Weight sensitive rug, generated video, and audio installation. In "In Defense of the Poor Image” Hito Steyerl writes “[Poor images] testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism.” In this piece, I generate and project a poor image: pixelated outlines of webcam footage shot from above the seated audience (in the color and pattern of the rug the audience sits on). I consider the wasteful production of constant surveillance data on the internet. I fully immerse my audience using sound, visuals, active participation (taking off shoes and sitting) and tactile experience. I recreated the ephemeral and intangible nature of spiritual practice that grounds me, using weight sensors that transform the body’s contact with the textile into data. The displacement of the image responds to weight data as I facilitate an embodied reaction to the digital projections and sounds the audience experiences.
I’m interested in our casual consent to surveillance (like unconsciously pressing “allow all cookies” on a website) and desensitization to being surveilled in public spaces. I’m considering two different implications of these issues:
1) Constant data production and collection has physical and environmental implications despite seeming intangible and ephemeral. For example, the Carbolytics Project finds that “browsing cookies contained in the top 1 million most-viewed websites on the internet produced 11,442 metric tons of carbon dioxide per month due to the energy consumption for the computing power to maintain them.” In my piece I try to make this accumulation of digital waste feel tangible and physical.
2) Surveillance has and is used by the state to spy on and criminalize already marginalized populations. In my work I’m interested in making the digital and video surveillance of Muslim communities visible and making its consequences legible.
By using the recording of Dua Komeil, I share a personal sound my audience. As I incorporate digital tools, I want to make work that can evolve and face repercussions. By incorporating family archival material and centering my own vulnerable relationship with spirituality, I connect the data, projections, and sounds to my own body as I attempt to make the digital feel tactile and embodied.
The audio (which plays through headphones) offers the viewer a private meditative experience, allowing them to carefully observe the manipulated webcam footage and kaleidoscopic movement of the image of the rug below them, along with the shadows, reflections, and tension that is formed by the net and collaged textile materials that extend the threads of the carpet upwards, augmenting the dimensions of the rug.
I can use immersive experience to transport people and recreate the intangible, grounding feeling of collective prayer and religious ritual to cope with and respond to vicious wasteful cycles of digital production and destruction.
The audio is composed of four sounds:
1) The song Dashtestani, my late grandmother’s favorite song that captures the passage of time for me both inter-generationally and within my life.
2) A recording of the adhan (the Muslim call to prayer) playing out loud from a mosque while an ambulance drives by. The resulting sound, formed by the siren, people on the street, and the droning tone of the call to prayer, evokes an urgency and uneasiness in me.
I use the call to prayer, which incites collective ritual movement, as a vessel to merge the individual with the collective and evoke consciousness. I communicate urgency to my community through an intervention that feels intimate and vulnerable.
3) A recognizable adhan recording
4) A recording of my mom’s friend saying Dua Komeil, a prayer traditionally said every Thursday night, before the beginning of Friday, the holy day in Islam. During my childhood, my mom and her friends would gather together every week to say this prayer together.
