War, Borders, and Brotherhood in the Digital World with Giath Taha

The minaret of Aleppo’s Grand Umayyad Mosque. I’m eminently grateful to have visited in 2009, when I took this photo — the minaret and much of the mosque was destroyed four years later when Assad’s government forces focused attacks on revolutionaries in the city.

“And that’s also what makes this [digital] experience quite unique. And scary at some point.

Because this… immersion, I would say, it felt like I met my brother. I didn’t meet him — but we met. And again, this is why it’s called ‘Becoming a Ghost’... in order to meet a ghost, you have to become a ghost. And the position of being there and not being there… this is what I meant, to meet and not meet as well.

I had a talk with my brother before we met [in the video game], and I said,  ‘We’re going to meet, are you okay with it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah yeah, I play the game quite a lot.’

And the moment when we were running to each other in the video, the first thing he said was,

‘I’m hearing my heartbeat.’”

— Giath Taha

Two years ago, I came across a small video art exhibit in Amsterdam’s foam museum, and it’s stuck with me since. The piece was the first time I saw something like a use of the “metaverse,” that much-hyped, very-Covid tech idea, that actually made me think it might sometimes — in very rarefied circumstances — serve a useful purpose.

The installation was “Becoming a Ghost” by Giath Taha, a Syrian-born artist now living in Amsterdam. We’ll discuss the piece in our interview, but suffice to say it involved Giath roaming around an online first-person shooter video game (though without a gun), performing “field research” to delve into the parallels between the game’s digital world and his physical reality outside it.

Giath’s art explores a number of ideas very relevant to this newsletter — the interplay between digital and real spaces, explorations of what it means to be “home” and a member of the diaspora away it. About borders and perceptions of war, and more.

Please enjoy the podcast interview this week! You can listen here in Substack, or on your favorite podcast player — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and more. And if you missed our first episode with Sean and Archana, founders of the AI chatbot startup Gooey.AI, you can find that here.

Links from the episode:

• Foam Museum discussion of “Becoming a Ghost”

• Giath Taha’s Website

• “Becoming a Ghost”

• “My House Has Tunnels”

• “5 Almond Seeds”

• “Homage to Aleppo”

Music: Juanitos, “Do the Kangaroo” from the Free Music Archive (CC BY-SA).

Two boys pose for a photo in Aleppo, 2008.

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