The project ‘1991’ is a room-scale virtual reality documentary that delves into the life of Suhan Tuyliyev, a Turkmen composer affected by the post-USSR ban on classical music, highlighting his journey of artistic suppression and resilience. It narrates the challenges faced by individuals in post-Soviet Turkmenistan through a blend of personal memories, a virtual re-creation of Tuyliyev’s office, and immersive VR experiences depicting his emotional struggles and eventual revival. The documentary combines emotional storytelling with innovative technology, featuring a volumetrically captured orchestra to symbolise the cultural revival and Tuyliyev’s personal healing through music. This immersive experience culminates in a visually rich, VR-rendered mural that celebrates the transformative power of music, paralleling Tuyliyev’s overcoming of depression and return to composing.
The #reactionaryGroup project is a provocative social experiment that uses a quartet of politically diverse bots—representing a conservative, a liberal, a conspiracy theorist, and an Alt-Right member—to stimulate heated debates on Twitter, allowing users to input arguments for these bots to tweet. Participants contribute to the discourse by submitting their crafted tweets on the project’s website, which are then posted in a threaded discussion by the bots, utilising crowdsourcing instead of automation to generate diverse, user-defined content. The initiative aims to explore polarisation and collect data on public political perceptions of different ideologies, using Natural Language Processing to analyse the language and themes prevalent in user submissions, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of political dialogue on social media.
Nouf Aljowaysir, Ana Min Wein (Where am I From)?, 2022, digital, moving image. (Teaser)
Cinematographer, Creative Consultant & Advisor: Sarra’a Alshehhi
Producer, Editor, Cinematography & Sound Design: Nicolás Escarpentier
Animator: Noura Adel
Commissioned by Somerset House for the PATH-AI residency program.
Alexa, Call Mom! x Cannes XR Teaser (2019), © Nouf Aljowaysir
Alexa, Call Mom! (2020) is a story about home and the way we navigate the use of technology in our most intimate spaces. Blending elements of fiction and non-fiction, comedy and horror, Alexa, Call Mom! is an IoT interactive experience where Alexa contacts the dead through the timeless tradition of Séance.
Team: Nitzan Bartov – oc-creator & producer, Char Simpson – co-creator & writer, Nouf Aljowaysir – lead creative technologist
Salaf [Arabic: سلف , ancestor] (2020) is part of my ongoing exploration into constructing my genealogical journey using two different voices: the artist’s and an AI ‘narrator’.
As part of ThoughtWorks Arts residency at exploring synthetic media, Nouf began to follow the migration patterns of my Saudi and Iraqi ancestors leading up to her own migration process to the US. She interviewed family members and studied the socio-cultural events transcribing in their distant memories and anecdotes. Through this process, she traced my lineage to the 1800s and began experimenting in re-imagining the past using Generative AI models.