“Whether this happened long ago, or not so long ago,
whether this really happened or not, nobody knows for certain.”
The Magic Flute (Belarusian folk tale)
Nobody Knows for Certain is a narrative artistic research project by Afrah Shafiq in video game format. The starting point for the project was the popularity of Soviet children’s books in India from the 1960s to the 1980s. Artist Afrah Shafiq presents the first part of her video game Nobody Knows for Certain, developed with the support of Garage Field Research.
The historical context was a result of the warm relations between India and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which included a focus on cultural exchange. Russian ballet and circuses performed in Indian cities and were broadcast frequently on Indian state television. Sovietland magazine was published in thirteen Indian languages. One particularly delightful by-product of this strategic agreement was an abundance of richly illustrated Soviet children’s books that were easily available in big cities and small towns across India. Afrah has observed that Soviet children’s stories and the accompanying illustrations reflect two different worlds that were straddled simultaneously. The world of the skazka, the fairy tale, featured illustrations drawing on a rich tradition of folk forms such as the lubok print, lacquer miniatures, the textile and decorative arts, and the Mir Isskustva (World of Art) and Art Nouveau movements. The children’s tales of Soviet writers, with their focus on space, industry, and the idea of a new nation and a new citizen, were influenced aesthetically by the avant-garde, geometric abstraction, constructivism, and suprematism.
The first part of the game Nobody Knows for Certain is a narrative quest that opens up on several levels, each of which has its own visual style referencing (pre-) Soviet book illustration. During the quest, the player can compile their own library of children’s books from the publishers Raduga and Progress, which were digitized by the artist from Indian private collections, and get to know characters from Slavic mythology and the Soviet world.
The artist based her scenario on The Morphology of the Fairy Tale by Vladimir Propp, in order to immerse the player “in the labyrinth of the tale’s multiformity, which becomes apparent as an amazing uniformity.” Shafiq pays particular attention to tropes of magical lands (Lukomorye, the Thrice-Nine Tsardom), the image of the field of mushrooms as a site for seekers, the evolution of archetypes such as the Sirin bird and the older wise woman (Baba Yaga, babushka), and the search for something that nobody knows for certain. Shafiq supplements the books’ characters with her own, including the Cat Without a Tail and the Empty Matryoshka.
The first part of the video game was released in 2023 in Russian and English for Windows and macOS
(b.1989, Bangalore) is a multi/new media artist and documentary filmmaker. Her practice moves across numerous platforms and mediums, seeking a way to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology. Her work has been shown at various festivals and galleries including the 4th Kochi Muziris Biennale in Kochi, Be.Fantastic in Bengaluru, Digital Graffiti Festival in Florida, Fusebox Festival in Texas, Computer Space festival in Bulgaria, Dhaka Art Summit, and Centre Pompidou-Metz. She has been invited on research and residency programs with the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Fluent Collaborative in Austin Texas, and the Institute of Advance Studies, Nantes. She lives and works in Goa and Bangalore.
The main goal of the seminar is to transform gaming practice, which is casually believed to be a nonimportant recreational activity, into a training ground for the production of knowledge and social and cultural studies.
This event is part of the public program of the World Gone By computer class.
Garage Digital stopped working on this project.
Performance Hydrogen City is the new site-specific performance by Digital Object Alliance invites visitors to experience the materiality of a speculative world of the future through the possible embodiment of videogame logics. The performance took place at Hyundai Motorstudio Moscow as part of the joint program by Garage Digital and the online platform Rhizome for the international exhibition World on a Wire.
