The Ever-expanding World of Linda Dounia
Linda Dounia is an artist, designer, and curator examining the intricate interplay between tangible and intangible structures through her expansive creative practice that celebrates the art of craft-making in dialogue with technology with acrylic, ink, pastels, vector, video, GANs, and more recently, Javascript, including languages like p5.js. These mediums fuse together harmoniously to craft her unique expressions. With a keen eye on technology's impact, Linda, who is Senegalese-Lebanese and currently based in Dakar, delves into how it can either perpetuate inequality or stimulate reflection on the profound philosophical dimensions of techno-capitalism.
Spannungsbogen (2022)
A notable achievement in Linda's journey is the unveiling of 'Spannungsbogen' in 2022, a series exhibited at Quantum Art. This monumental release marks the first expansive AI collection by an African woman, a compelling effort resonating with reflections on the biases ingrained in facial recognition technology and the dearth of non-Western perspectives within the realm of AI-generated art.
Dounia's artistic aspirations are entwined with envisioning futures steeped in solarpunk ideals, embracing degrowth, and championing decolonization. The echoes of her creativity have reverberated across renowned platforms and traditional auction houses like Christie’s, Unit London, Art X Lagos, Partcours, Art Basel Miami, The Dakar Biennale, Artsy NFT, Digital Art Fair Asia, and Art Dubai, where her work has found its vibrant stage.
Can you talk a little bit about your practice and what motivates you as an artist?
I was a designer, graphic, and interaction for nearly a decade before I transitioned to becoming an artist. I think craft has always led the way for me. I've always been happiest when I use my hands. It was true when I was a designer, and it's even more true now as an artist. In terms of how my practice has evolved, I think that true to my formal training as a designer, it's multidisciplinary in nature. I'm not constrained by medium. I use a lot of them in my work. More recently it's been about combining generative mediums with physical ones and exploring what comes out of that.
It’s also been about seeing how AI interacts with code, which has been up to this point, separate worlds for me. I’d say that multidisciplinarity is something that's very dear to me. I try to make that clear every time I talk about my practice because, in the art world, it’s hard to resist the temptation to be siloed.
Ultimately I'm always talking about the same thing in my work. It’s about exploring my upbringing here in Senegal and my family’s history through the towns we’ve lived in. It's a commentary on my experiences growing up and the environments I grew up in. I think I have a lot of nostalgia for that time because if I were to go back to my hometown today, the street I grew up on is completely different. It's almost like where I grew up and our way of life then doesn’t exist anymore. It's all gone. It's been replaced by a giant market.
For example, people are familiar with the checkered board in my work. That's because, in my childhood home, all the floors were checkered – black and white tiles. My work is very intimate in that way. Even though I might make work with mediums that are considered impersonal or not charged with emotions (which by the way I don't think is true at all), you can always see traces of that period of my life coming through.
The Garden At Dusk (2022)
When I make a techno-garden of flowers that don’t actually exist, like with my project ‘Once Upon A Garden’ once upon the garden, I am actually drawing inspiration from flowers that do exist. I actually used several endangered species of flora from the Sahel region in West Africa. So the work is really about flowers that grew up seeing or the ones that I didn’t get a chance to see because, by the time I was growing up, they were kind of rare.
There's definitely a lot of nostalgia in my work, and I think it’s a lot about mediating my context which I think a lot of people might not be familiar with. Some people have told me that my work feels political. I think it turns out to be political because my context is so often misrepresented and misunderstood. There aren’t many people who grew up where I grew up who have been able to break out in Web3 yet. So I think ultimately, when you see the things that I'm talking about or the perspective that I'm sharing, it can feel political if that is very unfamiliar to you.
How has this process of ideation, starting physically and moving into digital spaces, influenced your creative approach over time?
If I were to open my computer and start a project from scratch, I would be overwhelmed and there are a couple of things that play into that. First, the scope of what's possible when you're familiar with many tools is enormous. That can be crippling because you could just go so many different directions and therefore don't know where to start.
There is a French expression for it “l’embarras du choix”, which literally translates to being embarrassed by choice in the sense that a certain magnitude of choice can be paralyzing. So I definitely feel that experience, which is why I always start with my hands, with something tangible. It takes out the complexity altogether. When I pull out a piece of paper to make a mark, there are not so many more things I could do at that moment. Sure, you can swap the marker for an ink brush or whatever, but still, there's something very essential about that process that helps me narrow down my choice and feel less afraid to start or less confused about where to start.
