Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism
Performance-Lecture at New Museum, February 28 2019
(The above video was originally published on New Museum’s First Look website on Jun 6, 2019. The text below is a transcript of it).
It’s the morning of February 26, 2015. I’m scrolling through Twitter and I come across images and a video repeatedly shared on my newsfeed. It’s filmed, edited, and released by ISIS, documenting their destruction of artifacts at Mosul Museum in Iraq.
Around this same time I have been working on a series of research and art projects connecting 3D printing, plastic, crude oil, technocapitalism, and jihad as politically networked and poetically related concepts. So as the video keeps cycling through social media, for the next two days my head is spinning with it, thinking about a project that could potentially find its way through and beyond the shock of this violence. This then becomes a research based project that I work on for the next two years called Material Speculation: ISIS, in which I reconstruct 12 artifacts destroyed by ISIS through the use of digital modeling and fabrication. Inside the body of each 3D printed sculpture, I include a flash drive that contains visual, text, and 3D printable files of hundreds of pages of research I have gathered in relationship to the artifacts.
I sit in my studio looking at a wall that resembles a crime investigation map in one of those detective movies. Except that my crime investigation map ends up being much more complex and non-binary as time passes. And I have no court of justice to take anyone to.
I spend days and nights with the images of the artifacts and confusing information that sometimes doesn’t match up between an Arabic text and an English translation. Some nights I have strange dreams with Ebu or King Uthal in them. I feel connected to each of these objects. I spend days 3D modeling them with a team of students; days and nights 3D printing them, bathing them, cleaning them, shining them. I love them. I love them in a way that I haven’t loved any other works of art I have created. They are part of my culture, my people, my history. And I want to protect them. When I say ‘them’ here, think beyond this one project. Think about them as a whole series of other historical sites and artifacts in the Middle-East. And when I say “protect”, I mean that I want to protect them not only from ISIS, but from Silicon Valley, from Google, from all the tech companies in the West, from all the white men and their colonialist technologies.
I know once the artifacts are destroyed, they are gone forever and there is no way to truly replace them. Material Speculation: ISIS is and has been my homage to something that is lost, but it’s also a project that ever since has become bigger than me, changing and shaping my practice and my research into something much more important and critical. What I present here today is a set of questions and observations backed up by evidence that I don’t have all the answers for. It’s an unapologetic call for re-thinking and re-imagining. A call for not feeling easy. It’s the result of being pushed and pulled within systems and figures that have a long history of invading and colonizing our lives and our countries. As time passes and with access to new technologies like 3D scanners, these methods now take new forms. Positive, good, necessary, heroic at first sight. And I am here to perhaps scratch at that surface, and dig into some ground to make the invisible visible.
The crime investigation map I created on the wall at my studio in 2015 is much larger now. And yes! there is still no judicial system willing to take it on. But 4 years later, I have come to terms with the fact that I must create my own version of a court of justice. You are free to take whatever role that you wish to take. To be the judge, the defendant, the attorney, the observer, a member of the public, a dreamer, an enemy, an ally. My imaginary court of justice is a place not only for judgment, but for rituals, witchcraft, and magic. For practical ideas embedded into dystopian realities and utopian wishes and self-made methods for unfolding.
She who saw all things in the broad-boned earth and beyond, and knew what was to be known; She who had seen what there was, and had embraced the ‘otherness’ She to whom the image clung like a mirror; a display of crisis and who dwelt together with a devised becoming. She knows and sees the unknown and lays them bare. She is the ‘monstrous other’, the dark goddess, the possessive jinn, the dividing persona. She restores myths and histories; the untold and the forgotten; the misread and uneven; Those of and from the Near East.
Each personal object on this table, represents a form of protection, care, or curing to you. You have brought them here with you to ‘put them in use’ and let their story be told. As each object transforms from physical to digital, pixel by pixel, it will release some kind of undoing. It will protect the unprotected, it will create a path for return, it will work to empower, take over, it will cause interference with deliverance.
Examine 1: The Box and the notes
You have carried this box that sits next to your bed on a table for years. You can’t recall when you got it or how. On it we see an ancient Persian miniature of two men holding swords, sitting on their horse, heading towards or away from something or somewhere unknown to us. Inside it, there are notes you have kept since your teenage years where you have included all the forms time can take in relationship to trauma and violence; brainstorming kind of notes. Time and Power, Time when it’s too late, Being in time and with time, Immediate time, Slow time, stolen time, etc. You hardly ever open this box. Somewhere in your head you have decided to imagine it as a container that holds and protects some vulnerable thoughts and emotions that are dear to you. It holds them, protects them inside while the outside image reminds you every day that you can fight against the violent time and the violent place. Put it in use. TURN THEM AWAY.
