VCUarts Qatar presents 9 installations knowledgeable by linguistics

Dezeen Faculty Reveals: college students and school members from VCUarts Qatar have created a collection of installations referred to as Language-as-Machine that discover the idea of language.

The installations are presently on present at VCUarts Qatar’s campus in Doha, and look at language-based communication throughout historic time durations, mediums and cultures.

The items had been made utilizing a spectrum of various strategies, from utilizing modern mediums like LED lighting, pc packages, 3D printing and digital expertise to using extra conventional supplies like sand, wooden and cloth.


Establishment: VCUarts Qatar
Collaborators: xLab: Mohammad Suleiman, Haithem El Hammali, Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad, Basma Hamdy, Fatima Abbas, Fatima Al Dosari, Giovanni Innella, Hala Amer, Joshua Rodenberg, Lana Abou Selo, Martin Juras, Maryam Al-Homaid, Michael Hersrud, Rab McClure, Roudah Al Sheeb, Saga Elkabbash, Sara Al-Afifi, Sara Khalid, Selma Fejzullaj and Shima Aeinehdar
Organisers: The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar: Meera Badran
Exhibition design: Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad and Meera Badran
Manufacturing help: Joshua Bell, Lana Abou Selo, Rogsh Garcia, Humyra Najdam, Jood Elbeshti and Hagar Allam

Faculty assertion:

“Ever-evolving, language shops the historical past of our collective previous, holds our recollections, permits us to articulate our thought and preserves a basis of information that enables us to collaboratively construct towards the long run.

“Language is a sign from the previous.

“What might need occurred if language had advanced in a different way? What graphic encodings could possibly be speculated, given a distinct set of historic and contextual circumstances?

“What had been the forces that propagated some language encodings, whereas consuming others? What insights will be uncovered as we navigate the historic paths and landmarks that chart the present shapes of our language?

“Language is a map.

“This exhibition presents a group of inventive analysis and inventive expression that explores language as a machine.

“A machine that compresses, data and transmits a collective cultural data. A machine of many operators servicing many targets. A machine that labours, degrades and is repaired and upgraded.

“A machine that calculates and predicts. A machine that remembers and forgets.

“Language is a machine.

“Language-as-Machine was organised by The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar, commissioning xLab, a analysis lab on the college, to provide and exhibit their analysis and observe.”


Future Recollections by Giovanni Innella, Hala Amer and Saga Elkabbash

“Future Recollections is a writing system that makes use of sand as a recording medium and a steel sphere as a writing device.

“This set up refers back to the behavior of writing sentences on seashores, the place phrases are engraved on the sandy floor but shortly disappear due to the ocean or climate.

“Occasion prediction is the potential to estimate the likelihood that some occasion might happen sooner or later – nonetheless, usually these predictions are delivered as numeric possibilities that an occasion will happen once more.

“Future Recollections transforms that considerably chilly and impersonal data into private and intimate sentences that describe mundane or distinctive occasions and their emotional impression on our each day lives.

“Slowly delivered on sand by a seemingly invisible drive, the forecasts make it appear like our lives have already been lived, whereas we merely await issues to occur.”

Designers and collaborators: Giovanni Innella, Hala Amer and Saga Elkabbash
Supplies: sand, steel, aluminium and acrylic


Horizontal, long panel mounted on wall showing sparkly text

Sacred Silence by Basma Hamdy, Selma Fejzullaj, Shima Aeinehdar and Levi Hammett

“Sacred Silence explores the letter ‘nun’ (ن) as a seed that grows into ‘kun’ (be) and the trilateral root ‘sakan’ (dwelling/reside) and eventually manifests into ‘sukoon’ (stillness/bliss/quiet).

“The letter nun is the 14th letter of the Arabic alphabet, marking the midpoint of the 28 letters.

“Nun, in its remoted kind, opens Surat-al-Qalam within the Quran, making it considered one of Islam’s most spiritually vital letters.

“It’s reversible in spelling and symmetrical in form and its round bowl signifies the higher and decrease worlds – the earth and cosmos.

“It additionally represents a vessel or an ark with the diacritic dot signifying the seed of immortality.

“In Sacred Silence, the ideas of reflection and reversibility are explored to suggest the dance between an inside spirituality and an exterior stillness.

“The piece consists of tons of of LED bulbs that evoke the fractal multiplicity and repetition of nature, encompassing a spectrum from seeds to stars.”

Designers and collaborators: Basma Hamdy, Selma Fejzullaj, Shima Aeinehdar and Levi Hammett
Supplies: LED matrix and acrylic


Assembly of three screens mounted on dark wall

Self(Encoded) by Martin Juras, Hind Al Saad and Levi Hammett

“Self(Encoded) permits the viewer to enter a recursive dialog with a machine.

“Your facial options feed the loop with new knowledge, mirrored again as a fragmented array of frames, revealing how the machine processes incoming data by way of totally different layers of encoding.

“In the identical means our mind filters what we see and solely remembers what it deems vital, the machine compresses visible data, disregarding knowledge redundancy in a dogmatic pursuit of effectivity.

“Self(Encoded) exposes the info utilized by machines, displaying layers of decision and ranges of recognition in pixel kind.”

Designers and collaborators: Martin Juras, Hind Al Saad and Levi Hammett
Supplies: machine imaginative and prescient digital camera, screens and bespoke software program


Photograph showing piles of casette tapes on table covered in stickers

Youth of the Future by Michael Hersrud, Roudah Al Sheeb, and Fatima Al Dosari

“This mixtape consists of fifty opening tune tracks from cartoons and anime originating within the Seventies, Nineteen Eighties and Nineties.

“The songs – principally from French, English and Japanese programming – have been dubbed into Arabic with musical influences from the area.