Another thing that I've come to appreciate about starting with the physical is that it allows you to get all the brain farts out until you have a good idea. For example, if I were to open p5.js and I wanted to make a brushstroke, I’d have to actually write out the code to mimic a brushstroke. But if I just take an actual brush and make a bunch of marks on paper, then I can look at them, see what I am drawn, and try to replicate that using code.
Pointe de Bel Air (2023
Then that gives me enough room to be surprised as well, which is where I think a lot of the systems I work with become interesting – when they start to diverge from my initial idea or sensibilities. But I kind of need sticks in the ground to get there, tangible things I can observe, feel, and process.
There's a model we use in design where every process starts divergent and then converges and goes back and forth like that until we arrive at a solution. For me, the divergent phase is definitely taking a piece of paper, making some marks, and messing with some colors. When it comes time to pick a direction, I know I have reached the first convergence point. Then I execute that direction with a program or usually a combination of programs which leads me to another divergent until it’s time to curate and choose my favorite compositions.
Can you go into more about the tools and systems you’ve used over time until now essentially?
My introduction to making art with computers started with the program Paint, like many people I imagine. I was in my last year of primary school, and my grandma was given a computer by the church she worked for. That was my first time seeing a computer. I was born in 1994, so eight years after that (2002).
It's pretty late compared to some of my peers who might have been exposed to computers much earlier. I remember it didn't make any sound because we didn't have speakers. I would play some games and I had no idea they had sound until much later in life. We also didn’t have internet at home so the computer was a glorified typewriter for my grandma. One day, exploring it, I stumbled upon the paint software and was like, “What, you can do this?!”
I always loved drawing, so I was amazed that I could just draw the things that I drew on paper on the computer. I just kept at it after that. In middle school (it was a boarding school), we only had an hour of computer time each week per person. So my hour was usually spent trying to slowly load one video in the background while painting. I was taking art classes at the time but my teacher didn't really think that painting with computers was interesting. It didn’t discourage me though. Eventually in college, when I started teaching myself design, I was introduced to the Adobe Suite. I started with Illustrator because Photoshop just felt like a whole different world. I felt it would be a much easier transition from Paint. Illustrator became the gateway to all the other programs in the Adobe Suite and eventually, when I started working as a designer, I had to become proficient in many of the other programs like AfterEffects or Premiere.
Illustrator was still my favorite though because there was just a familiarity that I found easier to navigate. So for about 5 years I just kind of built my skills in those programs. When I started getting into interaction design, I had to learn a bit of CSS and HTML but I couldn’t get myself to enjoy coding buttons. It just felt like such a chore. It seemed to me like all websites were starting to look the same and function the same, so I couldn’t motivate myself to build what everyone else seemed to be building faster and better anyway.
Just before the pandemic happened, I had taken a sabbatical from work. I was burnt out from working in the design studio and having to travel so much. So I took some time off to travel, make art, and learn how to make ramen from scratch. Then the pandemic hit and I was between four walls. I had so much time on my hands that I decided to revisit coding. But instead of going straight back into front-end web design, I looked for ‘The Nature of Code’ to learn Processing. I looked for the book everywhere (I was living in Accra at the time)’, but couldn't find it. I read what I could find online and learned that way. At the same time, I was also teaching myself how to work with GANs. This was around 2020, the year I can say that my toolbox started to expand beyond that of a designer. Learning to work with GANs paid off a little quicker than learning Processing though. Within a couple of months, I was able to train my first model, but with p5, it just took a while to actually do something that I felt met my expectations. I was excited by the randomness of both these paths though. You can create systems that keep surprising you in delightful ways and get to places you hadn’t intended at all.
More recently, I was chatting with Ira Greenberg who introduced me to 3.js while we brainstormed a project we might work on together. So I've been looking into that as well.
That's amazing. Seems very vast and continues to grow.
Yes. I’ve heard other creative coders talk about the process of building an algorithm and the way it shapes up over time as interesting and beautiful in and of itself. The output's almost like the cherry on the cake at that point. I think it’s the other way around for me. I'm interested in form more than I'm interested in how to get to it. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in how to get to it, it's just that the form itself is what ultimately captures my focus.
If someone were to review my code, I'm sure they would probably find a hundred ways I could have done something better or more elegantly. That’s probably because I'm not necessarily investing as much capacity in being a better coder. I'm interested in achieving what I see in my mind's eye to start, and I guess skill with code is incidental in that pursuit.
