Morehshin Allahyari & Ryan Woodring Artist Interviews: Ghost Prints – A Joint Conversation About Destroyed Objects

Ryan Woodring:
Morehshin, you’ve deservedly had a great deal of press generated around your series Material Speculation: ISIS. You’ve talked about your 3D­-printed replicas of destroyed Assyrian and Hatrene sculptures in the context of your art practice, and yet the project has also been written about so much as cultural preservation and in some cases, even co­-opted as part of a larger fight against ISIS.

How has this project intentionally and/or unintentionally drawn you outside of aesthetic conversations into realms of cultural preservation, archaeology, history, etc.? What have been some of the more promising conversations that have come from this? Have any completely misunderstood your intentions?

Ryan Woodring:
My work has comparatively flown under the radar but pulls content from the same loaded subject matter, so I have engaged in many conversations on an artistic and political front. I think that the more troubling and flat conversations have come from misunderstandings of me as a patriotic visual effects artist on a mission to reclaim visual effects for America by removing ISIS members from their video of museum destruction. I am glad you identified the cyclical nature of war and terrorism, as the more difficult aspects of my research have lead me back to Hollywood’s polarizing representations of the Middle East, which contributes to a cycle of misunderstanding and violence.

 

The Exorcist, 1973, Film Still of Pazuzu

 

Several articles about the destruction of Hatra noted, for example, that the ancient city had been the backdrop for the beginning of the 1973 American film The Exorcist, without explaining what purpose it served in that movie. In the film, Hatra is the site of a nonsensically outdated excavation in which an Assyrian deity named Pazuzu is unearthed. A Catholic priest immediately identifies [that] as a sign that the devil has been released — the same devil that ends up in a white American girl’s body in Washington DC.

God vs Devil is the ultimate polarization of the monotheistic religion of Catholicism, not the polytheistic religion which Pazuzu is culled from. Beyond my current project, I’d like to investigate and appropriate more polarizing American mass media exports.

Ryan Woodring:
I love that your resin prints don’t try to mimic the plaster or stone from the originals. It makes sense that a ghost would take form in the most readily available materials of the time. I actually never considered that there could be another agent involved in those videos. I had thought of those as fragile performances of self­reflexivity on the part of the sculptures. But yes, now that you mention it, who could that invisible actor be?

I also wanted to mention that, as odd this sounds, I see those videos as additive rather than subtractive. One of the more interesting parts of removing something from a video is that it requires pixels from the rest of the video to fill in the gaps of what has been removed. A foreground object or actor is actively blocking information that sits behind it, and so when that element is “removed” it is actually just covered by an imagination of what the background should look like. Sometimes that is best achieved by cloning from other frames, sometimes by tracking the camera movement and projecting new images onto the scene. With the tarp scenes, there was a lot of actual digital painting and guessing what the motion of the tarp should look like.

Ryan Woodring:
Can you tell me more about your decision to implant an SD card containing your research and software files in each reproduction?

I’m fascinated by the idea that you’re embedding a physical casing for digital information that, like any piece of hardware, will be outdated in a matter of years. I imagine your sculptures being opened 2,000 years from now and having some of the same issues of translation that you had in your research with museum texts (backward scans, incomplete translations, grainy image quality, etc.). This is perhaps a romantic idea since I know you’ve also put all of your research online but… I’d love to also hear your thoughts on objecthood in an increasingly digital world.

Ryan Woodring:
Images of destruction are a fascinating form of propaganda for an “iconoclastic” regime, because in order to convey the value of the objects on the precipice of destruction, the cameramen and editors chose rather long sequences in which they were introducing us to the sculptures by either removing tarps from them or by panning around them. ISIS has made significant income from looting museums and selling similar sculptures on the black market — so destroying these objects rather than selling them was very much a visual move.

As an American with a nearly empty passport and a limited background in Assyrian and Hatrene art, I, along with a majority of internet users, was introduced to these sculptures on a computer screen in the context of their imminent destruction.

Ryan Woodring:
I originally chose photogrammetric rebuilding of the sculptures as a way to physicalize that moment in which a sculpture that had long been hidden from a majority of the world was given a chance to introduce itself, if only for it to make its case for existence before being destroyed.