I think about violence often. It’s a word that comes up in my talks constantly. When I talk about violence of destruction by ISIS, I am talking about the kind of violence that I am well familiar with, growing up in Iran. A violence that is not just ‘on’ and ‘against’ objects but also human bodies. But I also have made a point to equally talk about the kind of violence that follows me all my life prior to and after immigration to the United States at the age of 22. This violence is not like that of ISIS but by the very country that I choose to live in. The United States. The violence that sells weapons to Iraq during the 8 years of the Iran-Iraq war which shapes a significant part of my childhood memories. The kind of violence that kills millions of innocent humans, and destroys homes, schools, cultural centers, and hundreds of historical sites in Afghanistan and Iraq for at least two decades. The long violence of invasion and colonization of lands and cultures. The violence at borders that extends to and beyond maps and geographical lines.
Since 2015, I have sat at and through countless lectures and panels in relationship to reconstruction of historical sites and artifacts. This is also a time in which there is a sudden trend of using photo-grammy, 3D printing and 3D scanning by institutions and companies as tools for preservation and reconstruction. It’s also the time that ISIS goes from its rise to low. I have listened to technologists, archaeologists, historians, politicians all from the Western countries talking about the shock that they experienced watching the video of the destruction of artifacts by ISIS. And through these years, I have not once come across anyone addressing or condemning the destruction and violence committed by the very countries they come from. The kind of violence that has “shocked” them and has inspired them to do something. While other kinds of violence stays invisible, hidden in their binary simplistic readings of these events. Or it is cautiously untold.
ISIS takes pride in destruction. They are bold, direct. In their showcase of destruction, violence is presented as an eventful crisis; an explosive sudden kind of violence. You see it and it immediately shocks you. While for example the U.S. military hides, deletes, un-archives its violence and war crimes from public; or justifies it as a work that needs to happen for the safety of its people. Along side of this, those having access to platforms choose to participate in this kind of invisible violence. Them and those speaking about ISIS violence remove themselves from that picture pointing fingers at what’s obvious. For example, after ISIS destruction of Palmyra’s 1,800-year-old Arch, a project launched in London and then in NY as the result of major collaborations between the UK-based Institute for Digital Archaeology, UNESCO, and Dubai’s Museum of the Future. In a video documentation of its ceremony, as a white fabric gets pulled down to unveil the reconstructed site of Palmyra, Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, stands there to tell the audience: “No one should have the power to delete such monuments from our historical record. This is an arch of triumph and in many ways a triumph of technology and determination. We’re here in a spirit of defiance, defiance of the barbarians who destroyed the original as they have destroyed so many other relics in Syria and the Middle East.”
People in audience applaud. Then they take turns to take selfies with the new Palmyra and they perhaps go back to their safe homes never thinking back at what it was that was wrong with that image; How ISIS formed in first place as a result of U.S. and Europe invasion of the Middle-East. This violence that sits side by side to that so-called “barbarian” violence, the one that is equally real and destructive, is once again deferred, delayed. Has gone invisible. Pushed into some background, into some corner in some political maneuver of the bad and the good.
So the violence I am talking about here, is not just about how these figures remove themselves from a cycle they had been part of for centuries, but also a kind of Violence that is about Reclaiming.
ISIS reclaims the object’s through destruction, through creating absence. The western governments and tech companies reclaim it after destruction, through a new kind of presence; and we fail to see the violence of that presence in the way we see the violence of the absence.
In 2016 I released a zip folder of my research and gathered files of the Material Speculation: ISIS project online, on Rhizome’s website (the same materials that are inside the USB drives sealed in the belly of my reconstructed artifacts). In a folder named Destruction Images, I included 44 pictures showing the destruction of the artifacts at Mosul Museum by ISIS. The titles of these 44 images are words organized chronologically that when read from beginning to end create a complete sentence. And the sentence reads:
“Ultimately the only way to stop the destruction of Iraq and Syria’s cultural heritage is to stop the so-called war on terror and the military invasion of the Middle-East. Because everything is a cycle and nothing can truly be done without breaking that cycle.”
This was perhaps my quiet, wishful way of wanting to activate something beyond the one kind of Violence that at the time many people and the media chose to focus on. A battle that 3 years later still feels un-winnable.
