Faisal Anwar
Investigating Shared Narratives Through New Media Art
For our next edition of #SAIatHome, we are featuring artist Faisal Anwar, juror and advisor for South Asia Institute’s first virtual exhibition Diasporic Rhizome (March 15 - May 15). Anwar is also the curator for KB22 - Karachi Biennial 2022.
Faisal Anwar is a new media artist working between Canada and Pakistan. As a contemporary artist working in the digital medium, Anwar’s works respond to spatial surroundings to encourage interaction and curiosity while raising potent questions. His interactive works often utilize public data, community engagement, social media, and question how rights of access blur lines between private and public spaces to form new territories representing time, movement, memory and hope. Anwar explores this social interactivity and collective behavior in modern urban cultures by tapping into people’s perception of public and private spaces. His recent works examine ideas of identity, pains of dislocation, and notions of power through augmented realities. Most of Anwar’s projects are participatory in nature, inviting his audience to interact and evolve.
Can you tell us about your practice?
My inquiry lies in the many forms of human engagement, finding and telling stories that emerge and evolve with the ever-changing forms of mediums of communications. Through my practice, I explore the history and diversity of urban spaces and cultural identities. Investigating with the use of computing, algorithms, raw social data and creative coding as my medium, I create works that are conceptually intriguing while pivoting community participation, and narratives. My artistic practice branches through interactive installations, immersive environments, data driven interventions and internet art.
How do your surroundings integrate into your work?
Artists by and large respond to the times, critically examining issues and creating narratives reflective of their surrounding. Today, complex communication and digital structures are part of our lives. ‘Data’ is moving faster than the speed of travel and new behaviors are introduced in the way we communicate, live, know one another and form a society. I use technology and the internet as mediums commenting on our 24/7 global digital culture, while asking questions around the impact of these shifts. My immediate physical surroundings has been Canada for the past 17 years, yet the way I work, my geographical boundaries are blurred and facilitated by the space I work in.
How does working in the digital medium allow you to convey your message?
Storytelling and shared narratives have always been a major part of my work; starting from my student days at National College of Arts, where I was actively involved in performance and puppetry, and later working with Mammalian Diving Reflex, an experimental performance company in Canada. When bringing this interest to the digital realm, I became very intrigued by the concept of “the medium is the message” explained by the communication theorist Marshal McLuhan in the 1960s. McLuhan proposed that a communication medium itself, and not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. I find this theory and study equally valid today in relation to the digital mediums.
I like to work with public data and social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. I can give a few examples of my work to better answer and explain my process of navigating the digital. In 2019, I was awarded the Labverde Residency at the Amazon rainforest to research and work with scientific climate data. My proposed project Seek enables collaborative research with environmental scientists to develop playful and meaningful engagement helping scientists to create new methods of dissemination of information for various audience while bridging art with science, technology and nature. The project aims to create awareness, reduce ‘climate depression’, give a positive response to small changes in real-time and let people see the effects.
+City is another project that was funded by SSHRC Insight Development grant. It is an advanced creative/artistic and analytical application that was developed to track, visualize and archive content generated via social media platforms. Co-created with Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, this project provided insights into social good, social change, art and innovation, with the goal to change how we perceive the interplay of physical and digital lives. The project transformed Toronto’s Metro Hall Rotunda into a dynamic hub where for an entire night of the Nuit Blanche festival, a social experiment was created to present a series of improv sketches by actors sparked by ideas generated via curated #tags. It combined a physical space, live audience and the virtual simultaneously.
+City
Toronto, 2012
I See My Streets: Karachi
How does the digital space give you agency to connect with people in a way that you couldn’t in the public space?
Tweet Garden
The earliest investigation in my practice was and continues to be about connecting people separated by geography, time zones, social status and cultural barriers. Using new technologies and the digital space became critical in achieving and facilitating this exchange. My interest originated back in 2008/9 during my residency at Banff New Media Center in Canada. Since then I did a series of site-specific interventions, real-time video installations based on locative media and public interventions, which at times connected people from different continents responding to similar concerns. Projects such as Odd Spaces (2011/2013) and Tweet Garden (2013/2015) were exploration of such connectivity and the challenges that come with it.