Can you talk about your background in visual interaction and graphic design?
In 2021, I worked on a project for Figma’s annual conference, Config. It was a presentation of what I was kind of going through at that time as a designer. So I think it was when I became a designer, that I realized that there was just such a specific way of viewing the world. Obviously, I fell in love with design because of its history, but quickly, once you start becoming a practitioner, you realize that you're actually burdened by the historical influence of certain design movements.
It's undeniable, but it's also kind of become a crutch in many ways. It's there to me because design has evolved in the West mostly as what it's known today, we sort of started seeing a bit of tunnel vision of how other cultures around the world approach design. Because it looks different, you can't spot it immediately with the same principles that you apply to Western-based design. You have to kind of step out of that a bit. I was at the point in my career where I felt like I had to unlearn everything I grew up thinking that didn't fit this ideal of modern design and then you kind of get close to burnout and you realize, I don't have any more inspiration.
I feel like everyone is doing the same thing and we're just all copying each other. Nothing looked interesting anymore, so I had to figure out where I could find inspiration for myself. I realized how my eye was trained and unlearning and made a decision on whether I wanted to revisit that or not. So I went back into sort of like photographs of my childhood. The funny thing is that my grandpa had a cinema and my grandma had a grocery store and there was also a bakery under, like a house on the top floor and everything was on the bottom floor.
I grew up seeing posters of condensed milk or whatever, you know, branded socks and packages of stuff. And that was my idea of like, beautiful, right? Like growing up, the clothes people wore, the print that they matched. So there was a visual language that was very strong that drew me to art from those experiences. But then I had to favor app aesthetic because of my clients in design. When I hit that moment of burnout, both inspirationally and physically, I went back to that period and I tried to sort of feel my relationship with that and try to legitimize it in my practice and say like, “This is all a very valid way of looking at the world in a very valid way of designing and I'm gonna bring that into my work.”
Then, not long after I’m getting clients on the continent who are drawn to sort of a Western aesthetic. Following that period, I realized just how much I love posters and so a lot of my work actually is a poster to begin with. I think poster design is just an incredible art, and it's a very old art too. Like when you look at sort of Japanese tradition, where design is practiced and has been practiced for much longer than what we know. As design today has given me a lot of validation for the things I felt intrinsically and naturally. I think part of my work is part of saying, “Listen like my inspirations are valid. They're legitimate. Design is art.”
That's sort of the first language that I used to express myself artistically and I take principles of that and principles of what you might call more traditional, like within take in as much as I want from the world and craft my own from that. There's a lot of legitimizing that happens as I'm making choices for my work.
You mentioned the challenge of avoiding being pigeonholed in the art world. How has your ability to work across different mediums become a defining trait of your artistic identity?
Honestly, I've had a crisis of faith almost monthly, especially when I first came into the space, telling myself “Should I just be doubling down on one aesthetic or one medium?” I remember seeing some collectors cautioning artists that having a cohesive body of work makes it easier for them to find collectors. Even if it’s true in web3, history tells us something else. I often have to remind myself that the consumer view of art is a very curated understanding of how an artist actually works.
When you think of any of the greats, they’ll usually be widely known for a specific aesthetic. Galleries and auction houses obviously have an economic incentive to follow the demand in their curation, so it’s perhaps at museums or in history books that you’ll get a chance to dig deeper into these artists’ work and find out they usually used a variety of distinct ways to express themselves. Take Frida Kahlo for example, while people recognize her self-portraits, the symbolism and the context behind each work vary significantly. It’s hard to actually pin her down to a single aesthetic.
By using different mediums and exploring different aesthetics, I'm able to uncover different things about myself. Like if I were just using charcoal, I would never get to fall in love with how watered-down ink runs on paper, or how a GAN will always make itself known stylistically even with the most homogeneous training data. It doesn't even mean I have to be at the same level of proficiency with all the mediums I work with. It just means I have to be willing to experiment across all these different mediums and over time, build mastery at different rates. What it does mean though, probably, is that it takes me longer to build mastery than someone who focuses on one medium. But then, that stops to matter when you think of an art career spanning a lifetime.
The analogy I can give is like learning how to speak multiple languages. The person I am when I speak French or Wolof is not the same person I am when I speak English. For example, I'm much funnier in Wolof, but I can do different accents in French, while I am much better at articulating arguments in English. Knowing all these languages allows me to access different parts of my brain. It took me longer to speak them all like a native speaker, though I still struggle with basic phrases in all the languages I speak, but eventually, I am all the better for trying to use them all.
