The overriding principle driving my work is the integration of different fields of study, languages, objects, and aesthetics into a cohesive form, while employing an innovative cinematic or digital platform.  My work critically examines the nature of digital information and cyber existence in a post-9/11 world. I am primarily concerned with digital compositions, particularly in Arabic. In my practice, I aim to bypass the notion of critic as authority who controls narrative. Instead, I aim to create a new authoritative but participatory role that resonates with web culture—that of co-editor, co-curator, and co-producer all at the same time. These practices are dedicated to promoting digital literacy in a global community, and, finally, to producing participatory and interactive digital environments that speak across languages.

My passion for culture production is combined with a commitment to education. In both my Arabic-English archiving initiative and live cinematic performance, the literacy needed to produce these works has been neither in English nor in Arabic, but a fluency in code and digital software. This procedural literacy—an understanding of computational media at the level of its “rhetoric, aesthetics, and poetics encoded in any work” —is the language from which I conceptualize my work, which is also often ideologically couched in collaborative infrastructures (Michael Mateas, “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner”). I believe that a shared procedural literacy among collaborators in digital and new media productions might provide a key to 21st century democratic practices.  With the emergence of satellite university campuses and Arab media centers in Abu Dhabi, educational initiatives in Doha, and large-scale art initiatives in partnership with institutions like the Guggenheim Museum and the Louvre in the UAE, the future potential for promoting digital literacy and critical thinking around the subject is (almost) certain. -- VJ Um Amel