“Songs of the Revolution” 

by Rania Gaafar 

The awakening civil dissent in contemporary Arab society has been attended by forms of artistic and aesthetic agencies that reflect on an impure aesthetics that carries the struggle and fatal consequences of the asymmetrical conditions and means of the Egyptian uprising. Media technologies, mobile media and their crowdsourcing capacities in particular – virtual counterspaces -, for one, have not only paved the way for a rhizomatically perceived political movement and structure of the upheavals across the Arab world since 2011, but they have also mirrored and finally enacted the political demands and actions of the people in real-time. This rhizomatically ‘medial’ form and perception of the insurgency in an art context is conceptualized in virtual passages of new media art and the decisive role digital technologies and social networks have played during the revolutionary processes. Since the 2011 Egyptian revolution the interrelation of art in public – and primarily in digital and virtual – spaces and politics has created a new paradigm of a digitally enhanced reality.

Al Tawil’s audio-visual installation epitomizes the counter-punctual sound of disparate individual ‘players’ in rhizomatic structures of political performers and their digital impact in the visibility of events.

“A 442 Hz” is a single-screen installation by Egyptian artist Sameh Al Tawil. Musicians holding different instruments emerge in front of the steadily focused camera from an hors-champ, move steadily onto the screen and literally into the limelight of the camera’s – and thus the public’s – attention. A small orchestra of Egyptian musicians begins to take a seat, tune their instruments and prepare for a musical performance, a concert. The image is plunged in a death-blue cast that enhances its sculptural form. Three minutes into the video it seems this is no rehearsal session but an abruptly beginning performance in its own right, intentionally missing out on the organic test sound of 442 Hz, whilst diving into an array of sound deliberations.

The intentionality of gestures of incoherence and dysfunctionality that are enacted as if they were the opposite culminates in the calm and gracious facial expressions of the musicians at the end of their performance. The one minute time span of testing sound, pitching instruments for an orchestra, is transformed to lived time, an experiential duration that is not simply a rehearsal; the duration of tension and lasting incommensurability. Al Tawil conceptualizes the disruption of political events, civil political activism, and national repercussions through the sound of disharmony in a seemingly tuneful show; sound, the medium of sensual allurement and intuition then transforming to a medium of ‘resistance’ directed against the blatant power of the ruling class, or the imposition of religious ideologies and arbitrary laws and rules. The re-enactment of arbitrary decisions and their continuation of staged harmony and unity in times of political changes and power shifts is just one speculation on Al Tawil’s work.

His digital installation critically reflects on the history of performance in video art and the politics of new media art in post-revolutionary Egypt.

أغاني الثورة

بقلم: رانيا جعفر ٢٠١٣ 

A442Hz
A video by Artist Sameh Al Tawil 2013 , showing a professional orchestra without a Maestro pitching their instruments that made an unsuccessful attempt for compatibility between the instruments for a 3 full minutes.
Directed by:  Sameh Al Tawil
Produced by:  www.samehaltawil.com
Starring: Kamal Rabea and the Cairo Opera house orchestra