I've been fortunate that whenever I've had a crisis and grieve my inability to just do one thing, I am reminded that pursuing expansion comes naturally to me. Some of my collectors also celebrate me for it and pride themselves on their ability to spot my work even when I have gone a completely new route. Funny enough, they're always able to tell, which is so validating.
I remember somebody asking me how I find structure and peace in the studio with all the mediums that I work with. My response was “I don't.” I've devised my workspace such that I consistently overwhelm myself with the breadth of the tasks that I undertake. I'm constantly stuck and have to take a step back to look at something I am working on and ask myself “What are you doing?” In those moments, I find that I have to just push through, show up, and keep showing up until something happens. It always does and it’s always surprising and magical. I wouldn’t have planned for it, and the very configuration of my workspace and my workday wouldn't allow for me to have dreamt about even getting there.
I think, for me, working with many mediums is about letting myself get lost, and following whatever cues I have to find myself again. There is enough room in this approach for exploration and surrender to the unpredictability of making art. Even though I allow myself to get lost in the process, I am still receptive to signals or moments of clarity that guide me back home.
It’s a kind of Sisyphean approach to introspection but it works for me. None of this would happen without the complexity of combining a variety of mediums. It’s a kind of Sisyphean approach to introspecting through art but it works for me.
How has the combination of learning both design and coding skills enhanced your creative output? When did you start incorporating code into your work specifically?
If you look at the ‘Even by Design’ presentation I mentioned earlier for Config 2021, at the six-minute mark, you'll see these little cards I made in p5.js. That was the first time where I felt like I made something with code that worked aesthetically. Everything I made before that was trash. I still didn't feel like I was good enough though. You look at someone like Zach Lieberman who I've adored for a very long time, and you just think “Jesus, I'm nowhere yet.”
There's a certain insecurity when learning to babble a language that people have been speaking so fluently for so long. That’s kind of how it felt in the beginning, learning code. So I think it was always very scary for me. I scare easily (I have a lot of anxiety) but I don’t give up easily. One of my best friends once said to me that I’ve figured out a Pavlovian way to trick myself into continuing to work even when I am anxious. I put on a comedy series in the background while I work, usually The Office. Laughing sporadically helps ease my anxiety and I can keep working despite it.
Eventually, I started creating sketches that I liked and realized that you don't have to be a coding genius to make interesting things. One of my housemates, Delali, is a brilliant developer and I can't tell you how many times I have pestered him with “I'm stuck, how do you make this?” He usually says “Oh, it's simple. You can think about it in this, this, and that way.” So he's even teaching me how to think about certain concepts that don't naturally come to me. Even though I was decent at math in school, I think I would make a terrible developer, but as an artist who uses code to tell a story, sure, that I can do.
A lot of the time coding is a means to an end, maybe that’s blasphemous but there I said it. It's definitely a part of as opposed to the journey itself. I'm getting better at it as a function of doing it more often because I'm gaining more confidence as I'm reaching these sorts of milestones where I can look at something and say, “I really like that”, but my intent is just to make what I'm imagining. I have had a similar journey with painting. You might have the most beautiful concept and once you pick up a paintbrush, you realize you can't make a round shape because you don't know how to hold the brush. As you are getting better at that specific thing, you become more confident and you start to paint with a bit more freedom. I think that same principle applies to how I work with code.
made in p5.js (2023)
My design background does make it easier for me to come up with concepts that actually could work because I've worked in tech for quite a while. It gave me some principles of what might work and how things can play out in a beautiful way. And so I think there's an edge there. Having those design principles helps a lot in getting to the concept before I get to the program because it's just the same world. It's literally the same world.
I want to jump back to the topic of coding. Can you elaborate on how you view code as both a material and a creative tool, particularly in comparison to traditional art materials?
If I pick up a brush and I make a mark on paper, that is it, that is the beginning and the end of it. It's the system, it's everything in one. So you can say the paper is material. You can say the ink is material. And then, the brush would be the tool to sort of, you know, play with those materials. I think the same reasoning can be applied to GAN and code to an extent. What’s special about it is that it’s material that begets more material. It essentially multiplies itself. No brush can multiply itself.
