experiencing it, I was kind of like, OK, I want to know what each of the sounds sound like. But then to take that into, like, now I'm going to compose a piece was something that was like, there's so many cognitive overload of how many different choices I have. Then I found myself, I don't know, I didn't feel like I had, like, full agency to author something because I wasn't familiar enough with all the different samples and so it felt like there's like a number of phases of just kind of knowing what's there and then from there like how do I start to compose with that and so I'm just curious how you start to address that or what kind of instructions you may give to people to help them get over that paradox of choice type of situation with so many different options.
[00:16:30.290] Abbas Rattani: I would say that if you notice, it's blank, right? The MPC controller is blank. There is no even visuals of what the sounds are, and it's a little bit of a guessing game. But I think that was part of the philosophical makeup of this piece. you know, you can take one approach, which is what we're very much used to as the creator, right? There's a blank slate. You bring all your ingredients together and this is the food that you're going to make based on your familiarity with your own cooking processes. But when you're creating for a future, right, there's some aspects of letting go to your own natural individualistic desire to create and there's a disorientation that I think was deliberately baked in because I think that was really one of the challenges is like how can we create something that simultaneously is going to be random right you're pressing different keys and different sounds are emerging but how do we sync it sonically such that it doesn't sound cacophonous because like you said That approach that I think intuitively we're looking for, we're like, all right, we're going to bring the drums, and we're going to bring the strings. Some people have no music background. Like me, I have zero talent, you know? So going in and starting to experiment and just start putting sounds out there was the first part. But the second part, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, Yusuf, since you're the mastermind here, the knobs have labels, right? The knobs were called imagination, resistance, liberation, community, and identity. And now you are projecting some of your own socio-political, socio-economic thinking about the future. And especially if you're told that the future is a Muslim future. So now you're like, I'm going to rev down the resistance, rev down the liberation, rev up, you know, and you're just changing all that. But the narrative that you're creating is one in yourself, right? It's a reflective piece where there are aspects that you can't control by design. And then the things that did have labels that are things you can control. And the final soundscape is supposed to speak to where you are in this current moment as to what you're projecting out into the future.
[00:18:40.892] Yusuf Siddiquee: Isn't that, what do you think? That's a very good point. The pads are a starting point and yeah, you don't get to decide what's on the pads. But I also, that's how I view sounds, music. I mean, I was talking to someone earlier that music is really a language and it's a form of communication. And so here's your blank slate to start with in terms of communication, but those five dials, they are very important. And I think the experience that you described that you had was very common, that you kind of go through, folks come up to the installation and they bring their own definition of like, well, how is this supposed to be played? I'm not a musician. Can I do it? All kinds of things. And I think that blank, those pads, they're 64, they're all the same size, no labels. You're supposed to come to it a little bit more free. Now, I think that's hard. That's hard coming to a gallery, and usually you are told exactly what to do. We have some light instructions, but they're pretty vague, and they just say play around. Experiment. Experiment until you reach your desired state. So boss mentioned cacophonous several times. It can still be a cacophonous. A future can be loud or a future can be quiet. So there is the ability to just like wreck the thing, but there's also the ability to just have a very peaceful, quiet sound of birds in the sky.
[00:19:56.768] Shimul Chowdhury: I also want to say this piece thematically is making references to Islamic mysticism and Sufism that are these traditions of reaching God consciousness and transcendence through repetition of sound and movement. and intuition, right? And so I think behaviors that we wanted to encourage that are often discouraged in spaces that are heavily controlled, like a gallery, are intuitive discovery. And, you know, it is intimidating to come up to this pedestal and there's no labels, there's no clear direction. And what we want to do, not just with this piece, but also as a collective, is to help people unlearn some of those instinctual barriers to the creative process that are ingrained in us from society and from the structures that we're confined by and to find some play you know a sense of play and discovery through just these innate you know childlike behaviors of you know, pushing buttons or turning knobs until something works. Right. And so the ideal format of this piece or the ideal experience doesn't really there isn't really an ideal experience, right? Everyone comes to it from a different place and with a different perspective on music and sound. But we've seen folks spend 30 seconds with it and hear something that they really like and say, like, yeah, that's that's a cool sound. I really like that. We've also seen people spend 20 minutes with it and, you know, really reach that sense of transcendence. where you can see people hit their groove and really start to feel, and even if they have no musical background, no understanding of what it is that they're hearing, there's this very human reaction of hearing a rhythm and a sense of repetition that is connecting them to something spiritually, right? So those are the behaviors that we really wanted people to focus on. And again, it's difficult because people are not used to that. But we hope that through this kind of work and this mode of immersive installation, participatory installation, that people will start to realize that they too can and do impact the sounds and the states of being around them.
