Sam Chester

Sam is a London-based digital artist and crafts-person whose work orbits ideas of storytelling, moving between the real and unreal, the physical and digital.

Inspired by the pagan mysticism and coastal landscape of their hometown, they navigate the relationships and sensualities between nature and magic, the virtual and the cosmos.

As a means to unravel the multiplicity of their trans identity and how it intersects with the digital world, Sam manoeuvres between technological interfaces, video game experiences and A-I systems; myth, folklore, and ancient crafts. All the while weaving their own queer landscape.

At The Sea’s Edge

Reclaiming the body as a site of desire and sensuality, strands of identities woven together constructing THEM. Innate and tacit, the self is marked with the stains of the past, real and the un-real, binary and the non-binary.

Woven through time, materials retain ancestral traces. Myths + folklore, seaside town, digital craft person.

A chimeric construction of gender, craft and digital they re-shape the design landscape. Analogue hands and digital minds, together, ruptures the seamlessness of the technological present.

At the Sea’s Edge is an immersive digital performance piece, merging the realms of fashion, video games, and folklore, creating a dynamic new practise called Digital Mysticism. Digital mysticism, represents the intersection between ancient mythologies and future coded worlds. Drawing on powerful energies found within the physical world, ritual and spiritual practises, sensuous connections between a shared genealogical past and embodied experiences within the virtual.

Utilising this fast evolving collaboration between fashion and video game technologies, I hope to tell authentic stories of trans and queer identities through interactive enchanting narratives.

My cyber world is just at its beginning, a space I hope to develop into a shared collective ecosystem filled with other designers, peers, mentors whose voices share a common thread. A universe that spills out of the digital into physical performances, woven sculptures, and interactive experiences.

At_The_Sea's_Edge — Video piece of cgi world, A.I poetry, spoken word

Medium:

Video

Size:

11 minutes

Xenogenesis — 3D model of a mask inspired by the pagan legend of the Green Man.

3D modeling Mask Mysticism Mythology Video Games

Sea_of_Information

A video utilising generative adversarial network (GAN) to produce a series of Ai generated masks, this plays over aerial video navigating a digital environment based on the seaside town of Hastings. A digitised human voice reads a poem co-written between artist and Artificial Intelligence (Ai)