The Jirry Tribe Stop — Basmah Felemban

The Jirry Tribe Stop, 2021Video game. 2:00 mins

Videogame Catfish Corals

Basmah Felemban’s The Jirry Tribe Stop (2020) is an elaborate cosmography that is experienced as an interactive game. The work is the artist’s most comprehensive worldbuilding venture to date and is developed around stories she has scripted as a foundation for a new (simulated) world with its own logic, language, and order. Formally, the work is composed of surrealistic tempered abstractions. Semiotically, the rhythmic array of shapes, colors, and imagery form a complex system of signification developed by Felemban over a two year period and programmed in collaboration with a team of 3D artists and game designers.

As with Felemban’s other works on paper and installations, this project is abound with references that span early Islamic literature, modern geometry, interspersed with references that signify marine, space and desert ecosystems. She draws on the Islamic cosmographies such as the Durr i-Meknon (The Hidden Pearl) a 15th century cosmography of the apocalypse by the Ottoman mystic Ahmed Bican and the ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt wa Gharāʾib al-Mawjūdāt (Wonders of Creation and Oddities of Existence) a celestial cosmography by Zakariya al-Qazwini, born in Iran in the 13th century. Felemban casts invented shapes as protagonists.

The gömböc (pronounced: goemboets), imagine an egg with sharp edges that wiggles when set down, is an elegant and impossible form that rose to distinction as a mathematical innovation in 1995. It manifests in the game as an object-character but its nature, as a shape, informs the ethos of the “impossible” world of Felemban’s cosmology, which like the shape is simultaneously stable and unstable. Inhabiting this world is a plural character named Jirry (also, Garmoot, Sallor, or Jama’ah).

Jirry’s world is populated by other shape shifting characters including tent-clad catfish and mushroom-like objects descending from spacescapes onto brightly colored reefs. The Jirry live on a flat plane (“The Sea of Boards”) somewhere in the Red Sea. They must dedicate themselves to the acquisition of deep knowledge by learning to calculate data, compute probabilities, devise game strategies and solve problems; they know to apply the rules of the Zingg diagram (developed in 1935), a system that classifies geological sediments into spheres, blades, rods and disks and which helps them navigate their migration voyage.

The game is a heuristic into Felemban’s carefully constructed cosmology. The objective is for players to maximize the chances of the Jirry Tribe’s survival past the surpassing disaster by manipulating the data and experimenting with the composition of atom cells.

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