[00:22:06.440] Abbas Rattani: And I would say that's an aspect of Islam that I think people just in today's sociopolitical era just don't even know is there. And I think it's a vast tradition, several centuries old, that have crafted this reaching higher states of God consciousness without psilocybin, not to diss the psilocybin community, but also partially to diss the psilocybin community. No, I'm just kidding. But, you know, there's aspects about the Islamic tradition that I think aren't really presented in these kinds of venues, right? I mean, you've been doing this VR thing for a long time. How many, like, Muslim-centered pieces have you seen? There's a handful, yeah.
[00:22:47.477] Kent Bye: There was a piece that was a Sufi dance that Gaba Aurora did at Sundance back in, like, 2017 or so.
[00:22:53.163] Abbas Rattani: 2017 handful and you've been doing this for over 10 years and it's over a billion population you know so and a lot of them do have the tech background to code these things and they are making these things and I think there are aspects that sometimes there's a element of the opportunity to get into a place and to present it and I think that was the other big thing here you know
[00:23:17.239] Yusuf Siddiquee: Yeah, small shout out to Tribeca who took a chance on us three years ago as well. We were in the Tribeca Festival with our film Alhamdulillah Muslim Futurism 2022.
[00:23:27.532] Kent Bye: I'm wondering, a piece like this, I can imagine that if you go up and start playing, that you could probably put in a banger of a set. But that could also create this sense of people telling themselves, well, I'm not a musician. I'm not good enough. I can't match with that. It's like the same type of story that people have. They say that they're not an artist, and they can't draw, and then they don't make any art at all. And so I'm just curious if that is requested of you sometimes to come and give a performance as a demo, or if you try to resist that to let people have their own experience with it.
[00:23:56.084] Yusuf Siddiquee: We try to resist that. It does happen though. It was requested all this week. But I think our answer to that is that you just have to spend a little bit of time with it and play. You know, that's the answer.
[00:24:08.996] Shimul Chowdhury: I have no musical background at all, zero. But I've really only lived with this piece for the past four days. We had a prior version of it back in September that previewed. But even then, I think I spent maybe one week, one and a half weeks with it. And I don't know what I'm doing at all. I don't know what, you know, I kind of have some vague sense through the past couple of days of playing around with it. But really, it takes time, right? And that's the thing that I think... you know, it's a tool. We created it as an instrument. It's a tool that you learn, just as with anything else. And, you know, I think along with wanting people to be active participants with the artwork that they, you know, creators as well, but also just not passively consuming, we want people to actually take some time with the work that they're experiencing and not, you know, just breeze through it, which we all have a tendency to do. I know I've definitely been to museums where I've just ran through and looked at things from afar. The goal is to encourage folks to take some time. Maybe if they don't spend 20 minutes in it, maybe they come back to it after they've made the rounds, you know? And I think that's the way to learn and to become accustomed to the system.
[00:25:12.796] Abbas Rattani: I will say this is where the diss to the psilocybin community comes in, is I think in today's world, there's an instant gratification, right? Like, I want to reach heightened states of consciousness right now. right and so let me take this pill let me take these shrooms or whatever and i'm going to reach the same states that monks have spent years if not decades trying to cultivate within themselves and i think this piece could have been something that was like in one minute you're now djing a set or whatever blah blah blah i don't know why we're using the word djing but you know kind of in that mindset versus like this is a trance right like you're putting yourself into a trance, but you're also figuring out where your resonance is, right? You're figuring out where your own metronome is. And I think meditation, heightened states of consciousness that are durable, that last a long period of time, are cultivated with time. And I think we brought that philosophy to this piece. which is very much borrowing from the mystical tradition of Islam, Buddhist tradition of Islam. There's a lot of Muslim-Buddhist overlap where they talk about how do we cultivate a durable sense of heightened consciousness that doesn't require substances. Yeah, substances can take you there. But similarly, some pieces can't take you there immediately. Like you throw on a VR headset, now you're in a new place. The music is already designed for you, et cetera, et cetera. It's escapist. But this is less escapist and more a reflective, trance-inducing kind of experience. That's why all these elements, that's where all the philosophy came in. You have these sound people, you have the creative people, you have the technology people. Then you also have these philosophical people who are like, well, this is what we need to think about in terms of what we want to put in the mindset of the creator.
