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Images and the Imaginal: Ta'wil in Art Practices of Light
No full textThis practice-oriented research aims to provoke an imaginative understanding beyond representational knowledge of things using ta’wil, a method of esoteric interpretation in Islamic thought that performs in the metaphysical realm. Ta’wil unfolds in my light and sound installations as a process and an event with a continuous and perpetual esoteric dimension beyond physical matter, form and visibility. In installation art practices I explore light (together with animation, projection, voice, and textiles) as a medium with a poetic, philosophical and metaphysical resonance. In our daily life, the images we see are an effect of light, while light itself remains invisible and unseen. Ta’wil influences my observations, making, and recordings of light, and brings about a transcendental moment through my artistic practice, according to one’s potential to be affected. I work with Arabic huroof, letters and the mysterious fawatih of the Quran, which appear as bodies of light projected onto delicate fabric with fragrance and light-bearing qualities. A sonic space is marked through these letters’ voicing, and when the seer enters the installation, their body is inscribed with light. I consider how lustre and luminosity arouse ajab, a desired state of wonder in early Islamic visual culture, to open the seer’s potential to contemplative perception.
The philosophical paradigm of my art practice considers Islam’s triadic ontology of the Sensible, Imaginal, and Intelligible realms, each more real than the preceding realm. Each domain has its corresponding mode of perception, of which imagination is the isthmus that connects the purely sensory faculties of the body with incorporeal modes of intellect, al-Aql. Persian Muslim philosopher Shihab ud Deen Suhrawardi [1154-1191] describes the Imaginal as an extension of images of this world without any materiality, opening out to the world of the imagination and the suprasensory. Suhrawardi’s Imaginal develops in the subsequent process ontology of Mulla Sadra Shirazi [1571-1640]; he describes tashkik ul Wajud, intensification in existence, as a continuous and perpetual flow of a singular Being in all realms, which is Noor e Ilahy, the divine light of Being. Each particle of existence—material or immaterial, image or Imaginal—may be found in the cascading intensity of noor, light. I explore these potentials in my major body of work Hayakal al Noor, Bodies of Light (2020-2021). The sensorial connection of the creative image to the Imaginal is informed by contemporary theorists including Laura Marks, Rosalind E. Krauss, Sayyed Hossien Nasr and Matthew Saba.
These artworks probe into emergent modes of perception and interpretation of Islamic images, letters, and sounds. This research suggests that by interweaving philosophical dialogue with participatory experiences, we can create installation-art spaces of cultural inclusion that can expand our means of learning, articulating, and sharing knowledge, for the artist and the seer. My aspiration for this thesis is to increase inter-cultural efforts of understanding and respect for different modes of being, through public participation in my light installations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Motion Within Motion
No full textMotion Within Motion, a two-channel video installation with immersive sound, is inspired by Persian-Islamic philosophy of change. Using the theory of ‘substantial motion’ (al-harakat al-jawhariyya) by philosopher Mulla Sadrā Shirazi (1571-1641) as a starting point, Emadi employs digital video and installation technologies to challenge human-centric assumptions of change, time and motion. The work engages two distinct points of view: a non-narrative documentary filmed in Iran and an altered variation that magnifies the footage to the pixel-level. The resulting installation is both synchronized and perceptually disjointed, demanding a simultaneous reading of both cinematic time/movement and the largely abstracted constituent parts of the digital image. Zooming in and out of focus, splitting images into units and using different modalities of time and motion, Emadi’s installation reveals the inner activities of the frame – and provides experience “from a pixel’s point of view.
Floating Tiles
No full textSingle channel video screening, Floating Tiles continues Emadi's exploration of time and perception via the juxtaposition of classical Islamic tile work – themselves the product of algorithmic pattern creation – and the digital manipulation of the pixel. Floating Tiles was exhibited in conjunction with Motion Within Motion
Pixelated view: investigating the pixel in light of substantial motion.
Get PDFThis paper considers creative approaches engaging the body of digital video in relation to the outside world, drawing on Persian Islamic philosopher Mulla Sadra's (1571-1641) theory of "al-harakat al-jawhariyya" (Substantial Motion). For Sadra, the world is constantly changing in its substance. Substance is not fixed, as other philosophies suggest; rather, it is an act of existence, a process. Resisting fixity, this process emphasizes time and motion. Sadra's theory, alongside Deleuze's approach toward the point of view of non-human subjects, suggests new possibilities for the moving image
Flowing Like a River
No full textThe video screening, Flowing Like a River, is a critical response to current issues of global warming and war/immigration crisis. It is a video installation that recognizes the human’s disconnection from the nature and his inner-self as core causes for these global crises. Hence, the work aims to reconnect the viewer to the nature and all others by providing a perception at a micro level, in which defined intellectual boundaries between the self and the other, us and nature are blurred. Lack of defined identification can permit one to recognize his/her self and nature as driven from one source, that s/he is an interconnected being changing and transforming at the same time, like a river
Reconsidering the substance of digital video from a Sadrian perspective
Get PDFThe digitisation process is debated as video’s deficiency, where pixels are conceived as isolated fragments without an existential link to the source image. This article explores the ontology of digital-video through Mulla Sadrā’s (1571–1641) theory of Substantial Motion. Sadrā, a Persian-Islamic existentialist, proposed that substance (material/visible and immaterial/invisible) undergoes an internal change. Through imperceptible internal change, intimate connections exist between the smallest parts and the One, visible and invisible. We can think of these dynamic connections in terms of pixels and frames. From the view of Sadrā’s substance, pixels are explored as open to change. The apparent weaknesses of digital materiality become potentials towards understanding its existence in time
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