Your work spans the fields of art, tech, academia, care work, music, advocacy and more - can you share how you developed your interdisciplinary approach?

I have always been interested in image-making as a technology, and throughout human history artistic and technological dimensions have been entangled and interdisciplinary. Pottery or weaving, for example, are both ancient technologies and art forms. My work has mixed both traditional media and media-based practices and technologies. The difference between media and art can be debated but they both relate to image-making; however, each draws from its own distinct tradition of craft and scholarship.

I studied film-making as a graduate student, and then classical painting at the Florence Academy, where I learned approaches to image-making rooted in geometry and optics as foundations of so-called naturalism. Later, during my PhD at the RCA, I pivoted towards digital practices as a political and ethical response to being saturated by digital media and images, as the pandemic was accelerating the digitalisation of daily life at that time.

For me, working with technology through art practice is both a way of designing my own tools and a form of resistance against big tech and digital capitalism. Technologies are never neutral: they are bound up with politics, finance, power, and geopolitics. As an artist, I am both compelled and repelled by how digital technologies intersect with power and militarism.

My advocacy and research are inseparable from my artistic practice: on one hand, mapping the harms these technologies create; on the other, breaking, bending, and reshaping them towards care-based practices and cultivating co-vulnerabilities in the face of an increasingly polarised political landscape. I am comfortable with a degree of ethical duplicity in my work, and as an artist I prefer to build and experiment rather than take purely discursive positions. This often means getting my hands dirty with current technologies while also trying to subvert or remake these through critical media practices.

Can you explain a bit about how and why you redirect tech like generative AI towards supporting intersectional stories and archives that are under threat?

In my thinking, there are aspects of all technologies that are part of our global human intellectual inheritance, which forms the backbone of open-source thinking. The development of cuneiform, the practice of weaving, or the invention of the wheel, for example, have all carried implications for human culture on a transregional or global level. In recent years, critical theorists have rejected universalist framings, especially in relation to the legacies and realities of colonialism. This rejection of universalism and a shift to relativism is critical and valuable and informs decolonial practice.

However, I do think technologies can carry species-relevant innovation that should not be limited or assigned to one group, as the nature of science and technologies is built across so much multicultural knowledge. I think one of the reasons technologies become dominant, militaristic, and dangerous is because of the flattening of multicultural traditions, voices, and use cases including marginalised, oppressed, and non-hegemonic users, thinkers, and contributors who have shaped and can shape the development of technologies. Without the participation of intersectional or global south voices, there is danger of technologies like AI becoming entirely in service to militaristic and oppressive agendas which are regionalised or racialised, becoming anti-humanistic and anti-nature in the sense they do not help sustain multifarious life on this planet.

For me, the danger is in thinking only through polarities. In nature, opposing waves create interference patterns – complex, unexpected, and often beautiful. As an artist, I look for these kinds of interference patterns, to find ways of loosening the grip of the ideological polarities we are subjected to in the current toxic political landscape.

I see the role of artists as integral to developing more humanistic technologies – not just in terms of aesthetics and expression, but also in technical development and use cases. Artists have always been technologists, shaping fields from ceramics to photography to computer graphics, and bringing invaluable human, cultural, and critical dimensions into innovation. In doing so, they create openings that push back against corporate-led and oppressive roadmaps of dominant technologies and ideologies.

By centring intersectional and marginalised stories, we can move towards technologies that honour Indigenous cultures and natural systems. Ultimately, the participation and creativity of diverse voices will determine whether there are points of liberatory emergence in the development of technologies. This has very real implications as to whether AI or other advanced technologies can support the development of humanistic, anti-genocidal, and earth-affirming technologies and futures.

Can you describe a highlight moment from your journey as an artist?

I feel this most strongly when students or younger artists –especially from the Global South – reach out to say they found something in my work that inspired them or opened up their thinking. As an Arab-American woman working in technology and art, that feels deeply important: to open pathways and possibilities in a space that is still so hegemonic and exclusionary.

How do you relate to the idea of being a Middle Eastern woman?

I identify as a Palestinian-Iraqi-American female artist. I have issues with the term Middle East, and prefer the decolonial variation SWANA due to the obvious question: Middle of where, and East of what? In the tech space especially, being a SWANA woman is important as there is so much silencing of critical voices especially against the militarisation of technologies. I also identify as Arab-American, which is not an easy identity to knit together at this time of polarisation.

On top of that, I like to identify as Eastern Mediterranean, which I see as a historical identity that can be useful in rethinking or contesting the divide between Europe and the so-called Middle East. That divide is literally creating an invisible line in the Mediterranean to establish fortress Europe, whereas the Mediterranean has always also been about linkages, connections, and shared climates and ecologies. I see artists as integral to developing anti-racist practices, which includes looking for complexity and inference patterns between polarities, such as dividing the SWANA region from Europe.