Meet Shuruq Tramontini

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shuruq Tramontini.

Hi Shuruq, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My name is Shuruq Tramontini. Shuruq means sunrise in Arabic, while Tramontini means multiple small sunsets in Italian. While my mom is German and my dad is Italian, I grew up in the Middle East – I was born in Baghdad, Iraq and for the longest time of my life have lived in the Middle East (Lebanon, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran). So since early on I have been in constant transition which has led to bitter and sweet emotions, many goodbyes, tying up loose ends, and a lot of restarts.

For a long time, I tried to define my identity and my own narrative, but oftentimes it suffered a relatability problem. I was searching for a physical place to call my home, my culture and my kin, and I envied people who had that.

I think that when you grow up this way, there is a prevailing feeling of being lost. But to be lost is also to be open. Being exposed to so much change and non-constancy in life, people develop the skill to rouse one of the many selves stacked within the Self to best suit the place they are in, and I think that I am able to do so.

I came to realize that Home is everywhere and nowhere – it is something that is very personal and that I can tailor for myself. It is not tied to places or spaces or anything that can physically be visited, but it is a collection/an archive of relationships and spaces of memories that mold and form with time. And I can design this narrative.

Of course, all of this shaped me and maybe I thought that Architecture could help me come closer to define spatial understanding of the concept of home and belonging.

After school, I did a language course in Damascus, Syria and was impressed by the local Architecture with the bazaars of Hamidiya and Aleppo, so I decided to study Architecture. I went to Vienna, Austria and did a 5 year program at the Technical University. This was pretty tough and technical, and it taught me a lot about self-organizing and taking care of stuff. I realized that traditional Architecture will never fulfill my passion, as it is tied too much to a singular place, politics that I disliked, and hypocritical Starchitects that I don’t align with. A groundbreaking change of path was a lecture by Heather Davis about plastic and the challenges plastic imposes on the environment, which to her mind does not come to one place and does not have a home. Joining a month-long exchange program from The Angewandte University brought me to Immuna, Ghana where I started collecting stories of plastic and how plastic objects erased traditional objects and memories and the daily private personalized objects that it replaced.

Two years of experimenting with new media and tools in the art school Staedelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, brought me to an architecture school in Los Angeles called SCI-Arc, where I teach right now. I did a postgraduate program called Fiction and Entertainment which is a fairly new program that focuses on storytelling using groundbreaking digital tools. Exploring remote spaces and environments and interacting with them became my passion, and it was very clear that I wanted to make it my profession to work in real-time engines and explore interactive spaces that make the viewer and player feel something while interacting with it.

I feel the most important aspect of being a Creative Technical Artist is to be really aware of what forms you and also what is in front of you – what tools do you have, what stories can you tell, and what is the latest tech worth exploring.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Of course, this was not a smooth way and it took a while to understand and see, mostly in retrospect, how things fall into place, how one thing leads to the next, and how to understand the larger picture and remain confident and grounded in the work that you do and how you approach things.

There is constantly the need to progress, to work even more efficiently, to integrate new methods. Working with new media is challenging as software updates, new version releases and a constant upgrade is unavoidable – and a lot of questions arise of how to stay on top of things, how to embed new tools in your pipeline. It sometimes feels like a constant never ending chase with staying on top of things. I am very fortunate and lucky for all of the amazing mentors, artists and friends I learned from, who guided me and pushed me and helped me through sticky times.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have a background in Architecture and now work as a Creative Technical Artist in games and the art world. In my practice, I explore world-building and storytelling through games and interactive media. I use game engines and real-time tools as poetic mediums, allowing ambiguity and surprise for narrative fiction to unfold. I am curious about (open) worlds in which the viewer has agency to roam about freely and has space to make up their own stories while being an active participant to experience the world.

Games have a big cultural relevance in that they intertwine worldbuilding, technology, the virtual and storytelling into an experience that can be interacted with, played and inhabited. I am interested in new and playful ways of engaging with worlds that are not easily accessible, such as the depths of the ocean. How can the consequences of climate crisis and climate emergence trigger speculative futures and new worlds? Worlds that retell new narratives and explore new geomythologies that are informed by technology and touch upon ecology and culture, ecosystems and crisis, home and identity, belonging and separation. A Geomythology describes earth formations and are explained in poetic metaphor and mythological imagery through native folklore. What kind of geomythologies can be told today, and how can we speculate new geomythologies together with different species, technologies and forms of knowledge?

My own project, Current Affairs, is an interactive VR installation that takes the viewer into the depths of a plastic-drained ocean. During this journey, the viewer is accompanied by an octopus, whose role is to lead the player through the game. Realtime datasets that come live and directly from the deep sea generate an environment filled with surprise and complexity and simulate currents that pull the viewer from one space to the next. The ultimate destination is the so-called Plastic Island – but what is the plastic island, and does it really exist? Or is it just an anecdote to confirm our worst fears about over-consumption? A cloud drifting and floating through media spaces and digital forums? A society of objects which is created on a planetary scale and accumulates cultural traces and artifacts?

I have earned a degree in the postgraduate Master of Science called Fiction and Entertainment at SCi-Arc. It is a young program with a small number of students and is a degree of specialty that is sought and will continue to rise in demand for major industries. Pretty soon after graduating, one opportunity led to the next.

I think the pandemic sort of exhilarated my career – Being stuck at home during the pandemic and not being able to leave the country for two years forced me to stick to my screen, and sometimes I would work on multiple projects at the same time, doing morning and night and weekend shifts.

My skills are very specialized, and I developed a new set of skills that are in high demand. I have worked in positions of leadership on globally very prestigious and high-profile projects with international crews and professional people in the business. As a Creative Technical Artist, I work with game engines to produce projects in the field of art, interactive media, and technology. Game engines are traditionally the software that are used to produce video games. But the use of game engines is rising more than ever due to their ever-growing power to render visuals in real time and their time efficiency. It is a very powerful tool and major industries such as Hollywood Film, TV and Music are incorporating this medium in their own pipeline.

In the past, I have worked as the Lead Unity Artist/Production Designer for the animated series Life After Bob: The Chalice Study by Ian Cheng; the Lead Artist for the PC game Common’Hood, and as the Technical Lead for director and speculative architect Liam Young.

Also, since two years I have been an adjunct faculty at SCI-Arc’s postgrad program Fiction and Entertainment.

What sets me apart from others? A difficult question. I think that one is shaped by one’s life experiences, and my life having been what it was and as I described it made me into the person I am. Working for all of these great thinkers and artists has been an absolute pleasure, and I am proud of each and every project, as it is part of me now. I think that I had great mentors along the way, and I am very eager and confident to produce something that is my own again. I got an amazing opportunity for a fellowship with ONX Studio in NYC that supports artists and focuses on exploring storytelling through digital tools and groundbreaking tech. As a Creative Technical Artist, I am super eager exploring new technologies and experimenting with them to create groundbreaking projects and narratives that are meaningful and impactful. I also joined a fellowship called Supercollider and am planning on tying both of these fellowships together.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Looking back at all this, I can only say that it is okay if you sometimes don’t know where life will lead and bring you – as the Cheshire cat tells Alice: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”. Just don’t lose your own values, beliefs, and goals, and dream big. Whatever slows you down, get it out of your way. Easier said than done, but just don’t lose your own values.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shuruqtramontini.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shuruqtramontini/?hl=en