Blockchain
Ethereum (1)
Description
This conceptual animation originated with a photo I took of a chair found in the Negev Desert in 2014, recreated with AI for quality and combined with a recent self-shot photo of myself. The smoke was added with AI and digital painting. This image was then broken into layers and glitched with databending to create 430 unique glitches. During this process, I used a hex editor to corrupt data with specific writing, such as UN Resolution 194 Article 11 on the Palestinian right to return, phrases like “FUCK ISRAEL” and “from the river to the sea,” and poetry by Refaat Alareer and Mahmoud Darwish. My working title for this piece was “Erasure,” until I came across the line “the map of absence” in Darwish’s 2008 poem “To Our Land.” After creating hundreds of glitches, I combined them into over 700 different frames and organized these into a video. The gradual disintegration is a visualization of loss of territory and life, while the chair as an anchor and the faintly blinking map in the final frames represent the hope of return and existence as resistance. The music, created for this by θIθIθθθθ, samples Mohammed Assaf’s 2015 song “Dammi Falastini” (“My Blood is Palestinian”), which was unjustly removed from Spotify and Apple Music in 2023. This piece was minted on October 7, 2024, and its dimensions are 1948x1948 to reference the year of the Nakba.