[00:26:56.829] Kent Bye: I think it's the conceit of a sequencer that when you push a button it doesn't immediately take action because it has to wait until the next measure and so it'll start blinking and then when that next measure comes up then it'll start playing those songs and so there's a bit of a delay from the audio which I think is clear but one of the things I couldn't tell is whether or not pushing the buttons was influencing the visuals because there's a similar kind of delay that may be happening but I'm just curious how the visuals are tied into the interface.
[00:27:23.339] Yusuf Siddiquee: Yeah, I was going to bring up the visuals before you even said that. So, you know, I think one way to look at this piece is that if you take the lens of, well, I am performing for myself or, you know, I'm trying to reach this meditative or trance-like state, but there are kind of folks around you. They might be watching you or they might be having their own experience, and that's partially what's on the screen. You'll see a lot of performers on the screen. You'll see a lot of audience members clapping along, joyful. There's children, there's parents, there's all kinds of generations and all Muslim communities represented there. So that's very important, I think, to the experience. What we find is folks are usually immediately drawn to the sound and they don't look up. And after a few minutes, then they finally look up and say, oh, wow. I'm somewhere else. In terms of the mechanics, yes, some clips launch video and some don't. But I think that's also intentional to make you focus on the sounds on the left, the sounds on the right, the layered textures, you know, because there's 64 pads. It's basically infinite possibilities. I didn't do the math, but... In terms of the visuals, some people do want, I guess, they want to know exactly what's going on, but I just don't think that's not what we're trying to tell them.
[00:28:38.743] Abbas Rattani: Exactly. It's not what we're trying to tell them, and I think either they'll get there through frustration, and maybe that piece wasn't for them because there's too much internal chaos that they couldn't just take a second and breathe and spend time. And I think that first... catalysis needs to happen to reach a better state, a more reflective state, both in the real spiritual world and then with this piece, you know?
[00:29:01.428] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to dig into these concepts of Muslim futurism and speculative futures. I think it's a big topic that I've covered over the years and looking in to see how these virtual spaces can allow us a space to think about what's possible and then eventually bring that into what's actual over time. But there's a contrast there between often what is actual now and what may be possible in the future. And so I'd love if you could maybe elaborate on Muslim futurism and how you are trying to tie in some of those futurist and speculative futurist themes within this project.
[00:29:33.908] Yusuf Siddiquee: I will eventually pass the mic here, but what I'm going to say is the piece about the archive. Our project has been partially archival in the sense of curating an exhibition in an archive of works that delve with these themes in so many different ways. Just hearing the question from you, I'm almost immediately just like there's no way to encapsulate the answer other than to say that we've curated at least 100 different answers. So I'm going to say that and I'm going to pass.
