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ABOUT ME
Robert Farid Karimi
Critically acclaimed trans-channel artist, playfulness polymath, interactive experience educator, performer, author, Robert Farid Karimi, designs interactive immersive game-performance experiences to spark players to imagine worlds of mutual community nourishment. With over 25 years of expertise Karimi brings nourishment, playfulness, and interactive storytelling to spaces worldwide – from General Mills to Off Broadway to Nuyorican Poets Café to NPR to HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Hawaii International Film Festival, The Smithsonian, and South by Southwest.
A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, and UCLA/USC grad, their work appears in NPR, LA Times, Callaloo, Total Chaos: an anthology of Hip Hop theory, Asian American Literary Review, Wandering Song: Anthology of Central American Writers, and A Good Time for The Truth: Race In Minnesota
As a Creative Capital artist, Karimi made healthy messaging delicious with the Diabetes of Democracy: a culinary engagement project which inspires audiences to exchange their cultural culinary histories, connect with one another over humor& food, and discover their own power towards personal balance. DoD served over 80000 people from 2009-2022. Recent work: They created game performances focused on the disproportionate amount of people of color who cannot swim and a series of interactive analog immersive game experiences involving topics such as community-police relations and the illegal detention of Central American immigrant youth.
They designed the satirical video game installation Grandma Invaders for game recognize game / bazi recognize bazi [a series of broken games], a series of game performance installations meant to shine light on playfulness and the power of fun, generosity, and kinship to break and remix Orientalism at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu.
Karimi is co-director of the Public Practice + Generative Play StudioLab and serves as Assistant Professor in the Music, Dance and Theater department at Arizona State University.
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Check out the video from Bazi Recognize Bazi/Game Recognize Game residency at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art & Design
For more details on the entire team, it took to make this happen, go to: https://vimeo.com/879609915
Click here to see a Short Film about a revolutionary Filipinx spring roll that unites Latina and Filipina communities and farmworkers.
5 min of a 2.5 hour experience
Part interactive game, part immersive theater, part comedic storytelling Swimming Pool Party is a fictional swimming school of the future as the basis to address disparities in swimming ability based on race, and to bring visibility to the role of intergenerational trauma in this issue. Swimming Pool Party is an interactive performance concerning the role of culture in shaping people’s fear of water. Leaders of the Institute of Rebellious Swimming lead audience members to confront fear through shared experience, shared dialogue and joyous movement that the piece hopes to inspire.
Tehran Tacos (abgushte koobideh, garbanzo vegan mix, tortillas, cabbage, etc.), wood,
plastic buckets, Guatemalan table cloths, burkini, red Farsi 3 hats, aprons, card deck, vinyl
signs
Cards Against Iranians, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Yemenis, Libyans, Afghanis, Sudanese, Chadians, North Koreans, & Venezuelans (CAISIS) game night inside a loading dock created for French curator. Players play game, eat, listen to Israeli DJ spin Arab/Persian dance music, while Arab/Persian Comedians challenge players to make fun of them. Karimi wore burkini and shorts because they are banned in France and Iran, respectively.
Commissioned by USC Games
Cards, Game Box, Game pieces, Table, Cardboard Boxes,
A 3 player role-playing board game where each player takes a role of someone at a police stop: a police officer, the community member they stop, and an observer. The officer and the community member work to earn each other’s trust through the game’s mechanics. The officer must stay alive, not make a false arrest or brutalize the community member, and the community member’s goal is to leave the situation alive. The game created in response to the rise of police brutality in the US, was play tested with law enforcement, lawyers. Karimi coined the concept “broken game” because as he playtested he discovered that players began telling their stories of their relations with police while trying to correct the game’s mechanics. The game is kept “broken" to facilitate this conversation.
