[electronica music]
MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI: I think
genius is a word that gets used
so much more for men,
and I've always found
that were very problematic.
I'm here to change
that, I guess.
Here we are.
I was doing a lot of 3D
animation and 3D modeling.
But just like seeing something
that you modeled in a virtual
space coming to life from this
digital space to a physical
space layer by layer, I just
thought that's-- that's crazy
that you can just do that.
I was doing a lot of
research around how
oil relates to both jihad,
but also, like, capitalism.
And then the video of ISIS
destroying the artifacts
at Mosul Museum came out.
I was like, OK, how-- how
can I, like, relate this?
Because everything that
I'm reading right now,
everything that
I'm working on is--
is about this, like,
destruction and how the 3D
printer then become
this-- this machine
that rebirthed these things.
We were recreating
them based on images.
And once I started to do
research on these artifacts
that were destroyed, I realized
that there was such a lack
of information about them.
I contacted so many historians
and scholars that specifically
work on Hatral or Mosul.
I wanted to find a way that I
would share that, give access
both to kind of the sculptures,
but also this information
that I gathered.
So inside each artifact,
there is a memory card
and a flash drive that
is embedded that contains
all the information--
PDF files, images, videos,
even my email correspondence
with different scholars.
The more people read
about it, the more people
printed those pieces, the
more people have saved it
on their computers,
the more these things
will get saved and remembered.
I was really interested
in figuring out,
what are the material that I
can use I would be the closest
to the original
material, which was,
like, actually like a stone
more like dense material, right?
I just thought, resin would
be cool, because, like,
it almost looks like a
ghost of these objects.
I only had seen at that point
the object in a digital space,
in a virtual space.
And then seeing it
in a physical space
is a very different experience.
So I just remember opening
the door of the 3D printer
and having this thing printed,
but it would be so much,
like, support
material around it,
so it almost felt like
dug in the ground.
It was very, like,
archaeological in some ways.
There's really no way
to replace these objects
that were destroyed.
To me, that's where, like,
the beauty of that project
was, when I could just
use the technology
to archive something that was
meant to be lost or destroyed.
All the stories of
superheroes are 99% about men.
We have, like, very
little figures that
are superheroes that are women.
And I was looking to find these
female dark goddess figures
from different
mythical narratives
based in the Middle
East, bringing them back.
Not just reappropriating
their form and sculpture,
but also refiguring
their stories.
If you want to, like, imagine
other kind of futures,
I think you need new figures,
new stories, new histories
to use as a point of departure.
I obviously, like,
use technologies.
I have a lot of hope around that
and what's possible with it.
But I also think there's like
a very dark side of it, which
is that who gets to have
access to what technology
and use it in what way?
But also, you can
make small changes.
I-- I really, really do believe
in the power of micro changes
for macro influences.
