A VJ Manifesto
Download PDFVJ Um Amel is a name I use in a set of art practices that include ambient visual projection, media arts and design, cloud computing, and network analysis. As twelve Arab nations undergo uprisings and revolutions, an emergent twenty-first century public has been reporting, documenting, collecting, archiving, publishing, and producing copious amounts of media on the region in digital form. I work to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative, and to create a new role in the transnational Arab community that resonates with web culture: to function as critic, curator, and artist all at the same time. This cyber conscious, digital art practice allows me to shift between roles in VJ Um Amel and other technoscapes occupying these subjectivities simultaneously.
In my VJ remixes, I explore the implications of placing the identity of "mother" and a techno-feminist construct of "cyborg" within local and transnational expressions of "Arab." I think of "Arab, Cyborg, Mother" as a convergence of experiences, rather than a set of identities, because "convergence" and "experience" imply a notion of movement and phenomenology of action. I bring these words together in order to challenge us to think what does the child of a cyborg look like? If a cyborg is free from biological, technological, or physical determinism, then what does it mean a machine procreates?
The concept, "Arab," or a unified sense of "Arab" culture has been a point of debate since before the mid-century. I believe that trends in migration and the emergence of an Arabic-speaking Diaspora over the last few decades has given rise to a reemergence of "Arab" as a symbol of culture. Being situated, particularly, in a post-9/11 United States, I have felt the urgency to bring up the subject "Arab" again. That moment in history marked a critical call to action for all transnational Arab people. A lot has changed over the last 10 years, and we can see new patterns emerging. Hope has become a loaded term, recently. (And for the record, VJ Um Amel, Arabic for "Mother of Hope," was conceived of before Obama's hope campaign!) In literature, "hope" dates back to the Greeks and Pandora's box. As Femme Bot says in Call2Presence, "Modern feminists have interpreted Pandora's jar, to represent the female womb. That the jar releases myriad evils upon the earth suggests the culture's unease with friendly female sexuality. Pandora's jar originally contained winged souls." From my perspective, the recent political protests in the Middle East and North Africa have taken on a feminist twist and now "hope" is somehow linked back to the womb, winged souls, and the seeds of creations. I have yet to map it out; however, I do see a feminist praxis at work.
TIME
In my world, it is a lot of work to force a linear
narrative, as time does not occur so naturally. In conversation, I often respond with not one, but several possible avenues of
thought—divergent thinking. So simultaneity is natural for me. I sleep weird hours, if at
all, and am online UTC (computer time) rather than (PST) Pacific Coast Time where I
live. The man-made clock for me is something I resist.
SPACE
As for the role of distance in narrative making, I think of Edward Said and how the
experience of the exile, emigrant, and traveler was a central theme in his work.
Occupying an "in between" space, straddling two cultures rather than being grounded in
one, Said learned to develop a "double-vision"—the ability to see each of his cultures
both from the inside and the outside. The insider's and the outsider's are two different
ways of knowing. Indeed, seeing from a distance sometimes provides a perspective you
can't get from the close-up view with its subjective angle.
BODY
I use a maternal connection to reflect a larger idea of the creative act and its
transformative nature—which also applies to the sequence of making one clip, video,
soundbyte or when text begin and become another. Through a daily yoga practice, I have
learned to emphasize alignment and the inner directional action and movement also
known as vinyasa krama. "Krama" refers "to the effective sequence of actions" and
"vinyasa" means "to place in a special way."
I think a lot of comes down to intention and methodology. In working collectively, there can be some ambiguity between collaboration and appropriation. And sometimes appropriation is intentional and meant to be subversive. It is clear for me when new media is remixed with the intention to be in conversation with it, similar to how we write papers and cite other texts within them. And this may be because I think of VJing as a critical research methodology. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates an art + design research methodology offers a transformative practice to understanding the nature blogs, social networking sites, Twitter feeds, YouTube, etc, and how these new media platforms engage with and affect us.
These information visualizations and 3D modeling of Twitter and Internet data from 2011 Arab uprisings and revolutions have emerged from an objective to remix discourse in order to include the input of a "community-author" rather than a single subjectivity—whether expert, popular, or imaginative. I see my visualizations as extending these subjectivities through it and activating the space. Configuring ideas and activating various landscapes—these innovations offer new ways to mobilize communities of people. They are conceptually designed as the virtual embodiment of a 21st century transnational Arab imagination.
Somewhere in all of this…I believe we find VOICE. And can collectively get the impact of the voice! Hence, why I believe that a thriving arts scene indicates a healthy environment for democratic practices. This voice flows from the well of the body politic.
Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist known as VJ Um Amel.
April 30, 2011