The longer an object was filmed, the more information the computer had to try to stitch it back into a 3D object. This was never a practice in accuracy, and as these explorations continued, I started to feed the photogrammetry software too many frames, asking it to rebuild entire scenes from the video. It was at this time that I came across your work and was enamored and impressed with the lengths of intimate research and translation and modeling you were going through in order to restore the forms and expand the conversation around these destroyed objects. Personally, I wanted to thank you for all of your incredible art and activism.

At that time, I was also working as a visual effects artist at a stop­motion animation company called Laika where I was tasked with digitally removing unwanted elements from videos­ things like metal rigs, shadows, strings, seams, etc. A coworker at the time sent me an article about ISIS’s use of visual effects in some of their videos. I think there’s a great fear that a terrorist organization could be as good at media manipulation and circulation as a country who, as you said, helped give rise not only to cinema but to that terrorist entity. I began using my skillset as a digital object remover to directly appropriate ISIS’s video and remove the men in the scenes, leaving only sculptures that appear to be unveiling themselves in violent repetition (2 to 5 second clips). These are doomed moments of reveal, of synchronized fame and annihilation.

But I’m also interested in gif and more largely digital memory as eternal life support for physically nonexistent things. And this is all further complicated by knowing that many of the destroyed sculptures were replicas whose doubles exist in near and distant museums. That knowledge compelled me to try this current iteration of work, in which I remove, instead, the sculptures, from the video, leaving only angry gestures from angry, mortal men, exerting their scarce energy at the air. I do think at the base of it I am also interested in not allowing the sculptures and their destroyers to be in the same video, or in the same room, or on the same server as one another. That to me at least weakens the propaganda.

Ryan Woodring:
I’ll quickly say that I’m also interested in conversations about the digital afterlife of destroyed objects, and one of the most exciting collaborations I’ve had is with neuroscientist and computer programmer Brian Isett, who I’ve worked with to train a neural network to identify the form of a Lamassu (at least one of which was destroyed by ISIS in the video), as well as use the hundreds of thousands of images it was trained on (other images of Lamassu) to patch and “heal” the video of it being destroyed. Though our results have been far from utilitarian, it’s been a poetic exploration for us into the remembrance of forms even amidst a confusion of context. The Lamassu is a protective deity strategically placed at the gates of cities, so we were interested in symbolically doing its digital bidding by programming a regenerative piece of software based on past forms.

As far as the work I’m doing now to digitally remove the sculptures from this one video, I do think I’m influenced by what Susan Sontag wrote about Western photojournalists historically portraying and even exaggerating scenes of carnage in non-­Western countries, while shying from these graphic depictions at home. Though I’m fascinated by the paradoxical way in which ISIS’s video serves as both a piece of propaganda and an educational tool, I think there’s something to be said for evacuating the sculptures from the site of their demise­ especially considering the complicated circumstances in which many of them became replicas in the first place.

Ryan Woodring:
By the time ISIS had removed the Mosul Museum video (a day after its release) it had already been copied thousands of times and released by all major news outlets as visual evidence for a story that they had already leaked days in advance. For a supposedly iconoclastic act, the videos replicate the images of the destroyed sculptures (in most cases showing before and after) in a uniquely digital way. Because of the difficulty of separating these staged acts of object destruction from ISIS’s larger body of atrocities against the human body, the consumable and shareable quality of aggression against non­human actors plays into its hands as a propaganda piece.

With this type of destruction-­based propaganda conveyed by digital imagery, I think it’s important not only to address the replication/restoration of the actual sculptures, but also to tweak the conversations surrounding the video itself. I think this comes from the same type of repetition (social media clicks, eyes viewing articles, etc.) that allowed the propaganda piece to flourish in the first place­ spreading these ideas online and encouraging discussion.

As far as the repetition of the acts themselves, I wanted to remove the act of editing/splicing/collage from the original video and instead treat each clip like the sculpture that was being filmed in it. I displayed each looping video on a pedestal to further suggest the singularity of each cut of video. Now that I’ve moved on to removing the sculptures and leaving only the repeating gestures of the perpetrators, I think I’m most interested in showing the banality of the anger exerted by mortal beings in the face of works of art that will, destroyed or preserved, be remembered long beyond these acts of staged aggression.