Artist Studios – Page 6 – VITAL CAPACITIES

‘The California Ideology’ is an essay by media theorists Barbrook and Cameron written in 1995. They argued that the techno-utopic ideals propagated from Silicon Valley enthusiasts such as innovation, connectivity, and so on, was paradoxically driven by a radical sense of individualism, counterculture, and neoliberalism. These tech pioneers believed that wider and instant distribution of knowledge would liberate everyone from political grasps. However, today we realise that hypothesis is not the case.

Watching the two videos of Zuckerberg and Musk, what I find eerie is how they market their commodification of us, the users, as something virtuous and a necessary feat for human ‘advancement’. Musk’s argument for archiving human consciousness on Mars, in case of global humanitarian disaster, is essentially an eloquent phrase for continuing modern human colonisation. At what cost does this come at? It’s not only about personal privacy, but the cost for ‘greatness’ comes at the price of Earth’s resources, degradation of communities and infrastructures, and succumbing to our computer-generated identities, therefore eroding our socio-cultural structures of our material reality. So once the dreams of techno-utopists such as Musk and Zuckerberg are achieved, what is actually left for the community when we are not behind the computer’s gaze. I feel this rhetoric and ideology is highly contradicting and is more trapping than ‘liberating’. I’d go as far to argue that this equation of online = connected communities is a fallacy…

Transcript: Video #1
Interviewer: So on that kind of launch rate, you’re talking about it over two decades you could get your million people to Mars essentially. Who’s city is it? Is it NASA’s city, is it SpaceX’s city?

Musk: It’s the people of Mars’ city The reason for this I mean, obviously like why do this thing, I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness. Human civilization could come to an end, for external reasons like a giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change or world war three, or you know, any number of reasons. The probable lifespan of human civilizational consciousness as we know it, which we should really view as this very delicate thing, is like a small candle in a vast darkness. That’s what appears to be the case.

Transcript: Video #2
As I look around and as I travel around the world. I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward against this idea of a connected world and global community. I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others. For blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, reducing trade, and in some cases around the world even cutting access to the internet. It takes courage to choose hope over fear. To say we can build something and make it better than it has ever been before. You have to be optimistic to think that you can change the world. And people will always call you naïve but it’s this hope and this optimism, that is behind every important step forward. Our lives are connected and whether we are welcoming a refugee fleeing war, or an immigrant seeking new opportunity, whether we are coming together to fight global disease like Ebola, order to address climate change, I hope that we have the courage to see the path forward is to bring people together, not push people apart. To connect more, not less. We are one global community.

A choreography for oscillators #2

Tongues

by Estabrak

If I told you that my name should be spelt Istabraq but that at the borders of this country, those deciding the status of my family using a language which struggles to identify it, didn’t have patience enough to actually say.my.name…

Would you believe me?

Estabrak. It’s official. I mean, English tongues can say it.

Iss-tub-bruq is how it’s pronounced. And A rough silk only found in heaven is it’s meaning.

>> a reading of the text above for those who need it<<

Studio

Pomegranates and Hand Grenades

by Estabrak

Front and back view of glass explorations. The item being explored is a pomegranate.
The colours presented are earthy reds and yellowish browns with tints of green. As the glass is transparent both the front and back of the pomegranate allows you to see through the piece in great detail. The front resembles traces of what a pomegranate is where as the back almost looks like a section taken from inside the body.

A pomegranate is a fruit, round in shape with an extended lip at the top. Inside it is pull of seeds with juicy flesh around each one. An average pomegranate has 600-800 seeds inside.

Sneak peak at some current glass work I am exploring

Because I haven’t been posting anything on my socials since late 2020, not many people know I have been exploring the medium of glass for some time now..

Pomegranates have been one of the subjects of exploration as they are a fruit which I believe deeply resonates with the politics of the region in which we (myself and the pomegranate) are both from – West Asia.

Although beautiful and with so much potential, they have also been deeply intertwined with colonial politics and their once poetically dominant meanings in herstory, value, nutrition, mythology and ancient tales of fertility have been hijacked by misplaced ideas of warfare and destruction.

