I get off the bus near Al-Ahram Newspaper’s offices in the Ramses neighbourhood at around noon and make my way across the street and underneath Al-Galaa Bridge where street vendors sell anything from clothing to food items. As I navigate through the busy streets around people and cars, I think about the COVID-19 pandemic and I wonder at the countless Egyptians who need to pass through these crowds to make a living every day.
As I approach Cinema Radio, there’s a room to my left where I find a collection of furniture. I see a set of round double reflection mirrors, each divided down the middle –either horizontally or vertically– into two sections, each offering a different reflection. Below them is a cabinet set named Isfet, which, in ancient Egyptian culture, represents “chaos and darkness,” the opposite of another piece of hanging furniture named Maat, which represents “order and light.”
عندما كنا نفكّر في موضوع للدعوة لكتابة المقالات المتعلقة بممارسة الفن واستهلاكه، أردنا أن نترك الباب مفتوحًا إلى حدٍ ما ولكن أردنا أيضًا أن نشجّع الكتّاب على التفكير النقدي في موضوع أثّر على حياتنا ومعيشتنا بشكلٍ لا نستطيع إنكاره، ألا وهو المجال الرقمي، وهناك الكثير من الكتابات والأبحاث النقدية التي تضع موضوع التطوّر الرقمي وما قدّمه لنا (وما أخذه منا) نَصب أعينها، ولكن علينا أيضًا مناقشة التغييرات التي طرأت على الفن بشكلٍ خاصٍ بفعل التطوّر الرقمي وكيفية ممارستنا واستهلاكنا له في ظل هذا التطوّر.
خلال الشهور القادمة، سنقوم بنشر مجموعة من المقالات بالعربية وبالإنجليزية ضمن هذه السلسلة لمناقشة قضايا تتعلق بماهية الفن الرقمي، وكيف أثّرت التكنولوجيا الرقمية على انتشار الفن، والطرق التي يقوم هؤلاء الشغوفين بالفن باستهلاكه والاستمتاع به، خصوصًا في أوقاتنا هذه التي ينتشر فيها وباء كورونا، وأيضًا، ما قدمته مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي للمشهد الفني. سنبدأ هذه السلسلة بمقالٍ باللغة العربية من تأليف إسلام علّام حيث يشارك معنا العملية الفكرية التي رافقت رحلته نحو تطوير أسلوبه الخاص في الفن الرقمي.
خلال السنة الماضية، قمنا بتقديم محتوى أكبر عن الفن بشكل خاص، وأثناء البحث عن الفنانين لكتابة المقالات وإجراء المقابلات معهم، أردنا أن نظهر أفكار مختلفة يتم إهمالها أحيانًا أثناء الممارسة والتفكير في الفن مثل الخط العربي، ولكنها تؤثّر على جوانب مختلفة من حياتنا، منها الجوانب الثقافية، وأردنا أيضًا إلقاء الضوء على مناطق مختلفة يظن الكثيرون أنها لا ترتبط ببعض الممارسات الفنية ولكنها مرتبطة بها بشكل تاريخي ووثيق. أيضًا، بدأنا مؤخرًا بالعمل على المراجعات النقدية للمعارض الفنية –وهذه مبادرة منفصلة عن سلسلة الفن والمجال الرقمي هذه– وقمنا بنشر أول هذه المراجعات وسنقوم بنشر المزيد خلال الأشهر القادمة، وبعض الأهداف من كتابة هذه المراجعات تكمن في اهتمامنا بالفن الإسلامي والتصميم بشكل واسع، وأيضًا أهمية التفكّر في الأساليب التي يقوم الفنانون باستخدامها أثناء ابتكارهم للأعمال الفنية والرسائل التي يتم إرسالها للمتلقي في ظل سياقات اجتماعية وسياسية واقتصادية معينة، ونرى أيضًا أن الممارسات الفنية مرتبطة ارتباط وثيق بالممارسات الأرشيفية والمكتبية. ونحن لا نتحدث فقط عن الفن فقد بدأنا أيضًا باستخدامه –في شكل القصة المصورة– كوسيلة للتحدث عن مواضيع اجتماعية مهمة، مثل المصدر المفتوح وكيفية تعريفه، للوصول لنوع آخر من المتعلم، وهو المتعلم البصري.
نتمنى أن تقوم هذه السلسلة بتشجيع الفنانين والمهتمين بالفن أن يكونوا على دراية بالأدوار المهمة التي يلعبها المجال الرقمي أثناء ممارستهم واستهلاكهم للفن والتي يمكن أن تكون سلبية في بعض الأحيان. أثناء نشرنا للمقالات، ننتظر منكم أن تشاركونا آرائكم بشأن المواضيع المطروحة. سنقوم بوضع روابط المقالات أدناه عند نشر كل مقال. إذا كان لديك رغبة في كتابة مقال عن موضوع خاص بممارسة الفن أو استهلاكه أو إذا كان هناك معرض يقام في منطقتك تريد أن تتحدث عنه أو تكتب مقال نقدي عنه، يمكنك التواصل معنا: hazineblog {@} gmail.com.
