My work is informed by the experience of growing up and fleeing my homeland in Iraq as well as existing simultaneously between two worlds: the sphere of privilege and relative comfort in the U.S. and the zone of instability and conflict where my family remains in Iraq. These paradigms of conflict and comfort support an unstable binary that disconnects individuals from each other and desensitizes them to the struggles of others. Achieving a resolution between the two drives much of the impetus behind my work.

Thus I perceive the artist’s role as that of an initiator—one who establishes a platform of engagement between viewers who actively participate in the work and contribute collectively to its narrative. Since 2007, I have been crafting these platforms of engagement using network technologies, robotics, and mobile mapping to provoke dialogue on international politics and the effects of warfare on individuals and society.

In an increasingly interconnected world, my work emphasizes viewers who are empowered as autonomous participants and who shape the initiated platform into multiple branching and rhizomatic narratives. Each individual’s autonomous participation contributes to a more deeply personal encounter, whose experience re-engages their desensitized psyches with the realities of war.

In such a complex landscape of unmanned conflicts and rapidly shifting technological frameworks, the dichotomy of pure pleasure in aesthetics is a privilege difficult to justify. In my work, aesthetic pleasure instead operates as a strategy, enticing viewers to move closer, to engage within the platform, and to allow it to unfold with frisson and multidimensional tension. Ensnaring viewers within such tension activates the viewer’s agency further as a sense of micro-community begins to develop in response.

My work is informed by the experience of growing up and fleeing my homeland in Iraq as well as existing simultaneously between two worlds: the sphere of privilege and relative comfort in the U.S. and the zone of instability and conflict where my family remains in Iraq. These paradigms of conflict and comfort support an unstable binary that disconnects individuals from each other and desensitizes them to the struggles of others. Achieving a resolution between the two drives much of the impetus behind my work.

Thus I perceive the artist’s role as that of an initiator—one who establishes a platform of engagement between viewers who actively participate in the work and contribute collectively to its narrative. Since 2007, I have been crafting these platforms of engagement using network technologies, robotics, and mobile mapping to provoke dialogue on international politics and the effects of warfare on individuals and society.

In an increasingly interconnected world, my work emphasizes viewers who are empowered as autonomous participants and who shape the initiated platform into multiple branching and rhizomatic narratives. Each individual’s autonomous participation contributes to a more deeply personal encounter, whose experience re-engages their desensitized psyches with the realities of war.

In such a complex landscape of unmanned conflicts and rapidly shifting technological frameworks, the dichotomy of pure pleasure in aesthetics is a privilege difficult to justify. In my work, aesthetic pleasure instead operates as a strategy, enticing viewers to move closer, to engage within the platform, and to allow it to unfold with frisson and multidimensional tension. Ensnaring viewers within such tension activates the viewer’s agency further as a sense of micro-community begins to develop in response.

My work is informed by the experience of growing up and fleeing my homeland in Iraq as well as existing simultaneously between two worlds: the sphere of privilege and relative comfort in the U.S. and the zone of instability and conflict where my family remains in Iraq. These paradigms of conflict and comfort support an unstable binary that disconnects individuals from each other and desensitizes them to the struggles of others. Achieving a resolution between the two drives much of the impetus behind my work.

Thus I perceive the artist’s role as that of an initiator—one who establishes a platform of engagement between viewers who actively participate in the work and contribute collectively to its narrative. Since 2007, I have been crafting these platforms of engagement using network technologies, robotics, and mobile mapping to provoke dialogue on international politics and the effects of warfare on individuals and society.

In an increasingly interconnected world, my work emphasizes viewers who are empowered as autonomous participants and who shape the initiated platform into multiple branching and rhizomatic narratives. Each individual’s autonomous participation contributes to a more deeply personal encounter, whose experience re-engages their desensitized psyches with the realities of war.

In such a complex landscape of unmanned conflicts and rapidly shifting technological frameworks, the dichotomy of pure pleasure in aesthetics is a privilege difficult to justify. In my work, aesthetic pleasure instead operates as a strategy, enticing viewers to move closer, to engage within the platform, and to allow it to unfold with frisson and multidimensional tension. Ensnaring viewers within such tension activates the viewer’s agency further as a sense of micro-community begins to develop in response.