It’s also about the fact that you're feeding material to a program and you're getting more material as a result. So to me, it's also about scale. When you think about code or GAN, you have material ad infinitum. You have a few lines of code, you press a key, and a new composition emerges, forever. That's really interesting to me because a few lines of code become a gateway to so much more.
It's been a mind-bending concept to wrap my head around, but once I started looking at it as material, it became a lot easier to mess with it. It leads to a lot of interesting questions. There's a certain reverence to the code and a different kind of reverence to the output. So I find myself wondering what happens when you mess with the output and what happens when you mess with the code. Is an output an offshoot of a code-base? Is it something different? If you look at both nodes (input and output) as material, then you can kind of do away with the reverence and cross some lines.
Working with computer systems is pushing me to learn faster because of the scale I have to negotiate at any given time. I am confronted with huge volumes of stuff, but also a huge spectrum of possibilities that I have to navigate. It makes me have to step up and learn at a speed that I haven't before.
That’s a perfect segway into this next question. What evoked you to start learning about and experimenting with GANs?
A wonderful example of using GAN technology in your artwork was found in the piece, “Dust is hard to breathe” released in 2022. What was the process like for you when creating this piece?
Dust is hard to breathe (2022)
GANs were a really random encounter. Like really random. I knew about creative code from working in design, and people like Casey Reas, Ben Fry, and Lauren McCarthy. But AI applied to art was not in my purview, beyond working on adaptive learning apps projects at work. Then I watched Coded Bias, a documentary by the Algorithm Justice League, which called out bias in AI technology, especially facial recognition and surveillance. After I watched it, I thought “This is bad!” but I also felt I needed to explore it more. You have programs that look at images and try to recognize other images, which means they're probably able to replicate images. How do I get my hands on this?
Lo and behold, a bunch of people had already been experimenting with it, so I went into a rabbit hole and came across research papers on GANs. I was blown away. It was mostly figurative stuff, so a lot of people were doing either landscapes or faces. I wondered if anyone had been trying to do anything with abstract art and didn't find too much. Actually, I found one article which essentially argued that after many tests, the researcher came to the conclusion that AI was a really bad abstract painter. My interest peaked at that point.
Abstract art, at first, was all about spontaneity and, in many ways symbolizes a kind of creative liberation artists had been looking for to break away from the canon. It felt to me that the age of AI was perhaps a good opportunity to start looking for ways to redefine what creative liberation meant. So I started looking for ways I could start training a model myself and realized I didn't have the right setup at all for it, and I definitely didn't have any connection to any research institute that had the right computers to do this or people who knew enough to do it.
So I just went online and started looking for what people in my situation used. I was able to work with some people who are basically using cloud services where you could send your images and specify the number of steps of training you wanted, and they’d do it for you and send you the results. It was horrible.
Then shortly after Runway ML came out with its beta launch I was fortunate to get access pretty early, so I started experimenting with it and it made everything a lot easier. I remember the first GAN I trained was with photos of acrylic vignettes that I had hand-painted. When I say train, I really mean re-train. GANs are usually pre-trained with millions of images, and can easily be retrained with smaller databases of a few thousand images through what’s called transfer learning.
I wanted to experiment with something abstract and see the extent to which the model could recognize my style and build on it. I also wanted to be surprised. I started with 1,000 abstract vignettes. That didn’t quite work. So I made another 1,000 images, added more rounds of training, and then magic! I had never seen anything like it. Some of the results looked like I could have painted them, and some looked like something I might have painted in the future like I just hadn’t thought about it yet but would eventually. And some felt completely alien.
I remember I downloaded about 10,000 outputs the first time and I was like, hold on, I can download 10,000 more, and just keep doing that? How is this possible? And if I could do it with acrylic paintings, I could do it with ink paintings, or maybe next time I could just go out and take pictures of textures around me and use that. The possibilities seemed endless.
What was at first a curiosity that just fed on itself, the more I learned about GANs and experimented with them, the more I fell in love. Then eventually I realized that it was a tool that could help me tell more complex stories at a scale I hadn’t dared imagine because my hands alone definitely don’t work that fast and that much.
I was always obsessed with flowers, so ‘Once Upon a Garden’ was a natural next step with GANs. I started looking for pictures of flowers that I grew up with, flowers my grandma grew up with, and tried to go as far back as I could in terms of like archives of flora that existed within my region to build a database. For ‘Dust is hard to Breathe’, my contribution to Artsy’s first NFT release, I used outputs from the first model I trained. Those vignettes that I painted were inspired by the idea of change. I just moved back to Senegal and couldn’t recognize a lot of the places I used to call home. Everything was different and climate change had a huge role in that. It felt right to use that model for the project.