[00:30:05.481] Abbas Rattani: You bring up a good point. I think initial inspiration very much borrowed from and learned from Afrofuturism. You know, Afrofuturism, people will say, you know, goes back to the 60s or the 70s. But others, and we take this approach, goes back like centuries. However long there were black folks on this planet that are thinking about a future where in which blackness can thrive and flourish. You know, Mansa Musa being the best example of a... black Muslim futurist and then more contemporarily with Malcolm X, who's drawing both from Afro-futurist values or black values or black excellence, as well as self-sustainability of black folks in a world that's actively trying to destroy them. And then also the Muslim piece, right? Being part of a non-Christian religion in a Christian hegemonic state, I think is also pretty fundamentally pushes back on some of these ideas of what the future looks like. So borrowing from those two elements, now you have black Afro, you have Afro-Muslim futurism as a starting framework. Then emerging at the same time, you have all of these liberation ideas of like, what does a future look like for us? Is a future possible for us? Palestine being the most obvious example, as it is under occupation by a high income country. I don't think there are any other high income countries currently on the planet that is actively occupying a people's. in that way. And so when you think about the Palestinians, you think and they themselves are writing about this. Is there a future possible for us where we can thrive, where we can flourish, where we see joy? And these frameworks started coming together. And one of the big elements that started emerging concurrently was imagination. There was an imaginative and you automatically assign a positive view of imagination. But there could also be a dystopic or negative view of imagination or imagining that maybe there isn't this future for us. And that's where Muslim futurism as a genre started beginning and taking shape of what we call quote unquote speculative futures or what now the term is speculative futures. But I have to give the big nod to Afrofuturism as the first in this. but even look at america right like jewish comic book artists started creating like stan lee you know and marvel universe or dc universe a lot of those characters are created by jewish artists where they're imagining what does a world look like for us where we thrive where we have the ability to be successful in a post-holocaust united states you know what i mean so there's this futurism that's existing in all of these marginalized communities that have seen suffering that I think we were pulling in from extensively and heavily. And to Yusuf's point about the archive, which is very interesting, is we're starting to see among, there's this group of both Israeli-Palestinian artists, and this is in this book called Becoming Palestine, where they highlight these examples where the archive where you collect historical facts from the past in hopes of changing the future is not materializing. Yes, you're showing the government, like, look at the atrocities of slavery in the United States. Thus, we need to enact the following thing to help elevate descendants of slaves. They're like, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, we did do that, where there's an acknowledgement of the trueness of those facts, but that then doesn't mean that we now have to do something about it. You're making us take a moral position about these things that we are clearly at odds. But the speculative future, Muslim future element, or this new virtual, or this futurist archive that this group of Israeli-Palestinian artists are creating is, there's always an alternative possibility that could have been taken. The Schrodinger cat thing, right? There is a world where in which we retaliated by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. And there's a world where in which we didn't do that. Right. And so what does that world in which we didn't do that? What was our response post 9-11? Right. And so for every action, there's a parallel universe that's happening concurrently. And I think a lot of these new artists, especially us, are engaged in this thinking about. What if we didn't take this action and we took this other action or these infinite possibilities of actions? What could have been or what could be? Could we actually obtain a utopia if we lean more into our moral self and less into our animalistic, intuitive, natural, protective, reactive self? And I think a lot of us, you know, I come from a background of philosophy as well, and I'm always in a state of reflection. And you're thinking, OK, let's take the reflective route and let's try to build a future and think of a future where there is joy, flourishing and thriving of our peoples. And then in turn, that reverberates and connects across all peoples. And now here we are, you know, playing these funky melodies that Yusuf and the team of Muslim artists created.
[00:35:04.622] Shimul Chowdhury: Okay, I'm going to try to collect my thoughts here because I do want to kind of reference back to some of what these two said, but I think I want to talk about futuring as a practice and how it's been embodied into our practice as a collective and into each of our works and all of the work that we do, not just the artwork that we make, but also the events that we host, the video calls that we take with random 16-year-old Muslim artists who find us on Twitter. There is a very intentional practice, of openness and inclusion and creating opportunity. And we're folks who, we come from a wide variety of backgrounds. We all have, we like to say our day jobs, and then we do this work alongside that. And we've found ourselves mysteriously here at Tribeca Film Festival, you know, in New York City. And, you know, we're calling ourselves curators and we're in these spaces that historically have not been for us and historically do not feel when we enter them like they are made for us or welcome for us. And that's not to say that we resent that. Sometimes we might. But in this case, we have found ourselves kind of like climbing through this institution by this practice of futuring in everything that we do and creating opportunity in everything that we do. So that, you know, from everything of the design of this piece is something that is creating opportunities to make music and to be a part of this centuries long culture. to like also thinking about like this medium of immersion as something that can be transformative, that can alter structures, that can, you know, create these opportunities that I think are very intrinsic to us Islamically as much as they are artistically, right? So futuring for us, the way that I see it is, it is very much being able to imagine a different future and to be able to realize that imagination. But the way that we're realizing it is by in these small ways with the capacity that we have and the resources that we have been given to create those opportunities in our practice. So I think that like, you know, when we talk about futurism and we talk about speculative futures, very often it can be reduced. And I think realistically, it's important to think of those fantastical representations of futures and imagination, but it can be reduced to that often. Sometimes in our present, the very act of futuring is as simple as extending a hand to your neighbor and creating an opportunity. And we're, you know, these two are young parents. I'm an educator. It's really important for us to think about the next generation and especially in this day and age to think about the next generation. There are babies dying every single day, way more than there ever should. And it's important for us if we're thinking about The large-scale implications of being Muslim, proudly Muslim, and embedding these values into our work, centering the future generation is really important to that.
