PROJECTS
We hacked the US Declaration of Independence, helping to reclaim it by those who were not represented by the 56 white men who signed it over 240 years ago. The "re-declarations" were all made with words from the Declaration itself. The NFTs were free to mint, plus gas. There will be 568 Redeclarations total, ever. Make yours @ www.redeclarations.com.
Want a physical Redeclaration?
Head here 👉🏼 Redeclarations
BORROW (AND NEVER GIVE BACK)
The project demonstrates how literature can make a parasitic home out of any language: A job description, a scripted meditation, a scam email. By scavenging poetry out of linguistic dumpsters, the potentiality of our waning attention is reconsidered.
The project is also a double entendre: Immigrants and refugees are often accused of stealing nationals' jobs. As a Lebanese immigrant in America, my use of the English language can be interpreted as a reverse-colonization and a heist of sorts.
MORE VISUAL POETRY
A mixing of words, collage and painting! Work in Progress. More here.
MAIL ART
When lockdowns started in March 2020, Dream Farm Commons and friend and artist Shilpi created Mail art. The second promt was “How are you showing care for yourself + community?”. In my submission, I cut the ends of tea bags and created a postal card out of them.
INVISIBLE CIVILIZATIONS
This is a series about the people we stopped seeing in everyday life and who became, as a consequence, invisible. The series draws inspiration from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and an amazing expo I once saw in Paris whose name I completely forgot.
THE IMPOSSIBLE CAMPAIGN
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- Lewis Caroll, Alice In Wonderland
The Impossible Campaign was an email subscription in the style of popular email newsletters. It played - or "preyed" - on visitors' fear of having thoughts way too ordinary and missing out on time-worthy intellectual stimulation. The "pitch" went as follows:
BORROW, PRINT, CUT, PASTE
Language poems made of found language in my spam email.
GRIMES, LABOR OF LOVE NFT
My first piece as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The background is made of 3 of my favorite Grimes’ songs that include the word “baby” (and “born again”). I wrote them down by hand behind the portrait. It took a couple of hours. Almost as long as childbirth. A labor of love.
VR JAGUAR
One of a few dablings in Virtual Reality. Flying Jaguar is a short animation created using Quill.
LIFE OS
Life OS (Operating System) came from an insight not too foreign to the one that gave birth to driverless cars: If A. Dillard was right when she wrote "the way you live your day is the way you live your life", then we better not leave our days' design to ourselves and let professionals, or machines, handle the task.
Life OS, in the spirit of the tech industry's "lean methodology" took the form of a "minimal" landing page.
ALTERNATIVE MEDITATIONS
These Soundcloud recordings came to mind while following the Headspace Singles Series. Headspace is a meditation ap and "Singles" are contextual meditation sessions focused on being mindful when "Eating", "Running", "Cooking" etc.
I felt there were several gaps. First, in the delivery and the content: Why focus on the breath and physical sensations before "Eating" when there are several, more exciting, lenses to consider before one's first bite in a meal such as the memories one will retain or the real physical changes one will experience. Second, the themes tackled didn't feel compelling. Why not a meditation around the moment where Evolution starts underlying most of your mental models? Why not a meditation around when to say I love you?
I’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMDY
"I'd like to thank the academy" is a spoken word album born out of a love for movies and a desire to empathise with all the actors who, at the time, hadn't won an Oscar yet. From "Colin Firth"
"I sleep with women
but i fall in love with men -
Colin Firth, A single man
And the words strike a chord on the violin of my soul. Triggered a sonata I don't want to hear. But I learned, I read somewhere the things you don't want to face are the ones you should. Because then: the obstacle becomes the way": I'd like to thank the academy
And if you'd like to read the lyrics for each, head here: Spoken word Lyrics
You’ll find some of my old poetry here. My latest poetry is here on Medium.
MAILING SCANDAL
Mailing my book, In the Name of Scandal, meant making the mail envelope scandalous as well. My partner Katrina and I cut up Hyper Fructose, Bomb and Patagonia magazines to create these.
WRITING WITH SONTAG
1) Susan Sontag made a feminist out of me. Not through indisputable arguments but the power of radical intimacy ie "This is who I am and what being a woman in this world feels like".
2) She showed me how consciousness was embodied. How we ultimately feel our way to our epiphanies.
3) By writing with no bars hold, she painted the picture of a world with no censorship, of the self or others. She redefined vulnerability.
While reading "as consciousness is harnessed to flesh", her journal between 1964 and 1980, I found myself exercising that same vulnerability, like an apprentice, and started writing my own journal over it, experiencing one epiphany after another.
Writing with Susan went as follows: “If you'd like to read the book, I'll mail it to you with the condition you also write your journal over it. I'd say we can do this with 4 more people before it becomes too full. I chose black so you'll have to choose another color. Once we've rotated through 4 more people, I'd love to encase it and go place it in the Montparnasse cemetery where SS is buried.”
A YEAR OF TRYING TO BREATHE
Sep 2013 - Sep 2014. A year of inquiry using several kinds of mind enhancing and altering substances, culminating in an epiphany titled "Zen is the taste of entropy". Which I now have trouble remembering.
BUILD UNTITLED
Untitled was incepted and launched with my friend, Denis Maksimov. Untitled was meant to be the intersection between TED and Burning man: A transformational event for the mind and heart.
Read more about it here:
Untitled Manifesto - Exprnc.
I started sketching in 2010. First on paper, then on "paper" the app. Most of my work is on Instagram. Some you can find here: Sketches.
You’ll find some of my old writing here. My latest writing is here on Medium.