What are the themes you’re most interested in exploring and conveying through your artwork?
My work is really about my childhood. I had a solid 5 to 8 years of stability and then everything started to change. My parents split up, I had to move out of my childhood home. My grandparents started getting sick and eventually passed. My parents were really young when they had me so it’s my grandparents who raised me. Losing them one after the other was hard and I had to relearn my parents as parents and not the cool uncle and aunty that I’d sometimes hang out with. Before these changes, I had an idyllic period of feeling loved and safe. It was the most beautiful and loving introduction to the world. I roamed around everywhere just following my curiosities. Grandparents are not the best at telling you no so I could get myself into all sorts of situations.
But everything changed really fast, and it took me a while to adjust to all those changes. It felt like for 8 years I wasn’t aware there was a rat race where school was about getting good grades which then meant getting a good job which then meant being able to take care of your family. And because I was a girl, find a husband at some point along the way. It’s when I started boarding school that I became aware of the race and from that point, more structure was added to my life. I didn’t have my grandparents to hide behind anymore so I just did as I was told, to an extent. I always kept a small rebellious flame alive but the programming was starting to stick and I became frightened about failure and disappointing my parents.
There was a lot of pressure, a lot of structure, and it was stifling. I remember having panic attacks in college. Obviously, who I am today, the resilience and the discipline I built are from that period, but it got so bad that I decided to drop out of college and figure out what I actually wanted to be and do outside of the pressure I felt. I needed to reclaim some agency over what was happening to me. I didn’t my life to just happen to me. I wanted the chance to be myself, to create beautiful things. It took a few years to shed that programming but I eventually got there.
I feel like myself again, like the 5-year-old explorer I used to be. Art has helped me find her again, and explore who she was, why I liked her so much, and why I fought so much doubt to find her again. So it’s only right that the work I make and the way I make it honors her.
Can you discuss the importance and theme behind your collection entitled, ‘Slow Death by fluorescent lighting’?
Slow death by fluorescent lighting series (2021)
It’s funny how people really love that series. I was really just riffing. I think at the time I was thinking about womanhood a lot and all the ways you have to twist yourself to fit in the world. So the figures you see in the pieces are doing just that. It's very literal in that sense. I grew up seeing my mother do everything she was supposed to do, and no one was ever satisfied with her. As a child, I didn’t understand why she kept trying anyway. There was no one at the end of the line to thank her for it.
I was discussing it in therapy and I wanted to reflect on those questions in another way, like what does it take to be a woman? What does it take to fit in as a woman? And does it always have to mean twisting yourself into all these different shapes? It's just never a straightforward experience and it's best viewed through the lens of fashion, photography, and the poses women models have to adopt for example. Bend your knee to a 30-degree angle while your hand is reaching for something that is at a 60-degree angle. Male models don’t seem to be required to stretch as much. It's ridiculous. So it is a very literal exploration of those questions and observations.
What are your thoughts on bringing together the creative coding world with the digital fashion world?
Some of my sensibilities as an artist are inspired by textiles and garments. My mom is one of the most fashionable people you'll meet. She has so many outfits, and they're so well-curated. She gets a lot of outfits tailored and has a very keen eye for matching prints. I didn't know how much that influenced me until I started working on a project with Draup. Essentially, for this project, my art is mapped onto 3D garments and it just clicked. It's like it was made for it. A lot of my work actually does work really, really well with garments.
Wax prints are hugely popular in West Africa. When anyone thinks ‘African clothes’, I am pretty sure what comes to mind is invariably wax prints garments. They are actually Dutch prints though, specifically mechanically printed and developed commercially primarily for the African market. If you don’t know their origin, you might think of them as a symbol of ‘African culture’, which by the way isn’t a thing. But if you do know their complicated origins, which dates by colonization, you realize they are ghosts – vestiges of a dark past.
When I started working on that project with Draup (I can’t say too much about it until it’s announced), I realized that there is potentially a way, through generative art, for people on the continent of Africa to reclaim their ability to create prints and sort of reclaim their heritage.
Dutch prints have the monopoly of the print industry on the continent and most people, so what does it take for us to reclaim that narrative and create prints for ourselves now that the tools are accessible to anyone?
