by jad

Doomers in the Metaverse

It’s weird how the internet has made so many people think more highly of the Unabomber, as was evidenced by his recent passing. It’s weird and it’s ironic, given his whole off-the-grid anti-tech thing. What’s weirder than overly-online young people cleaning up the image of a self-important terrorist wackjob, however, is that you’d think they’d choose an anti-hero that speaks more to their actual lives. A person like Nasim Najafi Aghdam, for example, who in 2018 walked into YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA, and committed arguably the first act of terrorism against the creative economy. Nasim’s hatred of YouTube … Continue reading “Doomers in the Metaverse” →

by jad

Search Engine Optimism

I saw a reel this morning that detailed some moves at Meta to push people away from hashtags and towards “SEO” as THE way to get people to see their posts. I don’t know how this person got their information and I don’t care, but they did claim some level of insider knowledge that piqued my interest. But what motivated me to write these words was a reply they gave to a comment about wanting old instagram back; they said, and this is almost word for word because it’s seared into my brain: “it never will! the best thing to … Continue reading “Search Engine Optimism” →

by jad

Chase the Light ’23

Last Sunday, I took part in a global photography event for the first time, one that helps raise funds for @photocenternw. People had 48 hours to “chase the light” and submit their photos for inclusion in a pop-up exhibit and sale. I didn’t realize it on Sunday, but this time last year I was sharing my very first explorations in film photography, posting the results of a randomized photo walk (literally- I used @randonauticaapp) I’d set myself, trying expired film and an old APS-format Canon someone had gave me. So yeah – a lot has happened in a year! Without a theme … Continue reading “Chase the Light ’23” →

by jad

Montréal from Seattle

Christine and I are going to Montréal in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be my first international trip since becoming a U.S. citizen and the first time back on an airplane since getting my green card and landing here. There are a half dozen reasons to be excited about visiting this oddball part of North America, but our primary impetus for wanting to go in the first place was to visit a Mohawk Catholic shrine as part of @christine.bingham.art‘s ongoing book project based on her series of mirror saint paintings. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of … Continue reading “Montréal from Seattle” →

by jad

Lite-Touch Photography

I’ve been reflecting on what will soon be a year of toying with the idea of doing photography, and how it has represented a liminal time in which I’ve been gradually transitioning out of understanding what I do as “taking photos” into kinda maybe sort of imagining myself as “being a photographer.” It’s both a subtle distinction and one that’s completely serious (ask any professional how serious it is), and one that I didn’t see myself ever engaging in when I started reading Sontag, Benjamin, and Barthes on photography. I had meaning-making on my mind and wanted to wrap my … Continue reading “Lite-Touch Photography” →

by jad

Megapixel Memories

This last batch of recovered files from 2011 is probably my only and very modest foray into #urbex, apparently taken on an old Nokia phone. The space would feature in a @suzieselman music video, so all credit to finding the location and having the guts to “trespass” goes to her. I love how weird and ghostly the image rendering is in all of these. The metadata says that these were taken on an N97 mini, and yet, for the life of me, I can’t remember ever owning one of those, especially when it was supposed to have a 5 megapixel … Continue reading “Megapixel Memories” →

by jad

Seattle: City of the Future

Just came back from the phantasmagoric and fairly dystopian « #SEATTLE: CITY OF THE FUTURE » immersive art event at The Teal Building in #CapitolHill, organized by Third Place Technologies and @publicdisplay.art. Occupying the former site of R Place bar and nightclub, the exhibit played with and lampooned the futurist vernaculars of the space-age and cyberpunk eras to make dark commentary on the Seattle of today, in a bewildering array of interactive and augmented gizmos and doodads (I’m pretty sure that’s the technical terminology). I’m usually a little cynical about “activating” “vacant” “spaces,” but this was intelligent, insightful, and fun! x

by jad

GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY

Another set of photos from Beirut that I found as old attachments is this series I’d apparently taken for the long-defunct outlet “Hibr.me.” It depicts GREEN THE GREY, a “public intervention” in June 2011 meant to celebrate green spaces in a city in desperate need of them, or what @beirutgreenproject‘s co-founder Dima Boulad would later call a “peaceful protest” to coincide with World Environment Day. Patches of grass were laid out in car-centric Sassine Square and we spent the afternoon hanging out. It was as simple as that. It pains me to reflect on just how utterly prosaic the politic instantiated … Continue reading “GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY” →

by jad

Greyless in Beirut

As you already know, I’ve been making instax prints of some my photos to help raise funds for @christine.bingham.art‘s book project (see my bio for more info). This one is particularly meaningful to me because @greylessinseattle kindly gave me carte blanche to come up with any custom diptych I wanted, giving me the opportunity to dig into more of my old photos from Beirut. These were taken in 2013. It depicts the so-called “bus graveyard” that used to be on the site of the old train station (also defunct), now simply an administrative facility. Next to that is a Marian shrine from the … Continue reading “Greyless in Beirut” →

by jad

Sleepless in Beirut

Google had been bugging me about my cloud storage for a while before I finally clicked the link the other day to hopefully free up some space; a couple of scrolls later, I was punched in the gut with attachments in emails I’d long forgotten about, with files and photos I thought I’d lost forever, including these from a project I worked on with a then-anonymous blogger in 2011. You read that right – an anonymous blogger; this was 2011, after all. More on that later. Thank God for metadata because I simply have no recollection of ever using a … Continue reading “Sleepless in Beirut” →