Realizistance

Realizistance is a Sufi-Afrofuturist design movement initiated by Quasar Labs, founded by filmmaker and experience-designer Sultan Sharrief. Weaving together art, emerging technology, and social practice, we explore what it feels like when the world undergoes a fundamental transformation. Through interventions, dance events, and collective art projects spanning years, continents, and time-space, Realizistance asks: What does it feel like when everything changes?

A central project of Realizistance is When It All Changed, an immersive, mixed-reality story developed in collaboration with communities in Detroit, Ghana, and Los Angeles. The work blends documentary, speculative fiction, live performance, and interactive storytelling. Participants are invited into a world where their emotions and choices actively shape the narrative. Rather than watching a story unfold, they step inside it—inhabiting a reality where healing, memory, and collective authorship are central to the experience.

The development process of Realizistance follows a “constellation model” that emphasizes decentralized collaboration, shared leadership, and intuition-based decision-making. Instead of rigid hierarchies, Realizistance builds a network of artists, technologists, organizers, and community members who co-create together with care and intentionality. This approach is anchored in a Co-Creation Manifesto—a living set of principles centered around deep listening, embodied knowledge, and emotional accountability.

A foundational practice of the movement is the Compassion Dance, a conflict-resolution ritual co-developed with martial artist Riichi Kitano. Drawing from West African, Irish, and Japanese traditions, this practice invites participants to engage in physical, nonverbal dialogue. The goal is not to win or retreat, but to move through discomfort together, transforming generational pain into creative power.

At the heart of Realizistance is the principle of “Wage Love” — a call to action inspired by Grace Lee Boggs and carried forward through radical Black feminist organizing. For us, to wage love means to resist through care, creation, and connection. It’s a commitment to building systems of solidarity, storytelling, and social imagination that center joy, healing, and justice. Realizistance trains youth not just to critique the world, but to reimagine it — using technology, immersive media, and collaborative design as tools to dream and build alternatives rooted in love, not fear. Every VR project, confessional, and community workshop becomes a site of resistance powered by compassion and collective vision.

Realizistance integrates emerging technologies—such as AR, biometric sensors, and volumetric video—not for spectacle, but as tools for presence, embodiment, and radical empathy. Visual environments incorporate layered media, including cellphone footage, archival material, and ancestral holograms. These elements work together to create immersive worlds that are speculative yet rooted in ancestral memory.

Ultimately, Realizistance is about reimagining what design can do when grounded in love, memory, and resistance. It creates emotionally resonant, communally authored, and spiritually restorative experiences. It’s a movement for those who want to feel more deeply, create more honestly, and live in a world where transformation is not just possible, but inevitable.