“Most of the tracks derive from the corporate Spacetoon, a pan-Arab free-to-air tv channel specialising in kids’s programmes within the early 2000s.

“The broadcasted reveals ‘educated, nurtured and instilled values’ for a complete era of youngsters rising up within the Nineties onwards, at instances referring to them as ‘the youth of the long run’.

“The tracks on this mixtape had been extracted from varied on-line sources, together with footage from classic VHS tapes that had been been reposted on YouTube by fans.

“This playful assortment of songs has been curated by Roudah Alsheeb with help from Fatima Al Dosari, digitally composed and edited by Michael Hersrud and produced by Sonic Jeel.”

Designers and collaborators: Michael Hersrud, Roudah Al Sheeb, and Fatima Al Dosari
Supplies: cassette tapes, instances, and participant, RISO printed inserts and each holographic and glow-in-the-dark stickers


Photograph showing eight posters attached to a gridded screen

Computed Language by Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad and Sara Al-Afifi

“This assortment of posters begins a analysis effort to survey language developments notable inside the historical past of computing.

“The small print of computational expertise will be obscured by its innate complexity and area specificity, leaving vital improvements missed by these of us outdoors the actual fields of experience.

“This assortment options typefaces, applied sciences and people that mark timeline of computational growth.

“Every poster celebrates the significance, impression or affect of its particular person topic and is introduced as an version of 32 hand-printed items.”

Designers and collaborators: Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad and Sara Al-Afifi
Supplies: Silkscreen on paper


Photograph showing

Rays of Essence: Arabic and its Various Actuality by Hind Al Saad, Sara Khalid and Joshua Rodenberg

“Whether or not spoken or in ink, Arabic letterforms embody intrinsic meanings.

“Every letter, as a part of a phrase, has a nuance based mostly on its contextual placement, making a binding thread of connotations in each phrase.

“This mission permits viewers to expertise these inherent traits by twisting a collection of knobs, permitting them to work together with the Arabic varieties created by a projected laser by way of 5 sheer planes.

“One centered laser beam attracts the oscillating letterform over and over.

“It strikes on the velocity of sunshine, propelling us to think about an alternate actuality for Arabic.”

Designers and collaborators: Hind Al Saad, Sara Khalid and Joshua Rodenberg
Supplies: Laser, MIDI controller and sheer cloth


Photograph showing cluster of lights hung from ceiling

Virga by Rab McClure with MFA college students and school

“Virga is the result of VCUarts Qatar’s MFA in Design Area Research, 2022.

“It’s a assortment of glowing sculptural varieties constituted of steam-bent wooden, 3D-printed connectors, LED lights and tailor-made cloth.

“The bent wooden elements that lend every lamp its distinctive kind had been designed by college students and school from the MFA in Design program and produced throughout an immersive workshop with Atelier La Juntana – a instructing and fabrication facility situated on the north coast of Spain.

“The mission was impressed by virga cloud formations, that are present in scorching climates and characterised by trailing streaks of rain that evaporate earlier than reaching the bottom.

“The mission invitations free affiliation, fosters reverie, and conjures up imaginative hypothesis.

“The mission’s kinetic set up and interactive lighting had been designed and made doable by xLab.”

Designers and collaborators: Rab McClure with MFA college students and school
Supplies: Steam-bent ash, PETG and cotton


Six wooden panels mounted on dark wall with lit up Arabic text on each

Electrical Calligraphy by Fatima Abbas, Lana Abou Selo and Levi Hammett

“Electrical Calligraphy is a collection of anachronistic Arabic typeface designs that try to re-examine the evolutionary path of the Arabic script inside inherited technological constraints.

“The piece goals to to uncover new pathways for growth, including new views to the modern sort design discourse.

“These grids discover what modern calligraphy might need been had it been extra intimate with the digital revolution – calligraphy that’s guided by mild and constructed with segments and modules.

“The Names of Allah are normally displayed in intricate calligraphy to replicate the fantastic thing about their meanings.

“Displaying them with mild brings forth a brand new technique to honour the names whereas displaying them in modern instances, displaying how the Names of Allah will be displayed fantastically inside expertise, with out having to imitate conventional calligraphy.”

Designers and collaborators: Fatima Abbas, Lana Abou Selo and Levi Hammett
Supplies: LED matrix, acrylic and wooden


Lighting system mounted onto wall with reflection in polished wood floor

Turning into by Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad, Mohammad Nabil Suleiman, Fatima Abbas and Sara Khalid

“Turning into is the most recent mild set up in a physique of labor imagining different typographic histories by establishing unconventional language show applied sciences.

“Right here, free of structural conventions pressed by the dominance of Latin scripts, the formal potential of the Arabic language is widely known.

“Vibrant, daring, blinking verbs cycle by way of this hundred-segment show. The collection of phrases takes us to the roots and connotations of the verb ‘to be’.

“Arabic Sarf (Arabic Morphology and Etymology) is the inner meeting of a phrase by means of patterns of vowelisation and introduction of additional letters, which represent a template.

“The template supplies further connotations ‘the bolder the template, the heavier the which means’.

“Because the title suggests, ‘Istif’aal’ – which interprets to ‘changing into’ – is a dynamic verb type of six Arabic letters, which suggests, actually and figuratively, shifting from one state to the opposite.”

Designers and collaborators: Levi Hammett, Hind Al Saad, Mohammad Nabil Suleiman, Fatima Abbas and Sara Khalid
Supplies: LED tubes, aluminium, acrylic, PETG, bespoke electronics and software program

To view extra about VCUarts Qatar, go to its web site.

The pictures is by Raviv Cohen.

Partnership content material

This faculty present is a partnership between Dezeen and VCUarts Qatar. Discover out extra about Dezeen partnership content material right here.