NTH Culture #35 by Fingacode (2022)
With creative coding, you can create print patterns. For example, FingaCode has been working on a similar project with ‘Nth Culture’ which is inspired by traditional weaved garments from Cameroon, where his family is originally from. So I think it's really powerful to be able to use code as a way to sort of reclaim something like that.
Besides that, I think creative coding just works really well with digital fashion. You can automate the creation of prints, randomize their placements, and get really interesting garment types. To me, it’s a straightforward, easy transition and translation. I also think it's a political transition as well because of the history of fashion, especially fast fashion. With digital fashion, an algorithm creates a wide range of prints, whereas doing it with tangible material would generate a lot of pollution and waste. You can easily reach with code the speed of fashion trends today and even exceed it with a fraction of the waste. That’s really powerful.
Collage is another medium you’ve delved into over the years. Can you talk about the importance of this tool and what you appreciate most about it?
Eighth breath (2022)
Collage is the thing I do when I don't want to do anything. Collage is the thing I do when I'm stressed, when I'm stuck. It's the art that I fall in love with the most when I'm looking at other people's work. It’s my happy place. I think a lot about the concept of waste when I am collaging. I'm always thinking about waste in my work, like what's my digital footprint? Whenever I train a GAN, for example, I might produce thousands of outputs, but only a few will ever make it out into the world. The maximum I've ever done in a collection, and that hasn't even come out yet, is the one with Ledger, Art on Stax, which is 956 works from one GAN. Imagine the heaps of stuff that’s left over when I have finally curated the 956 works, and usually much less than that even.
Or even if I'm working on p5 and I make like, I don’t know, 500 outputs., I'm only realistically gonna share a few. So there is always this massive amount of stuff or material that just sits in my laptop and I don't know what to do with it. The same goes for physical sketches in my studio, or paintings I didn’t end up liking. When I think of all of that and start a collage, it just makes sense. So much of what could be considered waste becomes material again. I hate clutter, so I’ll even cut up grocery receipts lying around in my house, delivery slips, old magazines, bread wrapping, random stickers, you name it. With collage, all this waste just becomes layers of this beautiful thing that is so satisfying to make.
Fragmentary Leap To Feeling (2023)
The other thing I have also enjoyed is working with photographers' waste. There is a photographer I absolutely love, Adaeze Okaro, and I am always floored by her work. One day, I randomly DMed her “Listen, you share some of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure you have thousands of images you never use or you will never use to get to those. Can I use those in my collage? She said yes, and sent me this Google Drive folder with a bunch of images.
from the On Softness series (2023)
This birthed our collaboration, “On Softness” and it’s one of the most satisfying projects I have ever worked on. It has her photography and discards from GANs, code, physical artworks, and everyday stuff from around my house.
I want to talk about your piece, “The Owl”, What does it mean to you to have it be a part of the MAPS and Christie's exhibition called “Cartography of The Soul”?
The Owl (2023)
So I found out about MAPS through Ix Shells. I had experienced psychedelics a few years prior and I didn't know that there was an initiative raising funds for psychedelic research through art auctions. Trying psychedelics for the first time was a catalytic experience and a defining moment in my life. I had these visions that just affirmed my connection with form, color, and the way I use my senses to feel the world. It was also when I realized I had to make room for the child inside me who was being suffocated by the pressure of trying to be and do as I was told.
I have so much to thank psychedelics for and to be able to participate in raising money for research was just an incredible opportunity. The Owl is a really long-winded story. My first experience was basically organized by one of my best friends, Kim, an amateur sherpa of sorts. He made sure we had the right setting, and the right company, and even gave us some protective charms to go into the experience. We had delicious food before. We stayed clean for a few days before. He even gave us vitamins and supplements to make sure we didn’t overextend our bodies and brains.
That first experience was incredible because it reconnected me with something that I thought I'd lost and would never find my way to again. There was a well at the place where we stayed and I remember having this vision looked down the well. I was wrestling with the snake, but then I realized it was less wrestling and more dancing. The snake was sort of twisted on itself with its tail in its head, and I was somewhere within all the knots its body created. At some point, a massive owl swoops down into the well and picks up the snake, which becomes small, and she picks me up as well and takes us both out.
My grandma was obsessed with owls. She collected little figurines of owls, and she had like a whole cabinet dedicated to her owl trinkets. Funny enough, owls are a symbol of death and despair in Lebanese culture. My grandma is Lebanese, so it’s kind of weird that she was obsessed with what was essentially a bad omen in her culture. She just loved them so much, and I like that she was a weirdo to her community in that regard.
