lsakr /laila 210 a

Beyond Walls: Arab Urban Arts Collaborative...as of dec 2007.

working cluster

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The project I propose is to direct, organize, and produce a collaboration among hip-hop and graffiti artists in creating music videos on the subject of the apartheid wall that divides the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and the infrastructure in post-war Lebanon. The collaboration process itself will be documented online as artists will be given use of webcams, skype, messaging, and other online communication to work the creation process. The music videos will be presented online, on satellite channels, and in exhibits projected onto "walls."

The intent of this project is to explore issues of reclaiming public space for public imagination, and questioning claims of authority, crime/vandalism, and property in regards to graffiti and hip-hop as are culturally bound to Middle Eastern societies. I am interested in exploring how art forms change and adapt in a hyper-commercial age as well as the role of art in social movements. The significance of urban art as artistic interventions both reflecting and constituting the social landscape in and from which they emerge can reveal complexities about Middle Eastern society and culture that would otherwise remain silenced....

1. Design

There are several layers to this project and the output is multi-modal. We are producing lots of material around the same themes, formatted and remixed in different ways.

• The Art Objects--First, a series of music videos will be produced in a collaborative method among a variety of urban artists. The video material will feed on-going remixed, reprocessed in order to help provide an interpreted, cohesive response to the issues. Second, the documentation of the development of the collaborative art making process itself is another art object.

• Technique--Documenting the process of art making as collaboration process of video, sound, and graffiti cultures via (video capturing of screens, skype, webcams and other online communication methods). In this experience, the art making process also becomes performative.

• The Subject Matter--The apartheid wall dividing the Israeli and Palestinian people, as well as the physical landscape of Lebanon in respect to the 2006 war.

• The Collaborators--The cohort is composed of, at least, an Emcee, a DJ, a Poet, a Vocalist, a percussionist, and a Graffiti Artist. They live in diverse geographic regions including the Middle East and the US. What brings them together is an investment in the subject matter and motivation in the process of collaboration itself.

• The Distribution--To be distributed online, projected onto walls at exhibits, film and video festivals, and in public spaces, as well as mainstream media (HBO, MTV, Showtime, Al Jazeera, LBC, MSNBC, Free Speech TV, Current TV).

Each artist will be equipped with a computer, internet access, appropriate software, and training. The collaborators will virtually meet 3-5 times a week for a period of 6 months in development of their audio-visual collaboration. Over the summer of 2008, the artists will geographically meet in Middle East. Videotaping and some audio recording to be done there. The subsequent months will go into audio and video editing and advertising of project.

A neo cultural renaissance of post-colonial Middle Eastern art may be considered a new form of colonization and stems from what Jean Baudrillard calls “‘the supremacy of the object,’ a recognition that it is not the subject and its desire, but the object and its seduction that orders the world.” He argues that the symbolic structure of our world is "interpreted in terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances—that is, in terms of seduction.” I would like to consider how such seduction and supremacy of the object might frame a theory regarding various digital arts such as transnational Arab voices from traditional sources like Al Jazeera.net, urban art (spoken word performance, graffiti, street art), and internet-based virtual architecture (blogs, websites, and videos). By engaging urban artists in a collaborative audio-visual project, I hope to extend analyses to what sorts of conversations unfold online beyond the borders of the print and recording world.

Theoretically speaking, I am interested in the cultural production and expression of Arab youth like Palestinian hip-hop artists like DAM, who rap in Arabic and Hebrew. Do these new lyrical forms displace the role of the political poetry of Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish? How do we contextualize public forums occurring in virtual places and not on the pages of Al-Ahram, such as As‘ad Abukhalil’s blog, “The Angry Arab News Service,” and Poet Mohja Kahf’s “Sex and the Umma,” as they relate to social movements like Muslim Brotherhood or the March 14th coalition in Lebanon? Despite the numerous sourcing and citations of them in academic papers, advertisements, casual conversation, journalism, and the workplace, urban art forms like hip-hop and graffiti are often seen as commercial and popular, and therefore, are under-examined and overlooked.

