Artist Writing: KNOWMAD

KNOWMAD, 1999
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Motion + Action = Place

The KNOWMAD Confederacy is united by the spirit of MOTION, that drives the creative impulse into ACTION, and sets the conditions for PLACE.

KNOWMAD (the game) is mapped from a real world of tribal groups that are being currently eradicated by political and civil change. The cultural icons from various tribes, as found in the rugs they weave, are recharted here in a virtual world of gaming. Women knot bits of wool and create evidence of human survival. In KNOWMAD, the programmer and designer use these motifs as they keystroke pixels of color into a wireframed world. Knot on a weft and warp becomes refreshing pixel on a pitch.

KNOWMAD is a game to play while paying homage to both the tribal worlds and the forces of popular culture. Rugs selected by a mapping process refer to the places of tribal rug production as a source of visual and creative energy. Developed into a three-dimensional world, and paired with the gaming constraints of time and skill, a new space becomes available where the player must deal with the excitement of movement, image, and memory.

Consciousness imported from game to the real world is the travel that KNOWMAD seeks to promote. The worlds within the KNOWMAD tents are created in reverence for the beauty of human expression as found in the cultural content of tribal rugs.

The nomadic life has had an uneasy history of war and shepherding, of civil/political strife and struggle; but its history has yielded an eternal gift: the transmission of ideas. Modern nationalistic tendencies of the regions of Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Middle East have created territorial boundaries that are terminating the map-less drive thousands of years old. The KNOWMAD Confederacy is making a new contribution to the flow of ideas that might have originated in the commerce of antiquity through the ever-expanding boundaries of contemporary art. In a cyber-drive fashion, KNOWMAD seeks to catalyze the desire to know more about cultural artifacts and human expression and accelerate beyond preconceived methods of mapping and artistic expression.