Examine 2. The Bowl and the water
Your mother was a flight-attendant for 28 years for Iran Air. The majority of the years she worked, all civil aviations in Iran were under sanction imposed by the U.S. That meant difficulties in changing or renewing parts of the planes or permission to purchase new civil aircraft from most manufacturers. Which meant more plane crashes and technical failures while flying. So, to put it bluntly, you grew up with a lot of anxieties around your mother’s jobs. Separation anxieties. It got to a point that as a child your aunt taught you to say some verses from the Quran that would bring you peace. Your grandmother gave you this bowl here as a tool for protecting your parents. When a friend or family member leaves to go on a trip, Iranian families prepare a container of water. As they leave, the water from the container is tossed behind them, which ensures their safe return. So this bowl is a representation of your fears and a wish for return. It’s your container for protection and care and return, and return and return. Put it in use. WARD OFF THIS CURSE.
What is ‘care’? To care? To care for? To care about? Care can be a blessing but sometimes a curse. A curse mistaken as blessing: Care when it’s removed from context. When it’s dishonest and manipulative. Or to give it the benefit of doubt, care when it’s confused, misunderstood, wronged by the caregiver.
I want to begin by talking about Violent care. A concept I first came across in an article by Thom Van Dooren called A Day with Crows : Rarity, Nativity and the Violent-Care of Conservation, in which Dooren shares his story about a day spent at the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center in Hawaii, observing staff taking care of a captive population of critically endangered Hawaiian crows. Over the course of the day some animals were cared for (especially endangered birds), while others were trapped and killed as part of the conservation management of the larger property (i.e. feral pigs). He uses this story to explore the frameworks and the associated regimes of ‘violent-care’ that structure “how living beings are valued or sacrificed within contemporary conservation practices”.
These kind of decisions about the value of lives and cultures in Syria are made in central London; and so a replica of Palmyra’s arch in Trafalgar Square becomes a symptom of violent care: the unique and precious object that is rescued when so much is deemed disposable. For any Western institution to focus on the reconstruction of the rare and special while other Western institutions have wrought the destruction of the everyday, is violent care.
In the past years of developing my research on Digital Colonialism, I have specifically focused on three major cultural heritage and digital archeology projects. One is CyArk, a company based in Oakland California that “digitally archives the world’s heritage sites for preservation and education”. Then Project Mosul which is “a digital preservation project that attempted to crowdsource images to reconstruct the destroyed artifacts of Mosul,” and last but not least Google Arts and Culture’s Institute which is “a project for digital archiving enabling users to explore physical and contextual information about artworks, and to compile their own virtual collection.”
You read these ‘about’ descriptions on these websites and for half a minute your good natural side of being a human want to believe and trust something. But there are a lot of complications and troubles with these projects. In my days and days of research on these websites, I have come across two common kinds of language that reveal a violent aspect of these acts of showing care: the language of Alignment and the language of becoming an Ally.
The word Align means “To form in line; to fall into line. To adjust or form to a line”. It’s about becoming ‘one line’, a straight line. When talking about cultural heritage and historical artifacts, these organizations like many other digital preservation projects, use words such as “our”, “we”, “shared”, “universal”, “us”; You see it repeating and repeating and repeating. But Who is this we? What is ours? How is it shared? In a TEDx talk given in Hamburg by Change Coughenour, one of the two members of project Mosul, he ends his lecture with: “You see, cultural heritage is about our shared global history. It helps us connect with our ancestors and their stories…We need your help to reclaim the history that is being lost. Will you join us?” He then smiles and the audience, most of which is white, applauds. Coughenour’s words are a small example of the language of alignment. In simple ways they are saying: “Hey! We are one human species, standing side by side on one straight line; One straight line of heritage and ownership”. This is a tactic for colonization — a claim of universality in the midst of the subjugation of entire peoples — and it reveals a violent aspect of this apparent gesture of care.
Following some of these organizations closely since 2015, I have seen this language changing a bit as they reframe some of their activities, perhaps also due to a set of critique they have received in the past years. They start to use words like “Educating”, “assisting”, “helping”, “providing technology” more frequently. On their website and Instagram page for example, CyArk staff are sometimes pictured standing next to brown and black people in different countries, shaking hands, or putting their arms around their shoulders. Here they are pictured as helpers; as Allies. The word Ally means “To connect or form a relation between by resemblance, friendship, or love.” So in this case instead of saying we or ours, the position has changed to “you” and “yours”. Yet you, the other, the savage, the barbarian, the citizen of an undeveloped country, you are in need of our help because you are in a war crisis or you don’t have access to these digital tools. So as your allies, we come to you to help you. This is what I call a less leveled kind of alignment. The straight leveled line now shifts into a diagonal one. A line that has a top and a bottom.
