Arabic

The novel "Al-Barrah – The announcer" is a collaborative, immersive, and digital project between Reham Hosny and Mohamed A. Nasef. "Al-Barrah" is the first paper novel to combine augmented reality and hologram technologies with Arabic language text inside the borders of a paper page to provide the reader with a unique experience, and immerse her in the narrative.

The novel is divided into two parts, each part narrates a different story from the other part. The first story discusses the after Arab Spring situation in the Arab World and the second one imagines how the lost continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a day and night.  Each part can be read in the opposite direction of the other part so, the reader will flip the book upside down in order to read the other part, thus the novel can be read from both sides, and in a reverse way.

 The first story happens in contemporary times, while the second story goes back to ancient times, and the world of legends. The two stories converge in the middle of the book, and the reader will be able to create links between the two stories and understand their connotations.

The reader will download an AR application, designed especially for the novel of Al-Barrah, on her smart device, opens the application, and then directs the camera of the device above the image. The digital content starts to come out, which is written in Arabic, English, and in Heiroglyphic in some parts of the novel.

The hologram technology is used in the second story to project the light of a hologram video inside a plastic pyramid, which the reader will create by herself. The reader will watch the book of Osiris goes around inside the pyramid and some shapes like ancient statues and modern inventions get out of the book, here the reader gets the connotation of this scene and understands that the book of Osiris will tell her about the news of the ancient age and the future age. Al-Barrah has been featured and discussed in different conferences and symposiums around the world.

A Dictionary of the Revolution documents the rapid amplification of public political speech following the uprising of 25 January 2011 in Egypt.

Material for the Dictionary was collected in conversations with around 200 individuals in Egypt from March to August 2014. Participants reacted to vocabulary cards containing 160 words that were frequently used in political conversation, talking about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution.

The Arabic website contains 125 imagined dialogues woven from transcription of this speech.

Each word is accompanied by a diagram that shows its relationship to other words in the Dictionary. The thicker the line connecting two words, the closer their relationship is. The diagrams are the result of an analysis of the complete text of the Dictionary.

(Source: About-page website)

'The Dice Player' is an Animated Poetry film that visualizes a poem written by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. It was recited in the live event 'In the Shade of Words' 2008, along with harmonies by the band Le Trio Joubran. (English subtitles are available)

This is a Bachelor project made in the faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts in the GUC

Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive (1989-2004) is a transmedial, fictional 'archive' which supposedly encompasses donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs (some of which contain notes), and videos, archived on theatlasgroup.org. Apart from being published on the website, Raad's project has been exhibited in different galleries around the world.

The Tunnel People project is a work originally created for the exhibition "Metropolis", which was developed in two platforms. On the one hand the hypertext is a story of multiple paths presenting the fiction of mysterious inhabitants living in the underground. On the other hand there were a series of performances played by three actors, two men and one woman inside of trains traveling from North to South in Brussels subway. The actions and dialogues written by Dora García and performed by the actors try to awaken on the user the need to decide if the situation created by the performances can be accepted as real or if he/she has been trapped in a representation which aim is unknown. The questions that this project wants to suggest are: What is the limit of the accepted behaviourby the audience? How a strange situation can be felt as familiar? When does a conversation becomes absurd? Is it true that thruth is under the earth?

Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky takes advantage of an elegant interface to present the type of lore often passed from parents to children. A voice, speaking Arabic, is paired with text in English, asking readers if they would like to hear a series of stories. Clicking blue stars in the night sky gives access to sparse stories. The reader is able to access these stories by clicking on certain stars in the night sky that appear to be brighter than the rest. These stories, which read more like poems, have to do with personal experiences with Ezzat's life and most have an open ending suggesting that it is up to the subject of the poem to decide how it will end. The use of the night sky works to make a connection with the audience in that just as we share the stars we look up at every night, Ezzat wishes to share his stories and experiences.  

(Description from Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

Cityscapes is an exploration of how to integrate e-poetry into the realm of social and urban poetics. This work began to germinate in 2002 during my artist's residency in Tokyo at the time. Immersed in a world of moving/electronic signs, ever changing, flickering and in flux, I wanted to be able to reproduce this experience of linguistic signs devoid of semantic meaning –as a non Japanese reader- and consequently transform them into textual images, by use of digital technologies. I became excited by the idea of a new calligram, the calligram of the city, and how this would change from city to city; what poetics every city would offer?In western culture, the realm of media and advertising has absorbed the language of Visual Poetry, and calligrams have become another official way to engage people in the selling of their products. Reciprocally poetry has also been influenced by this exchange and has moved to other domains away from the page and into the public display. My interest therefore, was to use the language of advertising to create poetic/artistic public work in urban spaces and in so doing to explore the new calligram, that of social poetics, of the neon lights, flickering letters, moving messages and public textualities of city environments. I had the opportunity to go to Melbourne, Australia, and put this idea into practice. Research ProcessThe multicultural characteristic of Melbourne prompted me to enquire into this calligram of natural language sounds , the visual/textual signs from many different cultures encountered in the city as one walks around, the reasons for this diversity of cultures, why immigrants move to other places* how these cultures evolve and mix and the idea of interactivity between the many cultures and the city. It became a new calligram, which engendered a poetic space of the language of intercultural exchange ; of travelling words (to other languages) and the 'in-between' communicative area generated by the visual and audible qualities of these forms and with the recurrent question of how Image-Sound-Text interlace to create new languages. This new kinetic, nomadic, ever-changing calligram of the city became that of broken human voices, fragmented realities and the composition of different languages encountered in these cityscapes in flux.Extracting visual text from the city environment, deconstructing it and re-mapping it into a different context has been part of the process of this investigation and creation of the digital piece. I worked with cultural community groups to gather and develop soundscapes from their natural languages in the form of phonetic sounds. As there are more than a hundred and forty languages spoken in Melbourne, I chose some of the most prominent ones. The languages included in the project are: Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Spanish, Hindi and the aboriginal language Wathawurrung. The last one, being a language, which used to be spoken in Melbourne and currently taught to children by Bruce Pascoe with the hope of bringing it back to life. I documented the groups participating with the sounds and walked around, reading the city: visually, textually and phonetically.Interface LayoutIt is about the process of exploring and creating. It consists of a blank screen and it is not until the participant begins to explore, that the work exists. This is a concept I enjoy in digital works as I find it, as a user, to be both provocative and inviting to get involved in the performing of the artwork. The performance of the user with the piece is produced by rolling the mouse. As the user explores the surface, the palettes (images of Melbourne, animations, interactive scrolls, sounds, transitions) appear, and, by dragging, image size manipulation and roll over of the mouse, the user can create sound and image compositions. The more exhaustive the exploration, the more intrinsic the compositions which can be produced. It simulates the process of my investigation, in the way of finding images and sounds in the city, appropriating them and creating compositions. Participants are invited to do the same, to explore the city, producing, editing, in a word; creating.

(Source: Author's description from her site)