Published on the Web (individual site)

This digital artwork by Amira Hanafi was commissioned by the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, as part of the Navigating Risk, Managing Security, and Receiving Support research project.

It was made in response to research conducted in five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico), where researchers spoke with human rights defenders around issues of security, wellbeing, and perceptions of ‘human rights defenders’ in their countries.

Reading through these transcribed and anonymized interviews, I was struck by the range and depth of emotions expressed. The speakers’ experiences resonated with me in their resemblance to the emotions I feel as a practicing artist in Egypt. This website translates my reading of these interviews into visual patterns, through a system of classifying sentences by emotions expressed and evoked.

The title of this work (we are fragmented) is taken from the words of one of the human rights defenders who participated in the research.

After reading through the interviews that were shared with me, I created a classification system to coincide with the range of emotions I read in the text. I based my classification system on a few popular classification systems. It contains a set of 6 parent emotions, each with 6 subcategories, for a total of 36 classifications.

Reading the interviews again, I recorded my emotional experience by classifying sentences to which I had an emotional reaction, or in which the speaker explicitly expressed an emotion. It was a highly subjective exercise. Ultimately, this website offers personal maps of my reading of the research material, processed through language and emotion.

Alongside my visual interpretation of the research, you can directly access the source material for each classification on this site. Click on any colored circle, and you will see the direct quote from the individual defender on which that classification is based. I hope for this work to give an alternate way of reading through the research shared with me by Juliana Mensah and Alice Nah.

(Source: http://wearefragmented.amiraha.com/about/)

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)

A Dictionary of the Revolution was the winner of the 2018 New Media Writing Prize

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)

Questioning the notion of cybertext from Espen Aarseth (1997), beginEnd presents itself as a reflection on the mechanisms and materialities inherent in the book as an object. Beginning with the retelling of Finnegans Wake and the notion of intercircularity that characterizes this singular work of James Joyce, beginEnd is a combinatorial and continuous poem online, which reconverts in a digital transcoding the possibility of containing at one time two distinct moments.

“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

[(DES)CONEXÃO (2018), by artist collectivewreading digits, in collaboration with media artist Pedro Ferreira, is a cyberpoetic artifact developed under the artistic residency “Realtime Runtime People”, promoted by the INVITROgerador (Universidade Aberta). Having its first instantiation [realtime], in July 2018, at Atelier Concorde Lisbon, as a #cyberpoetic installation complemented with #livecoding #liveremixing#performance, (DES)CONEXÃO was also presented at ARTeFACTo 2018, without its digital component. The intention at stake here was to reinforce itsinitial questioning – a reflection on the ways technologies alter our perception of time –, by giving visibility and expressiveness to textual and poetic layers behind the surface of the artifact. In dissecting the machine and its fragmented layers of different data, certain experimental writing techniques used, that allow us to extend the word, and therefore the text,  – such as combinatorics, literary cut-ups, or fold-ins – are cut wide open. Beyond the circular walls of its anatomical theatre, the remains of these mediated and transmutated philosophical stone(s), once modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated were revealed. In runtime.

"Consumição" ("Consumption") presents itself as a digital wordlyphagic variation of a sequence that has as its starting point the paradox between noise and silence that permeates language and communication. In a collision of centripetal and centrifugal forces between the excess of speech and the reduction of words to the (almost) silence, which at one time is exhausted and renewed, in the form of a spiral, in the curves that revolve around a certain point, moving away or approaching according to a certain law, space is opened up to the consumption of words, which are devoured, chewed, digested, and returned, to be swallowed up again.

Sabotage Retroexistencial is a digital poem generator produced by an algorithmic sequence that pertains to the blog novel series of "Kublai Moon", specifically the blog novel "La tierra nunca comprenderá". This algorithmic poetry generator gives the reader access to an unlimited combination of poems and to an infinite text. In the fictional world of Kublai Moon where the story is set, the generator is the creation of the robot Al-Halim, an artificial intelligence engine who searches for the meaning and limits of poetry.