[00:38:07.438] Abbas Rattani: The title of this podcast episode has to be Babies Dying Every Day, and people won't even know what they're clicking on, and it's going to be about this immersive exhibit. But that little nugget, I think, is the title piece, right? People are like, what is this going to be about, man? Oh, man, Kent took a drastic turn with his episodes. Your photo on your badge looks great, man. Thanks.
[00:38:32.334] Kent Bye: Thanks.
[00:38:34.508] Abbas Rattani: Oh, what were you going to say?
[00:38:37.690] Yusuf Siddiquee: I just said great photo.
[00:38:38.750] Kent Bye: Oh, thanks. So there have been a number of speculative future projects that I've covered over the years. There was a whole series of indigenous futurist projects that was sponsored by Canada. It's called 2167. It was the 150th anniversary of colonialism that was in 2017. And then all these indigenous artists were like, well, we don't want to celebrate that. We want to think around like 150 years, seven generations from now. what's that america 250 yeah same thing yeah exactly so starting to think around like 150 years and talking to jason edward lewis who is like well when you go out that many generations you can start to decouple yourself from a lot of the economic and power dynamics of the existing reality right now and then seven generations allows you the leeway to think around a future that you really want to live into and so A lot of the examples of futurism I have have some sort of spatial context or science fiction or some ideas or concepts. But I think this may be the first project that I've seen that is more focused on music in terms of a futurist perspective. And so I'm curious if you could like connect the dots between like music that exists now, but has like pulling aspects from the future, but trying to lean into this state or emotion of flourishing that you're striving for or getting into these kind of altered states or mystical connected states. And so just curious how you start to connect those dots between the aspiration of the future states of being that you're striving for with this project as a catalyst to achieve that.
[00:40:04.932] Yusuf Siddiquee: That's interesting. I think I read recently sound is one of the senses or the only senses. You can't turn it off. You're just always hearing things around you. And I think there's the natural world and then there's our just digitally induced world now where we're consuming so much content. And I would say a majority, I mean, there's a lot of visual content, but the audio is, to me, is everywhere. You know, I know you can watch the video with captions on and turn the audio off, but I do think that sound to me has always been one of the most powerful. Even when I'm watching a movie, the sound tells me how to feel. I could watch the picture, you know, it could even be horror. but I won't be as scared as I am when the sound is turned up. And so that's where I started with sound. It tells you, it really tells you how to feel. So with these sounds in the project for Numicom City, these are the sounds that have told me how to feel, right? Heavy on percussion, that's one of my favorites, but the organization of the notes, You know, I grew up really, just really into indie rock, and it was people around me, indie rock and pop music. Everything's 4-4. Everything is, you know, snares on the 2s and 4s. And just to simply start with not that, start with snares somewhere else, start with not the kick drum, start with hand percussion, where, in fact, the thing that's grounding the rhythm is not the kick drum. You know, it can be the finger cymbals or it can be the high notes of the toba. I think these tell different stories. You know, I don't know if I can explain it that well other than you know it when you hear it. That four on the floor bass drum is telling me to just like go to a rave. But these sounds are telling you to do something else. They're telling you to sit with some of your feelings and be more introspective. And so that's why I think sounds can communicate a little bit more of that future to us. And I think Shemuel was saying earlier about instant gratification. Look, I do love dance music. We're not going to lie. That, to me, isn't a sonic example of instant gratification, you know? And that's not what we're doing here. I think if we talk about speculative futures, if I had heard these things on the radio, I can't tell you exactly what would happen. I know it would be different. I know exactly, like, if the pop music and the top 40 music sounded, you know, had toblas, had oud, had ganawa music, I just, you know, the entire society would be different.
[00:42:47.752] Shimul Chowdhury: But what's interesting, and I'm not going to speak too much on this because I truly know very, very little about music, but what's interesting is that I remember hearing you talk once about how so much of popular music nowadays does use a lot of sampling from historically Muslim and Eastern traditions, but it's never at the forefront. It's never celebrated as the unifying factor, even though we know it to be the thing that really pulls you in some of the most iconic samples.
