Interview

Physical Tactics For Digital Colonialism

In Conversation With Morehshin Allahyari

First published in the book Networked Futures: Online Exhibitions and Digital Hierarchies, 2021

This text documents a conversation with Iranian media artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari. It was commissioned as a contribution to the book Networked Futures: Online Exhibitions and Digital Hierarchies, edited by Bob Bicknell-Knight and published by IsThisIt? in 2021. The discussion focuses on Allahyari’s hybrid performance work Physical Tactics For Digital Colonialism, which was developed for the New Museum, New York, in 2019, and took the form of an expanded lecture drawing upon a body of research connecting 3D printing, plastic, crude oil, technocapitalism, and jihad as politically networked and poetically related concepts.

Jamie Sutcliffe: Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism, 2019, takes the form of a curious performance lecture. I was struck by the way that you moved fluidly between the various subject positions of a strange tripartite identity. On the one hand you were performing the role of a cultural historian presenting an analytical take on the destruction of artefacts by ISIS in the Mosul Museum in 2015 whilst also describing the counterviolence of digital preservation techniques by tech companies in Europe and the US. Secondly, you emulated the role of the tech worker, or artist, working with new media to produce digital scans of resonant objects in front of a live audience. But then there’s a third component, which was perhaps a little more mysterious, and that was a masked entity, who I think you describe as this monstrous ‘other’ or goddess. And this figure no longer speaks in terms of data but in anecdotes, storytelling and poetry. So I wondered if you could talk a little about the crossovers between those roles, how they might relate to your practice more broadly and whether or not there’s a distinct continuum there - or various kinds of rupture between them - that is productive for you in some way?

Morehshin Allahyari: So this is something that I’ve been developing in different ways as part of my practice in the past four or five years. I would say that this constant, very defined role, of being an artist and having a practice within a studio, and then at the same time like a big part of my work has been kind of travelling around the world (before the pandemic) and doing these lectures, artist talks and being a part of panels and conferences. And I think there was a point after two or three years of doing that full time, I was so tired of these super, again, kind of similar format and a bit boring ways that different institutions and universities want you to present your work. When I do artist talks I try to do a good job of still keeping an aspect of storytelling, talking about personal relationships, but again I don’t think it has that element of a little bit of experimenting with these spaces.

So for that reason I have been slowly more and more interested in finding ways that I can bring in these fictional, factual or multidisciplinary ways of discussing a topic together. There’s a long history of lecture performances, or performance lectures, where combining these two spaces. I think if it’s done well, or done in a way where it can fill different gaps in that topic, it can be really powerful. So I was commissioned by Rhizome and New Museum to make this lecture performance superficially focusing on ideas around digital colonialism and the work that I’ve been developing around that term.

So I, as you say, kind of decided to have multiple roles in this space. One would be this person who is like doing a more academic talk behind a lectern, standing there and talking about how this research started, what are the aspects of this research that I’ve been looking into with defining digital colonialism. So the academic talk, right? And then switching into the space where what I’m talking about is happening, these ideas around 3D scanning, we’re 3D scanning these objects but then objects that are chosen, the five objects that we’re 3D scanning and I have a technical assistant in the space as I’m moving back and forth between the space I needed someone to kind of assist. Basically using this idea of a 3D scanner as I’m talking about it, but showing it live, and scanning objects that I had chosen based on a very personal relationship to those objects but that are also in one way or another have some historical background to them. Whether it’s a family history, a personal history or like actually something that is or was really old, almost like an antique object that my father’s friend gave me. And in that space is where I take the role of this ‘other’ creature, this ‘other’ person who is telling the story about these objects as they’re being scanned.

Another thing I would add is that the one thing that I was always fascinated by, like I always wanted to do something with this 3D scanning live experience because I do feel like there is some really beautiful poetic invisible magic with how that works, where you’re watching this thing coming together pixel by pixel. Then at the end you have a 3-dimensional object, and I kind of like that.

