Tarek Atoui ‘Technology is a tool like a brush or a hammer or nail, but it’s not a finality. The idea of the workshop is to open it to the public and interact and bring in the student community. The works are interactive and a dynamic and amusing way for people to look at art. It’s quite new for a lot of people in Sharjah. The works are fun, impressive and confusing, and a lot deeper than just sound. The projects of the artists are very modern sound and image-wise, if you are looking at international standards, they have potential in the future as strong artwork.’
Aya Tarek from Egypt is working with toys imported from China. Her workspace looks like a messy child’s room; cheap plastic toys, little pianos, and a children’s computer that teaches spelling are just a few of the dismembered objects scattered across her table. Her project consists of breaking the toys apart and refurbishing them to give them a new purpose. Part of it plays on the story of capitalism and being influenced by a consumerist society: ‘we are flooded by all these toys from china, they come to us in big amounts but they are usually bad quality and don’t last very long’. As a child, Aya says she had always wanted to break her toys and pull them apart but was never allowed to. As an artist however, she is now finally able to make it happen. She enjoys taking apart the wiring, adding switches and finding new frequencies and hotspots, during Bytes & Pieces Aya will be performing for about two hours.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme from Palestine are developing a project that is almost purely audio-based. The idea is to use sound to evoke feelings. Basel says ‘in art there is always a gap between the viewer and the object and sound can be used to bridge that gap or bring the viewer closer to the artwork.’ Their work has a political theme to it, exploring the physicality of sound and looking at sound as a weapon. 'What we have chosen to present today is the initial research that further develops our work around the politics of sound; largely inspired by the use of sonic bombs during an assault on Gaza in 2005, this project seeks to explore the more subtle and at times covert uses of sound as a weapon of war. At the heart of this is not only an examination of the physicality of sound, its relationship to the body and the production of space, but critically the psychological resonances of certain sound frequencies. The sound frequencies we present today only begin to look at the potential of sound in this light.' Basel and Ruanne's installation is in a room with a long hallway, it is dimmed and speakers have been set up and some windows were covered to manipulate sound and create both an audio and a visual effect. The sounds you feel reverberating through your body as you enter the hallway sound choppy, like helicopter blades; as you walk further in the room the noise is different; towards the end of the room there is a chair surrounded by bass-heavy speakers from which the participant can experience the full impact of the work.
Mohammad Nabil from Egypt refers to his work as ‘live cinema’ and a social experiment. The project consists of capturing video of the audience whilst they are viewing another installation and projecting this video on a screen in another area of the exhibition. He removes the image of the original installation so it appears as if the viewers are observing a blank wall or empty space. By taking them out of context, viewers can study the way people behave and look at other people’s body language in relation to a blank space. He believes it will be interesting to see how different people observe art by, in turn, observing them from afar.
Shaikha Al Mazrou from the UAE is working on a project titled 107. All titles of her recent work are very literal, here referring to the 107 motherboards that were used in the installation. Shaikha’s project is concerned with collecting found and discarded objects that lost have lost their original value and giving them a new purpose: in this case motherboards and discarded computers. She has used them to create a vibrant installation that revisits the work of artist Paul Klee and plays with the idea of synchronism, literally meaning the translation of sound into colour. One of the purposes of her work is to test the viewer's intellect. She also plays with the idea of shocking the viewer. Her installation of colourful motherboards also looks like a painting or a galaxy from a distance.
Aya Younis from Jordan has developed a project titled Hallway 1,8,6. The project consists of a 1 pixel video , 8 basic sounds to make noise and 6 infrared lights. It is a sound and light installation: ‘the idea behind it is to explore the violent impact of information that we send and receive in the form of sound and body. The light is to show the emotional, psychological and mental state that we go through while dealing with violence in this installation, and to test human defence mechanisms.’ Hallway 1,8,6 is a one person interactive installation in which the viewer walks through a dimmed hallway, triggering sensors as they walk that effect an interaction with violent levels and speeds of light and sound.
Sarah Faruki from Jordan’s Light Composition is a series of sound installations that seek to understand the light qualities of a given space and translate them into sound. In this rendition of the series, Faruki studies the light properties of the exhibition space itself; specifically the light emanating from the exhibited works. The resultant sounds of each space can be heard separately and the whole composition in the artist's space at the end.