[00:43:16.331] Yusuf Siddiquee: Big Pimpin' is a very good example, you know, but you're right, the sample. A lot of Muslim community, Muslim sounds have been relegated to the sample, which is great. I mean, we love sample, I love sampling as well. Definitely sampled many Bollywood tracks, but I think that's a really good way of explaining the inverse. What if the Muslim sound was the bass and some other sound was the sample?
[00:43:41.320] Abbas Rattani: Yes. So I think one thing that's very important, and this has resonated with me for a long time, is that all human beings intrinsically can appreciate beauty, right? I think sometimes something that is very overtly beautiful doesn't need explaining, right? And you don't need to convince somebody that something is beautiful. And that within the Muslim tradition is very much a sign of divinity, right? Because we all have that divinity within us and it gets engaged and unlocked when we witness something of beauty, wherever it is, whether it's in the sound, whether it's visually, you know, something you taste. And I think we really like leaning into that, where there doesn't need all this words and explaining. And you're asking very difficult questions that we've been contemplating for some time. So some of it comes out, some of it doesn't come out well. But as you have experienced in this set, the sound here takes the center stage and you can walk away being like, I felt something that... hit me deep down. I can't really articulate it. It was interesting. It's going to sit with me with some time. To me, all of that is what I mean about that divine peace that exists in all human beings being unlocked, even for a short period of time. And I think we want to foster more of that all the time, everywhere, you know? And I think that's what our, our, you know, tradition teaches us. And that's something we try to engage in at least minimum five times a day, but maybe more if we can, you know?
[00:45:17.659] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential for this type of immersive art, immersive media, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:45:27.302] Yusuf Siddiquee: Wow. I mean, think about that.
[00:45:29.883] Abbas Rattani: You go first. You mean specifically our piece or just immersive media in general?
[00:45:34.411] Kent Bye: Just immersive media in general. But if you want to tailor it to like the practice of Muslim futurism, this is sort of how I end all of my interviews is kind of a peek into the future. And there's a kind of a speculative project of the voices of VR that has people meditating on where they want this all to go and what it might be able to enable.
[00:45:53.174] Abbas Rattani: I think more and more people are going to value the process behind the end product. You know, and I say this as a process artist, because look, I think we are already here where in which AI can generate some awesome immersive interactive experiences by just a few prompts here and there. I think there's a wealth of material that they can work off of, right? You can ask AI right now, like create some very stunning, beautiful pictures of Afrofuturism or Afrofuturist utopia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's created by a non-black person, right? Non-human being. And I think more and more the future is going to be what our actual human beings through a contemplative, reflective and even moral reflective process are coming up with. I want to go to the piece that you just highlighted coming out of Canada about indigenous futures and seeing what was the thinking process that went into this art, even if it's not polished. because that is what i want to understand and feel because i want to connect with that divine energy that they released out into the world and i want to capture that with my divine energy you know and i think seeing these pieces i really think you know in a matter of two three years we're going to be able to do some crazy stuff i mean hopefully cyborgs is around the corner and we can implant you know computers and half brain half computer but But ultimately, you know, and I say that almost in a silly way, because is that really the point? I mean, we're really on this planet for a short period of time. And even if we can live forever, I think what makes us human and makes life and living enjoyable is the opportunities to unlock divinity and feel the unlocked divinity in other people. And I think we're going to want more authentically human things and less AI things. I think because AI things will feel cheap and as cool as it may be. But as shabby and rugged and as unpolished the human things may be, I think as human beings, that's going to touch us more. The same way some of these indie films now these days are touching us more deep down than some of these super hyper polished films that, you know, Michael Bay and his AI team is making, you know? CGI team, you know? To that end... No disrespect, but yes, also disrespect to Michael Bay.
[00:48:22.036] Shimul Chowdhury: You're just dissing everyone on this podcast.
[00:48:24.218] Abbas Rattani: I want this episode to go viral.
[00:48:25.819] Shimul Chowdhury: Do you have anyone else that you want to diss before we move on?
[00:48:29.903] Abbas Rattani: Dissing commodity traders and the U.S. government. Shut up.
