This is a proposal for a multi-channel, interactive live cinema performance and installation about an animated cyborg, who is also an Arabic-speaking mother. Conceptually, this work stitches together dynamic, cultural concepts of ‘Media,’ ‘Migration,’ and ‘Imagination’ as they travel unevenly across cultural and linguistic boundaries. The story follows our cyber conscious trio, VJ Um Amel: an Arabic and English speaking, female cyborg, Shashi: an androgynous, male cyborg with sonic powers, and Femme Bot: VJ Um Amel’s seductive sidekick, as they move in and out of various media. These include film, web-based media, and animation from 1950s Egyptian cinema to contemporary feature-length films.The narrative structure is framed in the style of the literary epic, 1,001 Arabian Nights by Shehrazade. Our world extends animation, film, and media into a cyber imagination about the Middle East. LATEST VIDEO REMIX PREVIEWS
"Umdulation Circa 1950--> A VJ Um Amel Remix PREVIEW" [09.29.09] VJ Um Amel is an Egyptian-American, feminist cyborg who shape-shifts from animation to avatar, VJ to mother, from machine to human. In this live performance, VJ Um Amel remixes several musicals from Egyptian cinema including Lahn el Wafa (1955) starring Abdel Halim Hafez and Chadia; 'Afrita Hanen (1948) starring Samia Gamal and Farid El Atrache; and Fatma (1947) by Ahmed Badrakhan. Since its early beginnings in the late 1920s and until the late 1940s, the influential Arab Egyptian cinema evolved and reinvented itself largely by incorporating Hollywood's well-tested formulas and character roles. By the 1950s, the Egyptian motion picture industry was producing high-modernist aesthetic and narrative trends. Um Amel has always been curious about her mother's past as an opera singer and film star in 1950's Cairo.There she finds love, life, romance, and how to move her hips without glitches. After escaping modern Cairo, her premier appearance as the cybernetic belly dancer will astound everyone in 2010.
"The Cyber Conscious Trio--> Series Pilot TRAILER" [08.05.09] The pilot episode juxtaposes the politics of the aesthetics between Waltz with Bashir with that of Persepolis, two feature animated films on the Middle East. The cyber conscious trio also spend time in Jerusalem and imagine the Separation Wall in cyber space, as well as in and out of websites like youtube and Facebook.In the VJ Um Amel Series, the trio will navigate through these various landscapes by crossing between the cinematic worlds of these two films, and locating themselves and their world amidst it all. How do the cyborgs navigate through the tricky politics of this Middle Eastern terrain, the audience may be wondering…which side do they take? The Cyber Conscious trio attempt to show that issues of domination can be much more complicated than a typical binary vision of the Middle East might suggest.
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