As we were brainstorming a theme for the call for pitches for essays on artistic practice and consumption, we sought to keep it relatively open but also to encourage critical thought on a phenomenon that has indisputably influenced how we go about our lives: the digital sphere. While there has been much critical discourse on the things that digital advancement has given (and taken away from) us, it is important to discuss how it has changed the ways in which we have practiced and consumed art.
Over the coming months, this series will present articles, in both Arabic and English, that discuss what constitutes digital art, how digital technology has influenced the dissemination of art, the ways in which art enthusiasts consume art, particularly in pandemic times, and what social media has brought to the art scene. We’ll begin our series with an essay in Arabic by Islam Allam where he takes us through the thought process that accompanied his journey towards developing his own digital artistic style.
The last year has seen Hazine slowly expand its offerings on art. While searching for artists to profile and interview, we have kept an open eye for modes of thought that are often overlooked while creating and thinking about artwork like Arabic calligraphy, as well as work that is done in settings that are not necessarily associated with certain artistic practices. We have also sought to emphasize that certain forms of art can and may belong to more peoples than we may assume. We recently began running exhibition reviews –distinct from the Art in the Digital Sphere series– and you’ll see more of those in the next few months. Part of the motivation behind this expansion is our commitment to Islamic art –broadly defined– and design. We’re also seeking to better understand and critique the methods which artists use in their work and the messages that viewers receive in light of particular social, political and economic contexts. Another element of it is our acknowledgement that artistic practice and curation overlap with archival and library practices. We have also begun, not only discussing artistic practice, but also using it as a tool –in the form of comics– to appeal to the visual learner to discuss significant issues, such as open access and how we define it.
We hope that this series will encourage practitioners and consumers of art to be critically aware of the important, and sometimes adverse, roles that the digital plays in their practice and consumption. As we release the essays, we’d like to know your thoughts on the ideas discussed. We’ll be linking the essays below as they come out. Get in touch and let us know if you want to contribute something on artistic practice, consumption or discourse or if there’s an exhibition in your area that you’d like to review: hazineblog {@} gmail.com.
“Open access” is any resource you don’t have to pay for, that is available online and that has less obstacles to copying and using material – in short, anything that is available for all.1 As a movement in information sciences, it has been praised, but in our particular contexts, in mine as someone who lives in the Arabic-speaking world, I wonder about its limitations. What does “available for all” truly mean?
What open access is can be defined by cultural factors, like language, history and even the significance of computer literacy. I presented on this with N.A. Mansour at the Digital Orientalisms Twitter Conference in 2020 in both Arabic and English. But we thought a visual medium might help us provoke thought on this issue even more.
Alternative text is also available for each comic panel.
Neue Helvetica Arabic (sample text), designed by Nadine Chahine
If you were becoming an Arabic type designer, one of the things you would need to consider, oddly enough, is Latin type design: much Arabic type design involves creating Arabic counterparts to existing Latin typefaces, a process known as typographic matchmaking. The Arabic script was incorporated into printing technology –outside of Arabophone contexts for the purposes of those who studied Islam for both academic and polemic purposes– roughly a century after the Latin script: Gutenberg, the inventor of Latin movable type, didn’t design printing with the Arabic script in mind. Arabic is composed of 28 letters, which have four letterforms (isolated, initial, medial and final forms), thus requiring a large number of type pieces to be created and the process was time-consuming. Today, while the computer allows us to communicate in Arabic without having to worry about the multiple letterforms, out of the same Gutenbergian legacy comes typographic matchmaking.
In typographic matchmaking, a type designer studies the letterforms of the Latin typeface they are interested in and incorporates their features into the design of Arabic letterforms while maintaining their physical appearance as Arabic letters. An example is Neue Helvetica Arabic, based on the Latin script typeface Neue Helvetica. Typographic matchmaking represents a cultural and practical discourse that Arabic type designers engage in as they work with Arabic type: consequently, Arabic speakers have few typefaces that they can rely on for day-to-day uses.
TYPE Lab (Credit to Sarah Shebl and the TYPE Lab design team).
While historians have made efforts to document the Arabic script from both historical and visual perspectives, few have made the information and resources on the Arabic script accessible to the general public. Bahia Shehab is an artist, activist and academic who has recently founded TYPE Lab at the American University in Cairo (AUC). TYPE Lab is dedicated to promoting the documentation and development of the Arabic script in both Arabic and English, as well as to encouraging conversation around its history and development. Here, she describes her team’s efforts to create a project that reproduces and documents over 70,000 historical and contemporary Arabic letters in the Visual Encyclopedia of Arabic Letters, a TYPE Lab project, and make them open access so that artists, designers, historians and academics can learn more about the letters’ aesthetic features as well as their chronological information. While the TYPE Lab website is underway, the Facebook and Instagram pages are regularly used to share Arabic letters as well as events that host various designers, historians, publishers, academics and other speakers who have experience with the Arabic script. As this project unfolds over the coming years, we look forward to how Shehab and her team will have developed this project and taken it further.
(Questions by Marwa Gadallah, with contributions by N.A. Mansour)