A key component of most of my work is that it is not created in isolation, audiences become part of the creation of the work. Using mediums that they are already familiar with, such as cell phones, they play an active role in the artistic process. The project I See My Streets presented at the first Karachi Biennial was entirely developed by engaging the youth of Karachi through a workshop process to reimagine the streets of their city, through a digital pictorial mapping.
The digital space is not only my medium, but the potential within this space provides a methodology for my projects that would otherwise not be possible when working in conventional ways.
Can you tell us more about your work CharBagh, which was displayed at the Aga Khan Museum Toronto in 2016?
I am fascinated by elements of nature, architectural spaces and public encounters. The term ‘charbagh’ refers to the Persian/Islamic-style quadrilateral garden divided by walkways or flowing water into four smaller parts with axial paths intersecting at the garden’s centre. This highly structured geometrical scheme is a powerful metaphor for the organization and domestication of the landscape and a symbol of socio-political territory.
Using internet/web, open network data and patterned geometry, the interactive installation, CharBagh is an ever-evolving, dynamic digital garden that grows over time with incoming streams of large public data. The project examines today’s socio-political realities, questioning the changing human behaviors, and how we access and interpret information; specifically looking at how the data generated in social media documents our modern history and blurs the line of facts and fiction.
Prior to the project’s presentation, a set of hashtags were curated to provide a framework to the conversations. Through a process of workshops as well as live participation during the presentation, audiences responded to the hashtags through their phones. These conversations were then sorted, converted to patterns, and archived to construct the installation.
In 2016, CharBagh was curated by Zulfikar Hirji, Associate Professor, York University and was commissioned by the Ismaili Centre and the Aga Khan Museum Toronto. The project developed through a series of workshops with youth, exploring the topic sensory cities, and the ethical use of social media, later projected on the facade of the Aga Khan Museum growing over a course of 12 hours. In 2019, a new iteration of this project was presented at the exhibition Garden in the Machine at the Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver. Here the project grew from workshops with Surrey residents responding to questions on sustainable food production, climate change and nature.
CharBagh: A Sensory Garden
Faisal Anwar
Aga Khan Museum Toronto
October 1-28
How Do You see South Asian artists utilizing the digital space to connect to their audiences?
The one thing emerging digital space has done to our society, especially in COVID times, is that it has enhanced connectivity. People are able to get their message out to a much larger and wider audience quickly and directly. I see artists successfully using the digital space for the dissemination of their work to a wider international audience, and in many ways the dependency on promoters, agents, publications and galleries has reduced. Platforms like Instagram, e-galleries, influencers, bloggers etc. are widely and efficiently used to increase reach out. In terms of South Asian artists or artists in general using the digital space in the actual creation of their work, this is still in its early stages, in fact it’s in an evolutionary stage around the world. Educational institutions with interdisciplinary programs and multi-platform channels are definitely helping young artists to fill the gaps. Although I personally see that more and more artists are going to experiment more in the digital space; there is an exciting future ahead.
Participating youth in I See My Streets were select students and members from The NJV High School, the Orangi Pilot Project, Karachi School of Art, and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.
What is your definition of new media art and how do you think the art form will evolve in the future?
Art has always been a true reflection of the times it exists in. It amplifies diverse expressions, mindsets, along with archiving contemporary times. To understand new media art and its future evolution, I think we need to go through recent art movements in the past 2+ decades and study current art and industry trends.
The rapid progression in communication technology and development in computing has influenced all facets of life, including art, and directly impacting new media and technology-based art. Art definitions are always subjective to their times. Even within digital art there has been evolution from video to new media to transmedia, the internet of things (IoT) to hybrid art, and all of these definitions are sometimes complex and there is no one way to explain or experience it.
To me, the simplest new media art or media art definition can be art that is created with computing or code, but again it's not the full picture. I foresee evolution on three levels, ideation, process and presentation, with a major shift happening in the status quo. We have worked within architectural spaces like museums and galleries to host, archive and display work and invite artists to work within the boundaries viewed by a set audience. Most of the time, the conversations and engagement with the art, artist, and audience are subject to institutional level resources and planning. I think this model will change and evolve, and we will be creating more spaces that respond to work and not the other way around. Another inevitable evolution is that the emphasis on technology per se will become less and it will be more about experience and storytelling. The question I am really interested in experiencing is how will the art be shaped in the next 10 to 20 years with the mindset of today’s Generation?