The aim is to reach a popular audience—the same people who read about terrorist bombings in the Gaza strip or the West Bank in the New York Times and Washington Post, the ones who are informed about the Middle East by the stories they watch on major broadcast networks like Fox Entertainment News, CNN, and MSNBC. In these mainstream media sources, the stories reported on are mainly about politics between state leaders or on horrific war stories and terrorists(ism). Rarely, do we hear the stories of the lay people living in the region, using their "frames" (of reference, artistic renderings, perspective....) The purpose is to offer this popular audience, an alternative story, perhaps coming from the voices of Middle Eastern youth.

2. Design Brief

The following concepts frame and guide the design principles for this project:

• Reframing as Social Change--Why are young artists choosing new frames, and particularly these new frames to produce what they do? As George Lakoff writes, “Reframing is social change.” I want to participate in the groundbreaking scholarship that examines and contributes to the evolution of this part of our cultural legacy. Formally speaking, hip-hop as a musical genre that takes/appropriates beats (pre-recorded music for new purposes) and reframes them in the collaboration between the DJ and the Emcee. Multi-modal output of art objects reframes these the original pieces, and continually remixes, bringing together artists to create something new. Also reframes the spaces in discussion.

• Getting Beyond Physical Barriers--Disembodiment mean freedom from the state in the virtual world, a place where identity is not read through color, race, gender...phsyical appearance. The geographies of state and national identity affect visas, citizenship, and access to spaces/places. This is particularly true for the Arab peoples.

• Collaboration for Creative Purposes: Model for Organizing--Everyone has authority, everyone has a voice, everyone is an artist. Using digital communication to collaborate, document the process, and keeping it transparent, the art making collaborative process itself becomes the object of art.

• Artist as Context Provider--According to Sharon Daniels, "artist is that of 'context provider,' -- assisting communities, collecting their stories, soliciting their opinions on politics and social justice, and building the online archives and interfaces that make this data available across social, cultural and economic boundaries."

Example Projects

• Graffiti Research Lab
• Slingshot Hip-Hop
• The Vandal Squad

Currently, the work done around graffiti in the Middle East is limited to a Western authors and audience. Bansky's work on the apartheid wall in Israel/Palestine is one of the few discussed. Otherwise, the music videos by Middle Eastern hip-hop artist's are rare. Rather, what we have are more traditional mediums like documentaries (i.e. Slingshot Hip-hop).

3. Timeline

view online

4. Budget

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5. Artist Statement

view online

6. Biography

view online

7. Curriculum Vitae

view online
download pdf

8. Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

Debusmann, Bernd. "Around Globe, Walls Spring Up to Divide Neighbors." Common Dreams. Reuters, 2007. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/02/930

Eschler, Peter and Didier Stricker. "Virtual Graffiti: from stone-age to digital art." CG Topics. 1/2003. http://www.inigraphics.net/press/topics/2003/issue1/1_03a12.pdf

Ferrel, Jeff. Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality. New York: Garland, 1993.

Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.

Goodman, Amy. "Tear Down That Wall." Truthdig. 2007. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070913_tear_down_that_wall

Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.

Hayes-Raitt, Kelly. "Off the Wall: Graffiti on the Israeli Wall." Violating Sanctions: An American Woman’s Listening Tour Through the Axis of Evil. March 26, 2007. http://www.peacepathfoundation.org/israel/off-the-wall-graffiti-on-the-israeli-wall.html

Macdonald, Nancy. The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity, and Identity in London and New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.

Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.

Parry, Nigel. “Well-known UK graffiti artist Banksy hacks the Wall.” The Electronic Intifada. Sep 2, 2005. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4153.shtml

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Unplugged. Ars Electronica 2002. Hatje Cantz. Ars Electronica Center. Museum of the Future.

"Roger Waters graffitis the Israeli Wall in Palestine." War on Want. http://www.waronwant.org/Roger%20Waters%20graffitis%20the%20Israeli%20Wall%20in%20Palestine%2012377.twl

Williams, Saul. The Dead Emcee. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2006.