Internet of Things: Another World is Possible is an exhibition project facilitating a collective inquiry from (and through) the quarantine. Navigating online and offline. Traversing temporalities.
With the world currently on lockdown as a result of the COVID-19, most human interaction has become relegated to cyberspace. As such, we find ourselves increasingly vulnerable to the reign of communicative capitalism and high technology, connected to the precarious state of disembodied presence.
The internet utopians realised early on that just as cyberspace embodied the potential for liberation and the formation of radical subjectivity, it was also capable of being taken up by systems of domination. Driven by the expansion of capital, the proliferation of the digital corresponded to the acceleration of the info-sphere, and the simultaneous designification of the world. A cancellation of the future. Or in other words, the disappearance of a radically different political future. Following Baudrillard; “Everything.. transposed into the virtual, and we became confronted with a virtual apocalypse”.
How do we think about recovery and repair in the context of such hierarchical networks. The work of repair that allows for a sense of futurity and/or helps us think other worlds. Multiple. Without boundary.
(IOTAWIP) is an invitation for reflecting on the Situ, from our active positions behind the screens. Deconstructing the crisis, contingency, social structures, cyberspace, memes, anxiety, technology, geography and body-politics. From live stream to news feed. From the medium and its discontents, to the state of emergency.
(IOTAWIP) is curated by Darat al Funun Team: Joud Tamimi, Firas Shehadeh, Reem Marji.
Resident Artists
Ahmed Isam Aldin is an artist and designer from Khartoum. His work deals with topics of immigration and psychology, as well as processes of revolution and anti-colonial cartography. His residency project, Resistance of Rhizome: Behavioural Surplus, Surplus Value, takes as its point of departure colonised cities and bodies, and systems of domination that emerged guised with the discourses of public health and post-epidemic, trying to understand and imagine the resistance post the next transformation.
Areej Huniti is interested in understanding our relationship to technology and ways to reconfigure it. Her current interest revolves around the intersection of virtuality and subjectivity, research and practice, the present and the absent. By weaving real elements with fiction, she wishes to complexify reality while imagining different future possibilities. Her residency project Silent Spring looks at life within screens and absent algorithms. Reflecting on our current state of suspension, immobility and information overload, the project experiments with online generative tools to see what a rearrangement of what’s already there can say? When existence is constant labour, can technological tools do the ‘work’ for us?
Tamara Nassar is a Palestinian writer, researcher and editor based in Amman, Jordan. She is currently working as an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada. Her residency project, Absentee on the Couch, is a permanent editorial practice, a perpetual state of interrogation, an exchange of roles, an exercise in epistolary writing.
Bayan Kiwan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work documents female sociality and intimacy. Predominantly a painter, she seeks unaccountable possibilities within existing square codes. Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw's work typically revolves around intangible and ephemeral phenomena, traditions, and events that exist under and in opposition to imperialism and white supremacy. Their residency project, Drawing in the Chaos, appropriates Guilio Camillo’s memory theatre as a form and as an attempt to grapple with and organize the chaos of the pandemic and uprising in New York City, the city which they happen to currently inhabit. Not responding to but making constellations of the multitude of stimuli of the moment, the artists approach the material rhizomatically to construct an opaque, subjective archive.
Omar Adel is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, photography, sound, design, coding, and performative instances. His expansive artistic practices investigate what he calls "The triangular feed-backing relationship" between Human Cognition, Constructed environments, and Technology; with a special focus on addressing themes like time, reality, human error, AI, and language use. His residency project, machines of intimacy, is a preliminary research that meditates on the current situation and the power structure relationships between systems of control and individuals, the wider understanding of productivity in societies of consumption, and intimacy as a trending product in the time of social distancing.
Sulaïman Majali is an artist and writer who interrogates the spatio-temporal logics of the enduring colonial and subsequent incarcerations of histories and their futures. The work considers its contexts as an age of anxiety, crises, collapse and multiplicities and looks through a diasporic optic to poetic strategies for disruption and divergent modes of remembering. His residency project, assembly of the dispersed, looks at the saracen, outlier and outsider under supremacist apparatus - in the borderzones of globe and stream, intimacy and feed. Similarly to the ways in which the diasporan garden lives as a site and domain of collapse and folding – where the cumulative detritus, shrapnel and debris at the heart of the enduring colonial, aggregates, the artist gathers material that is slippery to hold and speak, and deposits or plants them into the earth of the domain, asking us to consider processes of research as slips, ruptures and rifts, remembering and reinhabiting as opposed to searching or finding.
The opening of the second iteration took place on the 28th of July and featured a presentation by resident artists Bayan Kiwan, Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw, Omar Adel and Sulaïman Majali and the release of an online publication featuring works by the residents and contributions from the public that respond to the conceptual framework of IOTAWIP.