Here is an essay I wrote about the Pinay body: “To My Unknown Daughter,” which was published in Glimmer Train back in 2014. I thought reading this essay for CA+T’s “Talking Bodies” exhibit was appropriate but also star-aligning, because I wanted to do something more with it, something visual, something multimedia. I decided against using footage of me reading this essay, or any footage of me really, and instead used this vintage, archival footage of my family in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines, in 1967, during the Marcos regime. There’s so much lovely irony in this archival, fragmentary footage ... My father's in there with his older brothers; him the youngest, the most hungry. He’s about five years old, such a ripe and innocent age, a persona of my father I’ve never met or seen before, and he is seen riding a bike or longing for his eldest brother, my Uncle Dennis, the chosen patriarch of my family after my grandfather died. The men first seen in the beginning, in the first clip, is my Uncle Geony and my Uncle Eddie—both of whom fled to the East Coast right around the time my grandfather passed, almost in defiance, in irrelevance to my Uncle Dennis. All the kids dancing are my familia—my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my bloodline.

Let me go deeper, and tell you the backstory behind the footage: my white uncle, who filmed this footage, met my Auntie Lodie near Clark Air Base (she was a prostitute), and they married; before he left for America (and subsequently took her, which allowed my whole family to immigrate), he would visit the family home in Manila and bring gifts, like this camera. In this essay, I talk a bit about how this complication, this nuance, this chance meeting between my white uncle and prostitute aunt is a consequence of U.S. Imperialism, and how all of this—this kind of colonial inheritance—affects the ways I write about the Pinay body. Although I wanted to film new material, these archival, old family videos made by my white uncle—who, ironically, is the only one archiving and recording our family histories, our family tree, and salvaging mementos from our past—obsessed me. This footage always damages me in a slow, pregnant way; it marks the infancy of my familia, it marks the moment when we were once together, before we broke apart. I decided to loop the video in hopes of producing a kind of fragmentary remembrance.

 

Here is an essay I wrote about the Pinay body: “To My Unknown Daughter,” which was published in Glimmer Train back in 2014. I thought reading this essay for CA+T’s “Talking Bodies” exhibit was appropriate but also star-aligning, because I wanted to do something more with it, something visual, something multimedia. I decided against using footage of me reading this essay, or any footage of me really, and instead used this vintage, archival footage of my family in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines, in 1967, during the Marcos regime. There’s so much lovely irony in this archival, fragmentary footage ... My father's in there with his older brothers; him the youngest, the most hungry. He’s about five years old, such a ripe and innocent age, a persona of my father I’ve never met or seen before, and he is seen riding a bike or longing for his eldest brother, my Uncle Dennis, the chosen patriarch of my family after my grandfather died. The men first seen in the beginning, in the first clip, is my Uncle Geony and my Uncle Eddie—both of whom fled to the East Coast right around the time my grandfather passed, almost in defiance, in irrelevance to my Uncle Dennis. All the kids dancing are my familia—my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my bloodline.

Let me go deeper, and tell you the backstory behind the footage: my white uncle, who filmed this footage, met my Auntie Lodie near Clark Air Base (she was a prostitute), and they married; before he left for America (and subsequently took her, which allowed my whole family to immigrate), he would visit the family home in Manila and bring gifts, like this camera. In this essay, I talk a bit about how this complication, this nuance, this chance meeting between my white uncle and prostitute aunt is a consequence of U.S. Imperialism, and how all of this—this kind of colonial inheritance—affects the ways I write about the Pinay body. Although I wanted to film new material, these archival, old family videos made by my white uncle—who, ironically, is the only one archiving and recording our family histories, our family tree, and salvaging mementos from our past—obsessed me. This footage always damages me in a slow, pregnant way; it marks the infancy of my familia, it marks the moment when we were once together, before we broke apart. I decided to loop the video in hopes of producing a kind of fragmentary remembrance.