Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images by Hashtag

#Gaza Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag, is an interactive work using five sets of posts from Twitter on #Gaza, #GazaUnderAttack, #ProtectiveEdge, #PalestineResists, and #48KMarch collected and analyzed at R-Shief.org. It includes an interactive mosaic of the surveillance image that went viral of the Baker boys killed on the beach in Gaza, along with computerized sound files of the tweets in English and Arabic and an organized gallery of the images most tweeted.

Well-known new media art critic and scholar Laura Marks invited VJ Um Amel to exhibit the interactive media, glitch art series, and live cinema performance at the 2015 Flaherty Film Seminar. In her curatorial statement work she wrote of the interactive media, “the images give a layered sense of how people responded to Israel’s massive destruction of Gaza on that day: they sent and resent darkly humorous editorial cartoons in Arabic and English, photographs of wounded children, protests, and other popular images; but also unique photographs, poems, and hand-written notes. Voice programs vocalize the English and Arabic tweets in a complementary auditory experience: in their percussive urgency, there is a lot of repetition—“pray for Gaza,” and the ironic greeting “happy Eid.” When a beholder navigating Shereen Sakr’s interface takes the time to look at and listen to some of these millions of posts, the time and place of the senders begin to unfold.”