Another thing that I would add as a last point is I have also been thinking a lot about how these, and I say this during the talk, but how these tools, 3D scanners, VR and 3D printers, etc are so much still in the hands of men and the white men of the silicon valley. One of the things that I still want to develop within my practice is to do more of these performances where these tools are in the hands of mostly women as tools for witchcraft. So what I’m doing is, for me, is also a mix of that, bringing some element of witchcraft and magic, and investigation in that sense into the process.

JS: At the start of the performance you present your research parameters in a really succinct way, outlining the cross-correspondences between 3D printing, plastic, technocapitalism and Jihad. It’s such a complex spectrum of issues, and you talk about the necessity of having this crime investigation map that bedecks the wall of your studio with which you negotiate between the sort of evidence that you’re accumulating there. So I wondered, in light of that forensic approach, how accountability might function in relation to the body of research that you’re producing? You mention the idea of a sort of fictional or dreamlike judicial space, acknowledging there’s no real jury to hold people to account for the evidence you’re presenting, but that doesn’t disregard a dream space, or dream logic, from being judicially productive. Could you expand on the constitution of that space, describe what sort of aftereffects you might expect from it as a process?

MA: Yeah absolutely. So one of the things that I’ve added to, you know we were just talking about social media, but one of the things that I’ve added to my social media, the little like bio is private investigator, right? So I’m like an artist, archivist, writer, private investigator, and I really feel that part of the work that I do and why I enjoy it so much is because it’s kind of like that, whether it’s on this project or other projects, where I’m kind of like investigating something within a space that requires the kind of research process that is very different than maybe just like reading a book or like gathering material for a book. Literally with this work I am looking at cases, I am trying to understand, I’ve talked to people I’ve interviewed people, trying to understand things that they don’t want me to know about, right? Like having someone email one of these tech companies and San Francisco and asking them if they can have access to a file, like a 3D file, just to know like what would they say? If like you want to have access, what are their rules and ways that they respond to it? Knowing that they also might know my work because I’ve done presentations in a conference they invited me to, so I kind of have to send someone else to say and ask for me if they’re still going to give this file.

So it’s a little bit of all that, you know? Like trying to kind of, as you said, there’s no jury, no court, it’s all made up in my head but at the same time with these issues around digital colonialism and cultural heritage I’ve felt like when I’ve started talking about this stuff, which was the very beginning of 2016. February 2016 was the first talk that I gave when I  said the term digital colonialism and then connecting it to cultural heritage, and I remember at the time there was just the beginning of a lot of these practices, right? I mean this is also the time that we had like a really intense concentration of ISIS prisons in Syria and Iraq, and they were doing a lot of destructions. That was simultaneously happening with these 3D scanners and 3D printers becoming more and more accessible. So there was a hype around that technology, the destructions were happening which then kind of became a thing that just kept getting connected. Like these tech companies trying to go and scan things or talk about how they’re going to like ‘save’ this cultural heritage.

So I was invited to places like Google Art and Culture Centre, actually in London, I came there and gave a talk there. I was invited at the beginning of this, again putting it into context in 2016 when I had just started Material Speculation: ISIS​ and people were like inviting me to talk about this project. And one of these places was Sciart which is this place that I specifically talk about that had a conference and whilst I was there I just saw all these tech companies, it was like a tech conference right? So there were all these tech companies who were coming and like basically showing the latest updates that they had of these 3D scanners and stuff, and there was no one like keeping them accountable, asking them what they were doing, why are they doing this, what is happening to this data that they’re gathering, who owns it, what’s the copyright situation? And I really felt the need, or like I also felt okay doing it because I feel that with this space it’s something that’s my culture and it’s my country, it’s my background, you know? So I felt like there was more legitimacy in a way of like me being able to ask these questions without feeling like they owe me answers to these questions. So that’s why I was interested in this idea of if there was or could be a court and if we could put this together in that scenario, you know? What would be things that we could actually make these people stop doing, because I can’t make them stop doing anything. Like the museums are still, even with colonialism as like a bigger practice of museums from the British Museum to Met, to all these places that have been doing these kinds of unethical practices and partly they’ve been stopped. There have been some cases of courts being involved and stuff but not really. So that space has always been so problematic but also so just, it’s just whatever, that’s just what happens, and the court that I made was a way to imagine the possibility of ways that there could be forces to stop these kinds of unethical practices.