“What is less apparent is the fruit’s relation to modern warfare. Stemming from the 12th century Anglo-Norman pome gernate, our English pomegranate became pume grenate in Old French. This pume grenate eventually became pomme grenade in Modern French. Pomme grenade, of course, looks exactly like grenade or hand grenade, and this is no coincidence.” -ALTA

This short post online, written some time ago now, offers a clear and straight forward definition of the complexities of this fruit.

“So why name the weapon after the fruit? If you were to crack open a hand grenade today you would see tiny balls of shrapnel inside the explosive’s casing. The shrapnel mimics the pomegranate’s seeds—each seed the potential for a new tree, each shrapnel the potential for a hit body. Shaped like a pomegranate and designed like a pomegranate, it’s certainly ironic that a weapon used to kill several people at once is named after the ancient fruit of fertility.’

It makes sense why so many Asian & African artists have used the symbol of a pomegranate to respond to white peoples wars in our homelands and countries. This language and extraction imposed upon an indigenous fruit of West Asian land is just another example of the consistent existence we must live that straddles the line of life and death, danger and beauty, the possible (fertility=future) and impossible (war=erasure).

There is so much to say about this subject.

To bring it back to the work in progress I have shared above, to me the back side of this glass pomegranate looks like the insides of a human body. Almost like lungs attached to a skeleton, I am in awe by the simplicity and clarity light can offer. Light is such a fascinating natural element.

I’m not quite sure what will come of this work I am exploring, but I know I’m working towards a language within my glass work which translates so effortlessly with my works in water and interest in the often complex and sometimes ephemeral experiences of the human condition.

Disability Justice Resource Directory

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qkhYKLmNSulh1xyPBVxmgIMmM15MCFtrNH2Pqint5SY/edit#heading=h.g7uucjlyfg0d

This is a (non-exhaustive, ever evolving) curation of disability justice tools, resources, and best practices curated by the Creating Freedom Movements #MoreJusticeMoreJoy

Research

I recently read the illustration book by artist Manjit Thapp. In it she tells the story of her mental health and state of my mind though-out a year through short poetic sentences and her incredible artwork. I was inspired by her ability to capture the feeling of time passing in still images. I wanted my artwork to reflect the process and time that goes into creating an artwork.

Research

So much of this project was inspired by watching the illustration master Kim Jung Gi live drawing videos, which I become obsessed with. The way he draws without hesitation while keeping so much detail in his work got me wondering if he had the whole artwork mapped out in his mind or if he was improvising. He also talks about drawing perspective and anatomy which is something I always felt was holding me back. Since I’m self taught and never studied art I feel I skipped a lot of the basic fundamental skills of drawing. Which inspired me to explore the balance between skill and creativity within the creating process.

IN LIMBO FILM (pt1 freestyle doodling)

Short film exploring/documenting the early stages of the creating process of the “In Limbo” artwork.

IN LIMBO rough sketches

first rough sketch of "In Limbo" artwork

second rough sketch of "In Limbo" artwork.

I saw this residency as an opportunity to create a follow up to my 2021 “Thought Experiment”. I started with these rough sketches, my approach was to just put pencil to paper, work off instinct and see what comes on to the page. My thinking was what the subconscious comes up with will always be more interesting to me then any idea or subject I could consciously come up with. I called the artwork “In Limbo”, looking back I think this was manifested from the feeling of worldwide uncertainty since 2020. But realised during this project it also related to the creating process itself, hitting on that mid point in creating something that I think many artist can relate to. When you’re unsure which direction the project is moving or if it even makes sense, like you’re just hanging in limbo to see if things will come together or just fall apart. Being dyslexic i’ve always had a love hate relationship with words, in a lot of my artwork I like to play with words and images and the relationship between the two. Which got me thinking about the word “limbo” and its two meanings, one being hanging between life and death and the other being a party game. I liked this huge contrast between the two meanings and realised what they had in common was an element of balance. Like a train of thought the word balance led me to thinking about a number of other concepts that I ended up exploring throughout the artwork: The balance of digital and traditional art I focus on in my work and how it relates to how I always try and balance and bride the gap between “high art” and “low art” to make artwork that feels less exclusive. The balance of skill and creativity artist use to create, and even more personally the balance of being mixrace and how it means simultaneously being two things and neither at the same time. I wanted every part of this project to reflect that process of creating embracing how erratic and messy it can be.

how i imagine my physical funeral to look like

Traditional Chinese funeral with people dressed in white and lighting incense. Offerings of food are also being provided. — Image description: Traditional procession of sending offerings and lighting incense

Various plates of different traditional Chinese dishes. — Image description: Traditional food banquet

how i imagine my online funeral to look like

Image description: Live camera feed of an Internet cafe in Hefei, China. Six people sit in green chairs in front of their computers.