Before she passed away, I didn't get the chance to tell her about the abuse I experienced as a teen, so it was almost like I was telling her during that experience. She did in that vision what she would have surely done for me while she was still alive: make me feel safe, and turn a nightmare into a bad memory I could heal from and learn to live with. With the hindsight of wisdom and a lot of therapy, I know that an event like abuse cannot be erased. You have to learn to accept it happened and forgive yourself, so you can begin the work of finding and trusting yourself again.
Before I was selected for this project, I was working on a GAN trained on Asemic Calligraphy, something that I do in my journals when I don’t feel like writing actual words. It’s basically writing, but not trying to say anything or convey meaning in the usual sense. You're writing shapes that reminisce of letters but they really aren’t.
I've been doing this in my journal for a long time and I scanned a lot of it to train a GAN. The results were pretty faithful but then some outputs had these spectral shapes that reminded me of birds. I’d like to think of owls because it would mean that I still carry my grandma with me, that she is still here with me in some way. It was fitting to use that GAN for MAPS and to try and find remnants of my psychedelic-induced vision amidst the 8,000 outputs from it. It was a very circular experience to create this work. It's very profound for me in many ways.
When I posted the thread with the story of this work, Ned Ryerson asked me more about it in DMs. We just ended up having a chat about psychedelics and I had no idea he was trying to collect the work. When he won the bid I was really, really happy the work ended up with him.
You’ve said that the concept of solarpunk, degrowth, and decolonized futures is fascinating to you. Can you discuss how these ideas shape your artistic vision and narrative for future artwork?
So, degrowth is amazing! Before I went into design, I was into development and I was interning at a strategy consulting firm that focused on development agencies and NGOs. Terrible choice! Essentially, development posits that the only thing worth pursuing is progress. So what is progress? It’s the roadmap that's been built by the giant capitalist countries of the world because they seem to have somehow won whatever there was to be won. There's economic prosperity, and everybody's happy which of course, as we are seeing now, isn’t true. So it’s a kind of dilemma. We are fed this idea of progress, but it's poisoning our atmosphere. Literally. Yet, the people who suffer the most from climate change are people based in the global south, who are actively trying to ‘progress’ using the same roadmap they’ve been forced to adopt by structures like the IMF for example.
So you have to wonder, what are we doing? I came across a paper on degrowth theory, which essentially argues that progress, as we’ve charted it, is not actually the ultimate goal it’s made out to be. It argues that if we want a sustainable world, where we can live comfortably for generations to come, we actually need to scale back on progress, think in more holistic ways about how to regenerate what we've destroyed, and chart a different course that doesn’t compromise the only liveable planet we have. I thought, man, that's so cool. It also felt very similar to what I had read in science fiction. You can find elements of degrowth theory in Ursula Le Guin’s work for example, or, Octavia Butler’s.
Decolonization is a term that’s used so often these days that it’s sort of running the risk of becoming vapid. At a very basic level, decolonization has gone from being understood as an event to an ongoing process. The event was the waves of emancipation of former colonies from their colonial masters in the 50s and 60s. Yet decolonization started before that and has continued since. It’s the literal undoing of colonialism which didn’t end when colonies became sovereign countries, because it’s going to take a while to undo systemic changes to these societies, which by the way, were entrenched over 400 years of colonial rule.
I think that decolonization offers interesting ways of looking at power, what it takes to cement it, and what it takes to dismantle it. Every culture around the world and every community around the world should be able to determine for themselves what ideals they should pursue, but colonization made that kind of impossible. So for me, I think it’s about the process of charting a path back to that level of agency.
As for solarpunk, I have science fiction to thank for bringing it onto my radar. Sure, we can build big cold steely cold phallic-shaped structures to live and work in, or we could learn to live with nature more symbiotically. We know that it serves the very function of keeping this world alive, including us. Yet, we systemically wipe it out. It's ironic that as people become wealthier, they actually isolate themselves from these steel concrete jungles. They build houses near lush forests or tend to have large and beautiful gardens. How is it that the wealthiest people in the world are enjoying a dying resource? How did we get here?
So when we think about architecture, when we think about technology, why can't we build with nature in mind? We don’t even have to look far if we fail to imagine what that might look like. The writings of Poul Anderson or Ernest Callenbach, my absolute favorites Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler can get us the inspiration we need to plan and build differently.
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