JS: Yeah, just as an aside from the interview, this idea made me think very specifically about a friend of mine, Dr. Jane Wildgoose, who as it happens designed the cenobite costumes for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser movies, but then went on to a career as an anti-colonial activist working with the repatriation of human remains from museum and medical collections in London, back to the countries from which they were illegaly expropriated. She was saying that one of the most difficult things to deal with in that field is the highly mediated self-image of the institution that wants to appear as somehow benevolent, sensitive and conscientious, but then works very actively behind the scenes to suppress the activities of individual researchers who are trying to raise these cases, the people who are actually doing the repatriative forensic work.

So my third question is about recuperation, and I was thinking specifically about something that the network engineer Tung-Hui Hu writes about, which is the idea that artists working with new media are at certain kinds of risk when their work enters an activist area, testing out the parameters of new media in ways that institutions see as a form of vanguardist market research. Hu’s example is the photographer Trevor Paglen using tracking software to locate CIA surveillance satellites. It’s an artist’s project which has actually led to the CIA using his ability to track their satellites as a way of improving the technology that cloaks them. Your work gets a lot of coverage from the tech industry in terms of its relationship to activism, there’s an enthusiastic hyperbole around it, and I wondered how you might navigate that space where your work might risk appropriation into the kinds of narrative that the tech industry wants to author for itself?

MA: Yeah, I mean I think like at the beginning of my practice I had a harder time understanding how to navigate that space, like what does it mean to be in it but at the same time be outside it, and criticise it? What does it mean to use the same tools that are being used for Los Angeles’ case colonising these artefacts but at the same time be the one that also 3D prints them, right? So that I would say took me some time to figure out what does that mean for me like an artist involved in this space. But the more I’ve been involved in it, the more I’ve realised that actually in the case in the ways that I’m using these tools, the only way to go against these spaces is to use the very tools that they use as a way to turn around these power structures, right? Because one way would be to not participate in that space at all, which then would mean another historic example of let’s say women being pushed out because I don’t want to be in the silicon valley tech space.

Like, I made Material Speculation: ISIS​ at Autodesk Pier 9 in San Francisco, and those people were just looking at me like, what the fuck is she doing? Like, what are these… You know, like, for a while they just didn’t know what I was doing. I just had access to the machines for free and the material was free because I was doing an artist residency there, and I was supposed to stay for four months but I kind of found my way into extending it and staying for one year. And really without that, I’m serious, without that residency I would never have been able to do Material Speculation: ISIS​ because there was no way I had access to that kind of money and machines, and the staff members who helped right? But again, one way would be to be like I don’t wanna be here, because this is the enemy. But one way would be to actually use the very resources, funding and possibilities that that very space offered as a way to then either go against it or get something out of it without having to abandon it. This is how I think about all these spaces, that I don’t want to not participate in it because then someone else will, you know? And that someone else most probably will be like a white Western, whatever, probably male person.

Let’s say I wouldn’t apply for the artist residency, right, like who else would get it and how, and what would that mean? And I’m not saying that I do that with all these spaces. For example since 2018 I did a project with some artists in Israel, and then after that I decided to do a thing where I don’t work with any institutions in Israel, even if they’re pro-Palestinian the fact that they exist in Israel and you know Palestinian artists and people can go and participate in those spaces in a similar way, and all the complicated situations there. I just decided that I’m going to follow this protocol which is about, which is a pro-Palestinian protocol which is to not work with any institutions, cultural institutions in Israel, regardless of what their ‘politics’ might be on their website or whatever. So I do make those choices and I do build those spaces where I know that this is a line for me, like I am not willing to participate in and these are my reasons, right? Bu then it comes to a point where, you know, there were cases when like I had a really amazing conversation with my gallerist, my former gallerist, where he was like, look there is no clean money in these big art institutions, all of it is dirty money, like that’s what you need to understand. But then you need to kind of define which part of this is what you want to participate in, what does it mean and where is it that you draw a line. So that’s again how I think about participation within these tech spaces, where I want to be part of it, and I want to sometimes use the money and the funding to do the work that I want to do, but at the same time I want to make sure that I can go to a Google Art and Culture conference and criticise them in that space. And they’re not going to like it, they’re probably not going to invite me back, but at least I went and got money for talking, like I told them what I thought was wrong with their practice. So it’s always a place that I’m constantly navigating in my head, and it’s not easy, but I think it’s always a work in progress.