Screenshot of the reset password function — Image description: On-screen reset password function

A choreography for oscillators #1

Sculpting different sinewaves, I am using only a few modules of this huge modular synthesizer! I am only trying to move the speaker’s cone quietly.

I am using a patch build only with an oscillator running at the lowest frequency with a low-pass filter before going to the mixer.

Our modern relationship with death

Funeral rites represent an important part of collective behaviour in human societies. According to researchers, humans conducted the earliest burials (i.e. bodies deposited in deliberately excavated graves), deriving from caves in Canaan dating to 90 000–110 000 BP (Before Present).

However, with changes in economic and technological development, the free communal labour and services that were traditionally required for funeral ceremonies have diminished. In most parts of the world today, professional services are required to hold one’s ceremony. The free labour of the community typically involves excavation, touching or cleaning the body itself, building material structures, crowd choreography, gathering offerings, and much more. This type of ritual also embodied a collective social agreement of care, responsibility, and sealing the ‘archive’ of one’s body and spirit.

Now, with the commodification of funeral services and convenience of digital access, it seems that funeral rituals have not only become commodified but turned into a spectacle for entertainment. I use the word ‘entertainment’ lightly but it’s more so to signify the desensitisation we have towards death due to frequency that we see it through the computer’s gaze.

One recent memory I have about this was the reaction to Kobe Bryant’s death. The live television broadcasts and online streams of his ceremony seemed surreal because of how someone’s death could be commodified for digital spectatorship and entertainment. On the one hand, you have people grieving the real person, then on the other you have people grieving the persona, all in real time – physically and digitally.

Three figures emotionally speaking at the funeral service for basketballer Kobe Bryant. The NBC news icon is situated in the bottom-left side of the image. — Image description: Michael Jordan, Vanessa Bryant, and Jimmy Kimmel speaking at Kobe Bryant’s funeral service.

From a sociological perspective, this appears as a subtle erasure towards the collective labour and social bonds with the dead due to modernisation. In the online sphere, businesses market the illusions of a community when in actual reality in order for us to participate online and utilise our power to ‘post’ or ‘comment’ it requires a sense of radical individualism and self-actualisation. And so, without these communal hands-on elements involved in traditional funeral rites, and increased accessibility to viewing livestreams of funeral and memorial services, how does this affect our relationship with the dead and our own sense of mortality?

Abandoning “visual arts”

I had some exchanges about my work lately, which made me think a lot about the language we use. I feel it is essential to avoid using categories like “visual art” because the comfort zone these words secure is rooted in some profoundly excluding average agreement. Whenever we repeat “visual arts,” we are not communicating any precious information about the artistic practice or the subject of the research; we create a perimeter that bond a conventional understanding of sensing with the privilege of having access to the specific creative experience. It feels like an exclusive category that only announces who will be admitted to the experience of art.

I doubt that the normative understanding of our senses in most European languages is exhaustive so that we can define artistic experiences with those words. The long literary exercises we regard as ekphrasis express this struggle to translate the senses. There must be more if so much effort has been put into describing the experience of a painting in words or music beyond a simple equation of the normative understanding of the sensing.

Two sketches and a photo of my left ear, layered on a whiteboard. A cyborg's ear is made of hearing aid and a piercing. — Sketches for a cyborg’s ear, 2022.

Most of us are familiar with feeling the sound in haptics. It happens with low frequencies and subwoofers, our stomach and lower belly eat the frequencies, and our breath becomes a continuum with the sonic frequencies. I am sketching ideas to explore the thresholds of the sonic experience, the visual, and the haptic. I am looking for the uncanny territory where I am not finding the right words to describe the knowledge that is materializing; a questioning space where allegories may comfort us and doubts may guide our un-learning.

Dreaming Tomorrow

by Estabrak

Sometimes I dream of ancient worlds where fruit and bombs have never mixed. Where family, love and freedom co-exist.