[00:48:33.145] Shimul Chowdhury: Shut up. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a professor of immersive media for an undergraduate immersive media program in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I think that makes me uniquely qualified to be constantly and every day thinking about the future of immersive media, because I'm training these young impressionable folks who are joining this industry and this discipline because they love VR or they found some community online or they have grown up playing video games or watching animations and they want to know what drives that. And so often what is driving conversations about immersive media and particularly with these kids is the technology. And I think so are within this industry and within this discipline know that the technology is changing by the second. And as Abbas was talking about AI, as we're talking about all of the different work that we're witnessing and seeing nowadays, we know that this technology is very fleeting, and if that is our through line for how we're contextualizing and defining immersive media, then we may never know what the future of immersive media looks like, because that's a very tenuous through line, right? I think the thing that holds immersive media together and this type of interactive, meaningful, life-changing art experience, creative experience, I think it's storytelling. And I think that goes along with some of what Abbas was saying. I think that the future of immersive media is this increase and this focus on telling real and genuine stories in ways that will invite more people to share their story. I mean, storytelling is a practice that has, you know, it's as old as humans, right? Like this is one of the most human behaviors that we can think of. And when I'm teaching these students, I don't want them to feel confined by the resources around them. And I want them to get jobs and I want them to be successful and do all the things they want to do. But I also want them to know that the thing that is going to last is their unique story, the story that they have to tell. So that is my hope for the future of immersive media is that we don't rely on the machine to create the story for us, that we work with the machine, but we also work with ourselves and our own communities and each other to tell those stories.
[00:50:56.483] Yusuf Siddiquee: Okay. Hearing both of you speak has awakened a lot in me. I'm a newcomer right to this space as like officially labeled as immersive. But the first thing that came to mind was I'm not convinced that immersive needs to be its own category. Right? Because I think the goal of immersive is empathy, right? There's a piece in this show actually that asks you to sit in someone's, you know, step in someone else's shoes quite literally and the screen and go through what they went through. I think that is to me the most powerful potential of immersive is you know, last mentioned cyborgs and implants. Like if you could implant us all with the experience or the perspective of somebody who's been just like habitually oppressed and didn't have freedom, I just think that would solve a lot of things. Right. And so. If immersive can get to that point where it's every time effectively delivering empathy that you can understand, you can feel, that would be the best case scenario. And I think if you brought in that more, like our piece fits in an immersive space, but it fits in a traditional gallery and a traditional museum. So I think the goal of all art should be some version of that, invite you to the viewpoint, let you feel the viewpoint. And so, yeah, I think eventually there shouldn't be a category that's just called immersive, but it helps to focus on it, you know, right now.
[00:52:24.259] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And in Montreal, FI is combining their contemporary art with their immersive program, and it's all just art now. So I think that more and more museums are going to start to follow that lead, and it's all going to just be art and storytelling. Anyway, I really enjoyed New Macomb City and just being able to experiment and play around. And I feel like it's a project I want to come back to and kind of tinker around a little bit more because it does feel like a tool to kind of get into that state of that desired state. So, yeah, but just really cool to hear all about each of your journeys into the space and all of your thoughts and thinking around that. So thank you.
[00:52:56.800] Yusuf Siddiquee: I hope you do come back. Was there anything, any sound that stuck with you?
[00:53:00.714] Kent Bye: Well, it was sort of like trying to figure out what are the bass, what are the other signs. And I think the thing that I liked a lot was to have just one sound playing and then to just like push four or five keys and then have the beat dropping, as it were. So just having the kind of waves and dynamic. And I think that's the thing that music has this building and releasing of that tension. And so I really wanted to have that experience of like creating an arc of the flow. And that was what I was really resonating with. It's kind of like in that rhythm of that building and the releasing of that tension. So yeah.
[00:53:30.940] Yusuf Siddiquee: Well, I mean, I was just going to plug one more thing about the piece, which is the resting state is like this really kind of, Abbas was talking about the process, right? I think that's true. I think we are evaluating artworks and media based on what we think to be the process. And I think one of the processes behind this was to capture, you know, a slice of Muslim life, if you want to call it that. And that's what you hear when you first walk in. You hear basically my life. As authentically as I could record it, you're hearing a little snippet of my life. There's Nusra Fateh Ali Khan playing in the background. There's birds chirping outside and there's a preacher on the street, a Christian preacher who's just, you know, yelling at everyone. But, you know, but I think the thing is this mix, that's just my mix. And as soon as you press a button, you hear your mix.
[00:54:27.173] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you.
[00:54:30.215] Shimul Chowdhury: Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:54:32.536] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is part of the podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
