Left: Hyperflower on the “Flower” page. Right: Hyperflower journeying from “Pollen” to “Emigration.”
Hyperflower is an internet-connected object that autonomously browses Wikipedia. Starting from the Wikipedia page for “Flower,” the object selects a random link and navigates to it. On each new page, it repeats this process, continuously following links deeper into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The petal screen displays the main image from the current Wikipedia page, while the leaf screen lists all the possible links on that page. If the object encounters a page with no links or an error, it returns to the “Flower” page.
Failing Archives installed in Lines of Flight: From Above, PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, March 14-April 20, 2019.Failing Archives installed in Lines of Flight: From Above., PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, March 14-April 20, 2019.
In 2016, as Syrian cities were being flattened due to civil war, trenches, walls and migrant detention centres were rising across the world to prevent the movement of refugees. Based on investigations conducted using aerial imagery and found footage, this film tracks the destruction of homes and the construction of anti-migrant infrastructures as intertwined processes dispersed across space and time.
In this section of the film, a video uploaded to Youtube showing the attempted toppling of a statue of Hafez al-Assad (right) is traced to the location it was shot in—the central square of Daraa, Syria (left).
Sandbox session showing the Sand, Water, Flower, Fern and Bee elements.
A multiplayer falling sand game utilizing cellular automata and WebSocket. A love letter to the falling sand games of my childhood and an experiment in imagining alternative digital commons.
LANDSAT.EARTH Low-resolution map of the earth, 2023
Landsat.Earth is a low-resolution portrait of the earth as it appeared yesterday. It is made by combining all the images captured by NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite in a single day. Landsat images have a coarse spatial and temporal resolution; they are taken 16 days apart and each of their pixels cover 30x30 meters on the ground. As such, Landsat images are ill suited to surveillance at the human scale and instead function as documents of planetary phenomena.
THE JACK PINE 2 channel installation, live video, 2019
The Jack Pine installed in Scaffolds I can no longer see (on left and right walls), InterAccess, Toronto, November 6-December 7, 2019. Also in the frame: work by Guillaume Pascale and Sahar Te. Image by Natalie Logan.Channel 1 of The Jack Pine showing live camera locations across Canada on February 18, 2021.
In 2014, leaked documents revealed that Canada’s Communications and Security Establishment used airport Wi-Fi hotspots to surveil passengers and tracked them for weeks after they had left the airport. The number of people surveilled in this operation is unknown even to Canada’s security agencies because of the automated, artificial intelligence backed methods used in contemporary data collection. The staggering scale of data being gathered by governments, militaries and corporations requires them to pair their surveillance infrastructures with AI to efficiently profile, police and profit. The Jack Pine combines live security cameras from around Canada with public AI software to paint the new Canadian landscape.
Channel 2 of The Jack Pine showing live camera locations across Canada on February 18, 2021
The Jack Pine is named after Tom Thomson’s famous 1916 landscape painting. This updated Jack Pine presents the new Canadian landscape, in which we hold our breath not at the serene coastlines of Southern Ontario lakes but at the scale and capacity of contemporary surveillance and AI infrastructures.
A Pre-Partition sketch of Pakistan from the Jinnah Papers at the British Library (IOR Neg 10811/41), georeferenced to highlight its spatial and political distortions.
In the summer of 1947, a British barrister who had never set foot in India used paper maps to sketch out the lines that would lead to its partition. Today, the border he drew is one of the most securitized spaces on earth. Thousands of floodlights installed along the border’s perimeter render it visible from space in a bright orange hue, underscoring the power of pencil lines drawn decades ago. In my MA thesis, I investigate how British and Muslim political interests used cartography to construct, reinforce, and contest ideas of nationhood and statehood during India’s partition.
Read the ThesisLeft: A section of the map used by the British to produce the Punjab section of the Pakistan-India border in 1947 (Reproduced from Mian M. Sadullah’s The Partition of the Punjab, 1993). Right: The same border visible from space in 2011, captured by the crew of the ISS.
My thesis is accompanied by an atlas of the maps produced in the lead up to Partition. The glitchy maps in this atlas visualize the distorted geographies embedded in the maps which were used to design the borders lining South Asia today. The atlas illustrates the absurdity of governing and partitioning land using just pieces of paper, and brings into relief the cruelty of imperial logics under which paper is held sovereign over millions of people.
NEWS OF THE WORLD Procedurally generated environment, 2019
News of the World as it appeared on August 31, 2019 at 5:56PM.A news person born on October 11, 2018 (left) and a news person born on October 27, 2018 (right).
News of the World is a procedural environment shaped by the text and images circulated by the news media. The World gathers the latest news stories every hour and uses their content and metadata to spawn figures, objects, and landscapes which interact with each other within the frame of a web-page. Face detection APIs are used to isolate the facial features of the people mentioned the day’s news and these features are then spliced together to produce news people which populate the landscape. News headlines and metadata are used to stitch together a shifting terrain in which the news people live. News of the World updates itself every five minutes with more creatures and features, transforming through exhibition periods and mimicking the world building powers of the news media.
The birth of a news person. News of the World as it appeared on August 31, 2019 at 5:44PM.
Screenshot of the online presentation of Falling Border. showing all three channelsThe left channel of the film uses aerial imagery to trace the route taken by refugees from Syria to Turkey, while the right channel utilizes 3D modelling and elevation data to reconstruct the terrain they traversed through.
Three years into the Syrian Civil War, ISIS launched an attack on Kobanî—a Kurdish city in Rojava. Within weeks all foreign journalists left the city. In their absence, daily reports from citizen journalists detailed key events from the fighting while satellites periodically captured images of the battle’s toll. Across three screens, this film combines these sources to document the siege of Kobanî, the migration it provoked, and how the city’s proximity to a border affected both militants and migrants.