Where blurred lines of nourishment and destruction do not need to exist.

Where culture no longer negates safety. Sometimes, I dream of this.

>> a reading of the text above for those who need it<<

A self portrait with fruit.
This image is an underwater image.
The view is under the surface where you can see the reflection of the skin of the water as well as underneath its surface.
There is a light skinned hand holding a full red and light brown pomegranate. The hand and pomegranate are fully submerged into the water, cut off by the skin of the water just below where the land meets the wrist.
The body of water holds borders of coppers, oranges, yellows, and blues.
The reflective skin at the top sees rippled yet mirrored images of the body underneath it.

Image info:

Estabrak // Ummi (meaning My Mother in Arabic) 2021/22 // Archival print under Acrylic Glass, mounted on Aluminum Dibond // Edition of 3

ABOUT: Another offering I’d like to share is of one of my most recent underwater images. It’s a self portrait, and one which was taken in a time of deep isolation and a work which also translates into other works I am currently exploring.

I’ve so much to say about pomegranates, their heritage and the importance of them in West Asia. The significance of it’s name and the body in which it expresses. There’s so much beauty and passion in this fruit, yet so much destruction attached to it.

For years I’ve noticed it’s presence in West Asian arts, yet it’s only been in isolation with internal conversations where I’ve found my relationship to it develop from one of a human eating fruit into a life lesson in history, language, colonisation and love.

Pomegranates have origins all over West and South West Asia, although it can specifically be traced back to Iran. Iran has huge significance to me as it was the place I was born, in exile after my family were forced to flee Iraq.

I’m going to go in more detail about the significance of pomegranates in a separate post which you can find in the research section of my studio, but for now I hope this offering can plant a seed of thought for you as much as it has for me.

The photograph and text were shared earliar this year via the Emeargeast exhibition ‘Dreaming Tomorrow’. And the image Ummi belongs to a current and ongoing multidisciplinary project called Letters To Ummi (Ummi meaning My Mother in Arabic). It is the first image in this series.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Often before starting a piece I’ll do a rough sketch with notes of ideas for it. Looking through these rough sketches I felt the end piece always lost some sincere venerableness that the early sketches had, as if I was uninhibited knowing no one would ever see these rough takes. I wondered what a balance between the sincere sketches and polished final artwork would look like. Which is where the sketchy erratic almost unfinished feel to the piece came from. This piece is like a visual diary, a live stream of my thoughts at the time, even going as far as including the tools I used to create the piece, as if this was a blank canvas I was projecting my thoughts on to. While creating this piece I felt off balance, thinking back to regrets of the past, or worrying about the future instead of being balanced in the present moment. being a self employed artist comes with many pros and cons which I explored in this piece. The main type of commission I work on are album artworks for musicians, these artworks need to be the perfect square to fit the size of the album cover, I started to feel boxed in my this same type of canvas with fears of repeating myself, using up my creativity on others work, losing love for what I do, but needing to make money. Even with my personal artworks, I wondered if I was creating as a distraction so I didn’t have to stop, be still and just think. I felt I was in a never ending cycle with all these different versions of myself (the freelancer, the artist, past and future) all colliding in an anxiety filled mess. despite this piece being personal, I felt drawing myself would instantly make the piece about one thing. me. But I wanted anyone to be able to project themselves onto these figures, which is why I often leave faces quite abstract to detach any one identity. Identity was another thing I was thinking a lot about, and how being a POC growing up in England is a kind of psychological obstacle everyone has to go through. Growing up being taught to love and respect a culture that doesn’t do the same back, and how it can create inner conflict from early ages. Despite going to some fairly dark and painful places with this piece, It still has a fun childish energy about it. Often when I’m working I feel I’m doing a balancing act between my inner child who’s the artist and my inner adult who’s the editor that cuts the fat and gives the piece more intention. So I think this childish optimistic feel comes from me naturally not taking myself too seriously, wanting to create art to be fun, enjoyed and give the viewer the feeling of being a child looking at something with curious wide eyes. Despite art being tired up with all these different aspects of my life like my work, passion, self worth, identity. Creating this piece reminded me to just enjoy/embrace the process and have fun with it.

Forbes article: Future of Death Tech

PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

Individual drawings for Thought Experiment artwork

PUZZLING THE ART TOGEATHER