In a video called Documenting The temple of Eshmun, you see the Field Manager of CyArk, Ross Davison, with a small group of Middle-Eastern women and men in Lebanon, training them how to use digital conservation technologies. In an interview with him and Kacey Hadick, the program Coordinator of CyArk titled Syria’s Heritage Gets a Helping Hand, Ross describes the group as one “eager to learn this process and to integrate it with their work.” In response to the question asked by the interviewer on ways they ensure this digital data is protected, Kacey Hadick response that they have actually backed it up numerous times and stored a gold copy at the Iron Mountain bunker (which is a storing, protecting and managing of digital information business based in Boston). “It’s not going anywhere.” he says. Then continues: “The most secure and fool-proof way to get data out of Syria is to carry it out. I think that all of the data we have received has actually been transmitted to us from outside of Syria. For that reason, the teams in Syria have been given our favorite Seagate LaCie rugged drives which they are using for data back up in the field and to securely transfer and transmit data.” Once again, we are back at a familiar image. The white man, the same traditional colonial master who maintained missionary schools for the indigenous people they referred to as savages, who goes to a developing country now to assist them, to bring them its technological knowledge. A kind of assistant that has never been about the empowerment of the powerless, but like Petar Jandrić and Ana Kuzmanić say, has been about “making those they called savage “more efficient within the dominating socio-economic orders”. So this is a kind of colonial expansion: Now from physical to digital.
Imagine this, that in a much better world than what it is, these people could come back home only with their white saviour complex, feeling good about themselves. Being the hero they want to be, but they never have.;Never do. What they get their hands on, they do not leave behind. When they take it they do not return it to us. Whether a physical object like the Nefertiti bust stolen from Egypt in 1912 by a German archaeological team and never returned, or the digital scanned Data from The Temple of Eshmun. Yet another example of violent care. A much more gentle and slow one. Difficult to spot and easy to miss.
Examine 3. The Demon face with wide Open mouth
It’s the early evening in Tehran. You are back from school. Your father’s friend come for a visit and bring you a gift that you will keep with you in the next 19 years. When he hands it to you, you hold it and ask him “what is it?”. He laughs and tells you: “Just hang it on your wall. It’s a greedy demon and its open mouth catches all the greedy people.” You take it and hang it on the wall on top of your bed. When leaving Iran you somehow feel guilty to leave it behind. So you carry it with you and hang it in your room on the wall of the next 9 houses you live in while in diaspora. Until the past years, you have not really thought about oppression and greed. Until talking about it at a dinner table with friends in NY when you suddenly connects dots you can no longer unsee. Put it to use. LET IT COLONIZE THE COLONIZERS.
Since 2018, Google Arts and Culture in collaboration with CyArk has launched a project called Open Heritage which promises to make their archives available to a broader audience. A new push to bring their gathered data from a private servers to public access.
Before you can request any kind of digital data from the Open Heritage website, you must check four boxes to indicate your agreement to certain conditions. Two of them are: “I must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.” and “I may not use the material for commercial purposes.”
This means that CyArk has a monopoly on the commercial use of the data and the countries where the scanned sites are located may not sell the scans without permission. This is a kind of sharing that reinforces CyArk’s ultimate ownership.
My point is that the copyright ownership of this 3D scanned data by these Western institutions is problematic — and so is the concept of open heritage. Is open heritage good? Is open source always good?
This isn’t the only issue with Open Heritage. What I have learned in past years is that like Care, openness on the internet can also be a blessing and a curse. I admit in 2016, I used to have a naive understanding of open source and free access. When I released that zipped folder of the artifacts destroyed by ISIS, I included an .obj/.stl file of one of the 12 artifacts: King Uthal. At the time I was under the impression that giving open and free access to this file could potentially be an important method to go against the work that other organizations were doing, which was keeping their 3D scans and digital data on private servers or only giving access to it if one could afford to purchase the data. But simultaneously, due to all the press around my own project and also similar projects at the time, somewhere in my gut I felt the need to step back. To not get carried away by the hype that surrounded my work. Since then I have kept the digital models of the 11 other artifacts private; with me. And I’ve been working to come up with a method, perhaps a better solution to these issues of access and ownership. In the similar way that the utopian dream of free and democratic internet in the 80’s proved to be a naive prediction, open access and free information are uneven and politically charged issues. Who gets to have access to fast internet to download a free 50 GB of a 3D scanned data from their home country? Who has access to a 3D printer or have the skills to use these preservation technologies in a world where digital gap is a messy real problem? Who owns the serves and control over the free data that is put on these websites? And why give open access to our cultures and histories when there is no fair and truly un-imperialistic system and infrastructure built to preserve them without colonizing or making profit of them?
