June 2022 – VITAL CAPACITIES

Carmen Hermosillo aka humdog was a huge advocate for technological innovation and computer networks in the 80s/90s, until 1994, when she published ‘Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace.’

Her writing remains relevant to this day when examining the digitisation of our deaths and identity ‘immortalisation’ online. She argued that the use of computer networks do not lead to a reduction in hierarchy, but actually the commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to corporations.

In this sense, all of our interior thoughts (taste, preferences, beliefs, fears) are commodified, and has manifested into what we know today to be the algorithm that caters to our likes and interests. And so, when it comes to our digital death and footprints we leave online, it essentially becomes packaged and sold onto other consumer entities as a form of ‘entertainment’. What I mean by entertainment is that the cyberspace is a blackhole – it absorbs our energy and personality to create an emotional spectacle. This is practiced by businesses and marketers who commodify human interactions and emotions, such as Big Tech corps we already know and exist on.

Screenshot of a person's Facebook newsfeed homepage showing dog photos and emoji reactions. — Image description: Screenshot of a person’s Facebook newsfeed homepage showing dog photos and emoji reactions.

Taking this image of someone’s FB newsfeed as an example which I think is an interface we are all very familiar with, there is a bizarre quality to our online interaction on this platform. In early 2022, I was invited to an online memorial service of a dear friend which was also livestreamed on Facebook. What I found a little bizarre is that this is the same platform where I read daily news headlines, see meme posts, cat videos, friend’s holiday photos, and relationship updates.

Screenshot of 4 tile image videos of cats suggested by my Instagram recommendations. — Image description: Screenshot of my algorithmically generated recommendation of Instagram reels, all featuring cats.

Similarly, this is relays back to humdog’s essay about ourselves becoming commodified and release of agency. I have never learned to mourn or remember someone via an entertainment platform, yet this is becoming the norm.

Spiritual or sacred spaces of worship such as churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, graveyards, contain a certain element of solely fixating on the cycle of life and death with symbolic elements such as praying, worship, repentance, burning of incense, hearing cymbals and gongs, chants, and much more. What’s important about these practices is not the act itself but how it is choreographed with a community.

With these daily practices slowly fading since we have digital platforms to accommodate memorial services and distant attendance, it leads one to wonder whether these traditions will maintain its grip in the next 10, 20, or 30 years, or will it have merged into the chaotic mix of entertainment consumption where we exist under the illusion of a ‘community’ online.

Research

What is the loudest silence, around love, that you sit with?

I’m curious.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, Socialist Review (US), 1985

Link to a digital copy of the essay, available on Internet Archive.

This is a short ongoing anthology that helped me understand my cyborg’s nature. There are many texts where I found guidance, and in some cases I left them behind because my identity and subjective awareness feels everything but static, given values. I like to begin with “The Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985, the year I was born. I will slowly add here more recent wordings that suggested me new understandings and shaped my thinking.

Lynn Randolph made this painting in collaboration with Donna Haraway: "So I placed my human-computer/artist/writer/shamans/scientist in the center and on the horizon line of a new canvas. I put the DIPswitches of the computer board on her chest as if it were a part of her dress. A giant keyboard sits in front of her and her hands are poised to play with the cosmos, words, games, images, and unlimited interactions and activities. She can do anything. The computer screen in the night sky offers examples. There are three images that graphically display different aspects of the same galaxy, using new high-technological imaging devices. Another panel exhibits a diagram of a gravity well. The central panel offers mathematical formulas, one from Einstein and the other a calculation found in chaos theory. In the same panel a game of tic-tac-toe has been played using the symbols for male and female and the woman has won. The foreground is a historical desert plain replete with pyramids, implying that the cyborg can roam across histories and civilizations and incorporate them into her life and work. Finally I placed the shamanic headdress of a white tigress spirit on her head and arms. The paws and limbs of the tigress reveal its skeleton. They both look directly at the viewer. The underlying intent was to create a figure that could visually do what Haraway was describing as the potential for re-figuring our consciousness." — Lynn Randolph’s “Cyborg” painting, that became the cover of her new book “Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.”

The image’s alt-text, is an excerpt form Lynn Randolph’s “Modest Witnesses: A Painter’s Collaboration with Donna Haraway” in which the authors describe the composition of this painting and unpack its iconography. It feels great to find an artist creating another way to access their work, beyond vision.

Audiobook version of “A cyborg manifesto.”

Donna Haraway, From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture, September 16, 2003.

Donna Haraway presented her lecture as the 2003-2004 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

Research

Courage is a muscle

a poster of two women kissing.
the one on the left is a light skinned woman in a hijab with sunglasses on her head. her eyes are closed and her lips and intertwined with a black woman who is on the right hand side of this poster. the black woman is wearing a fabric around her head also. they are embracing each other and holding each other lovingly. at the top of the poster is one word in two different languages. COURAGE in English and Arabic. In Arabic it is pronounced 'shaja-ah'

I travel allot for work.

In the last week alone I’ve been in Venice, London, Bradford and Sheffield.

Often my ideas don’t just come from working in my studio, but from exploring outside and beyond binding walls.

I was at a talk on Saturday, at the Bradford Literary Festival, with some phenomenal women writers.

The topic was Bell Hooks and her book; all about love and the impacts it has had on so many, us included.

There was a speaker there, Mona Eltahawy who reminded us to write with courage.

To exist in it.

‘Courage is a muscle, and you have to exercise it’

I was reminded of a poster made for the streets of Italy. Why Italy? Why not Italy?!

This poster sits in my studio and in my home.

It is an image I use in workshops to instigate discussions. Discussions which are always fascinating to hear.

I think it’s so beautiful. And I think it’s something that everyone needs to see. You’re welcome.

The artist @doublewhy_y (instagram)

Self-actualisation dogma

‘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

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

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