JS: At the end of Physical Tactics… you talk about the ways in which this aesthetic detective work might animate the objective and the evidential by means of poetry, metaphor and magic. In the present moment, after four long years of Trumpism, magical thinking has a certain kind of common currency. It’s evident in the way that Trump and conspiracy groups such as QAnon used delusional thinking as forms of wish fulfilment for example. But that doesn’t necessarily discount all of magical thinking as a strategy for rethinking relations of power. Could you address the  magical approaches in your work, and where the magical and the mythic might intersect with the evidential?

MA: Yeah, I think one of the things that is the most important, has been the most important in the development of for example my She Who Sees the Unknown series which specifically focuses on mythology of and finding these female/queer and genderless figures within ancient stories of the Arab and Persian manuscripts and books. That work was really important in kind of making me realise why I want to build a space that uses non-Western, like a really long history, of non-Western ways of thinking about magic and magical thinking and myth building and mythical thinking, in a way that it can then connect to issues that are politically related. Whether like it’s patriarchism or environmental degradation, so each of these figures that I’ve chosen to work with, these monstrous figures, they take different roles. But one of the first things for me was that how the idea of rationality, right? Through, when you look at specific history of let’s say Arab and Persian era and you see the arrival of rationality, in a way that is not accepted as a way to think through everything, or like science within that sense. How like there’s a big part of it that is very much influenced by the rationality of, again, the Western and again specifically, the white man, right? And how that was appreciated because it was the correct way to make sense of things, like that kind of focus on rationality and modernism and individualism of humans.

So I was really curious about researching all these ways that actually haven’t been explored that I find a lot of value and power into the ways that people, you know thousands of years ago within our cultures practiced making sense of the world, right? And that was to imaginal thinking and mythical building and imagination. I mean, what did imagination allow and also it was, what I also find fascinating is that some of these methodologies were very much connected to mathematic and science, so there is like this beautiful merging of these two worlds. For example there is a very specific practice called the ‘science of sand’  or Ilm-Al-Raml which translates to the science of sand which was practiced by, specifically in the Arab world, where people would go and sit on the desert or some sandy area and they would draw these dots and lines, like sixteen lines, they would get into this zone head space and just let their hand go and it would be like random, each line of these sixteen lines would be a random number of dots and through this complex calculation they would basically turn these dots into lines. Then at the end there would be a pattern that would remain, but again every time that ending pattern would be a different pattern because of how the number of dots they would draw was random. And then they would align that, this is where the mathematics come, they would align that to all these studying and understanding of the position of stars. Then through this process they would then tell the future, or what is known as opening doors, or opening doors of the house to make sense of events in the future. So I’ve been really fascinated by those methods where these things are combined and is very removed from, again, Westernised thinking of futurity and future telling. Like the time within ilm al-raml, the time is not past, present and future, but the time is present, past, present and future. So it’s a completely different understanding of our relationship to time and I think if we could break though again this very one way of thinking through time and space and magic and the possibilities of mythical thinking was something that I’ve been trying to do with my work, where it allows for new methods that hopefully suggest new spaces that can be opened and imagined because of these practices. So I’m very removed from magical thinking when it comes down to more often modern or trendy practices of it at a moment within, like how astrology and all of these practices of talking about stars and stuff is like a trendy thing right now. And I participate, I have the app and look at it, all that, but I still think like for my work and the kind of work I want to do, I want to do something that is not falling into that space but actually doing something different with all these methods that are thousands of years old.