Imagine you walk into Neues Museum in Berlin and see the Nefertiti bust. If you know the history of how it got here, you know it wasn’t with permission. And you might have heard that for the last decades, there have been a lot of requests from the Egyptian government to get the Nefertiti back to Egypt, where it belongs. So not only the physical object is stolen, but it’s also is put on public view. The German government doesn’t sell the Nefertiti bust itself, but it makes profit of displaying it at museums charging visitor fee, loaning it, making accurate replicas of it that it sells on their website for up to $8900 Euro.
What I’ve been trying to do with my research on Digital Colonialism, is to use more traditional examples like this as frameworks to make sense of the issues that comes with new tools and technologies like 3D scanners and 3D printers. And to apply these historical colonial examples to what’s happening now, at this very moment. Like I said I don’t yet have all the answers for these questions. What I certainly know is that we have to explore these issues beyond what’s positive and simple at first sight. A position I am committed to hold and explore.
Examine 4. The Lamp
It’s August 26, 2007. You are leaving Iran tomorrow. Your friend Saba, brings you this lamp. She tells you that not only it’s a working lamp but also like that cheesy Aladdin lamp, it has magical powers. You place it in your room under a poster that reads: “Believe that We Will Win”. It is the sight you wake up to every day. Put it in use. LET IT BE YOUR GUIDANCE FOR WISDOM AND THE BEYOND.
One of my favorite TV shows from America is Twin Peaks. It’s a surreal crime drama show in which an FBI Agent Dale Cooper, travels to the town of Twin Peaks to solve the murder of Laura Palmer. But through the course of the show, instead of a final resolution that could reveal a clear solution to that one crime, you are presented with a set of situations that remind you ‘things are not what they seem’; Not the objects, nor the animals or humans in the show, nor the figures who carry the ability for the twisting of reality. The only thing real perhaps, is your intuition as the audience (alongside agent Cooper) to make sense of elements, connecting points that might seem disconnected on surface; to go beyond facts, using dream sequence, metaphors, and magic as clues for exploration and understanding.
In my sentimental head and looking back at the past 4 years, I have come to terms that this is exactly what I have been doing. It’s what we just did right here in the past one hour. Connecting points on a crime investigation wall using facts, quotes, evidence, and analogy while searching for something deeper beyond; that is about emotional, personal, poetic, and magical understanding of the world we live in and its uneven realities.
For a long time, I’ve had imagined and carried this scene in my head in which a 3D scanner is being used, held, operated by women in a ceremony of rituals; opening paths towards the unseen; towards what’s unknown to the others. As we 3D scan the objects, as they become digital, instead of us ‘saving’ them, we let them ‘save us’. We let them save us and what belongs to us from colonial powers. Instead of the digital file of an object, we let its story, its power, to be the elements that travels towards the clouds. The kinda cloud that is unlimited, dreamy, impossible to be caught, controlled, or owned. The kinda cloud that allows for the re-imagining of both the limited and the unlimited sky. For a long time I’ve had imagined and carried this dream in my head where I am standing on a stage and the time is in the future, and the box, and the bowl, and the open-mouth monster, and the lamp have already won and we have mastered leaving marks on the wall, never being pleased at what it seems.
*To develop this performance-lecture, I received a grant as part of the 2019 Rhizome Commissions Program, which is supported by Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Notes
This text is a complete version of a research I’ve been doing Since 2015 on Digital Colonialism, a term I coined and developed in relationship to cultural heritage and digital reconstruction of historical sites and artifacts.
References
UK: Boris Johnson gives IS two fingers during Palmyra arch replica unveiling, April 19, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsDz_Bxe168
Van Dooren, Thom, A Day with Crows — Rarity, Nativity and the Violent-Care of Conservation, Animal Studies Journal, 4(2), 2015, 1–28. Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol4/iss2/2
How your pictures can help reclaim lost history, TEDxHamburg | June 2016: https://www.ted.com/talks/chance_coughenour_how_your_pictures_can_help_reclaim_lost_history/transcript
Syria’s Heritage Gets a Helping Hand, February 11, 2017: https://www.cyark.org/about/syrias-heritage-gets-a-helping-hand
DIGITAL POSTCOLONIALISM, Petar Jandrić and Ana Kuzmanić, IADIS International Journal, Vol. 13, №2, pp. 34–51, 2015.