Diaa Ahmedien
#6: Future

Diaa Ahmedien is an international artist-based Cairo. He is a lecturer in the sciences of New-Media Arts and Technology and an associate editor in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, a Nature journal group, part of Springer Nature. Diaa is an educator, researcher and creator of setup systems for interactive artworks. His accurate specialization lies in the area of the sciences of New-Media arts, Digital Humanities, visual communications, and medical humanities, all of which emphasize the crucial role of the intersections among the arts, sciences and technology in shaping knowledge-based societies. In his practices, Diaa concentrates on the role of empirical interdisciplinary practice-based research in the artistic creation processes as a means of interactive communication-based creation, rather than being a mere means of individual creation.

ARTIST STATEMENT

It is well known that if you clearly understand an idea, you are able to explain it simply to the public. However, under today’s digital transformation, I am convinced that if I clearly understand an idea, I must be able to explain it to a computer. Talking to smart machines as an integral part of human capabilities is an inevitable path when I think of today’s self-making technologies.

My work, therefore, investigates convergent technologies as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping computational and biological systems in uncovering and augmenting the intersections of man-made life and nature-made life. My research and creation processes involve a balance of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Through my cutting-edge experimental artistic projects, I seek to foster the interdisciplinary knowledge derived from the artistic practice-based research and reinforce its dual functions of being a means of integrating the public into complicated scientific inquiries and as an approach to enrich the visual interface of the contemporary science.

ABOUT #FUTURE

During this program at ´ace, I expanded my practice to reflect on the ways in which I had used the browser as an active medium that can host and re-present the artistic creation process within a virtual context. The artistic gesture in this kind of practices is in the coding process itself, the programming is the script of the artwork and what we see as a result is the visual manifestation of the code. For instance, in my first exercise, I presented a model of six generative paintings created through open-ended processes.

Daniela Ruiz Moreno (curator-in-residency) said that “this experiment has been created in order to work not only within the possibilities of that technology, but also to expand it or go against its process”. I highly agree with that as it is (or it will be) worthy for an artist to build an autonomous system that offers infinite interactive loops for artists and their viewers to share their activities and inform each other towards more democratic, reflective, and transparent creative practices.

In the final joint project, I have investigated the concept of digital waste management by creating a generative environment to calculate the amount of energy consumed to save and sustain every bit of data waste used in that environment. Consuming such an amount results in increasing carbon emissions, thermal pollution, and water consumption by the cooling systems. This sheds light on the cons of digital transformation. But this is not to be against the future’s digital transformation, it is to think of how to overcome tomorrow’s digital pollution.