So I am in back in Beirut: city of daily 3-hour power cuts, checkpoints, crazy traffic, the best bars and restaurants in the Middle East, political stagnation, and a small but lively art scene. The Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, ALBA, invited me to teach an intensive seminar on media installation art. It wasn’t my first time at ALBA: in 2005 artist and ALBA professor Ricardo Mbarkho invited me for an introductory lecture about electronic art. It was my first visit to Lebanon, and I had arrived 2 days after the assassination on former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. I found a city in shock and turmoil, with mass demonstrations crowding the streets (actually…I met up with most artists during the demos), but I also encountered an energy and a political momentum, many felt would finally bring a long-needed political change. A few years later, after the Syrian pull-out, various political assassinations, a devastating war with Israel and a political crisis which has paralysed the country and is sending it into an abyss…I find myself again at Sin el Fil’s campus.

During my various trips to Beirut I had come to know the Lebanese art scene quite well. While there is a proliferation of video art, there is little artistic production invested in media installations. Media installation – interactive or not – has a profound relation to the space and context it is created in, and provides the viewer with a perceptual experience that works differently than purely screen-based work. Its very format offers multiple perspectives on a single situation, and hence lends itself well to a content befitting our post-modern times of fragmented subject position, complex geo-politics and the lack of master narratives and big truths. My intention with the seminar was two-fold: offer the students a historical and conceptual overview of media installation, but also try to find ways how the characteristics of media installation art could feed in into their own ideas and projects.

Obviously this is not an easy task: one cannot just copy/paste artistic practices and concepts from one place to the other. Art is after all, site-specific (though biennialism culture would have us believe the opposite). Nevertheless, I did feel compelled to introduce the students to the icons of media art history: Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Bruce Naumann, Tony Ousler, Jeffrey Shaw, Krysztof Wodiczko, and juxtaposing that pioneering work with the output of a younger generation of media artists, whilst also showing them the work of “regional” artists working with similar aesthetic vocabularies: Kutlug Ataman, Oraib Toukan, Catherine Cattaruzza & Vatche Boulghourjian, and Lamia Joreige.

I was in luck: Lamia Joreige’s solo exhibition “A Strange Feeling of Familiarity” was still on, so I decided to take my 4 graduate students out of the class room, and into the field. Come to think of it, I was in double luck because Lamia graciously agreed to come to the venue and explain her work to us. I have over the past few years been very much impressed with her work, which deals with questions pertinent to the Lebanese condition. How can or does one chronicle history? How are historical or other narratives produced? How can one represent personal and collective memory? And first and foremost perhaps: how does Beirut as a site, a city, a metaphor, a historical cut, a present reality and phantom imaginary fit within these concerns. Lamia’s work, whether media installations, videos, photographs, or documentary film projects, is very much based on her personal archives: material she collected or recorded over the years. She believes that the first step of the creative process is in effect the creation of a personal archive. In the introduction brochure for her show, she writes: “As history escapes us, only fragments remain, words and images; each fragment carries its own memory and its whole history. These fragments are memory and oblivion at the same time, parts of an incomplete whole and assembled subsequently. Rearranged and reinterpreted, they border fiction.” In other words, Lamia is not only interested in the residue of memory, but also in trying to materialise that what has vanished and has been erased. Especially her photo collages express a haunting and textured phantom sensibility of memory retained and memory lost.

I was particularly struck by her latest video “Full Moon”, wherein the course of a few years she tries to recapture a poetic moment of seeing a beautiful full moon when driving from her home in Gemayzeh to Raouche. In the video Lamia repeats the drive in search of that one perfect moment; each time the drive’s date is logged, each time it is slightly different because of traffic, time of day, light, and each time the radio news – almost - brings us back to Lebanon’s hard reality. I use the word “almost” because the repetition of the movement is mesmerising, and we “almost” tend to forget after 20’ that her initial quest was the moon. When finally she shows us the moon, the feeling is not one of catharsis, rather it becomes an insignificant detail: a disposable image. The ritualised and continuously repeated act of trying to revisit an event in the past, becomes more significant than its actual retrieval. Meaning is to be found more in the rehearsals here, than in the grand finale.

In any case, Cynthia, Suzanne, Nanor and Michèle turned out to have an impressive stamina for media art. Being exposed to new theoretical frameworks, artistic concepts and lots of audio-visual stimulation 5 hours a day, is quite exhausting 9for student and for teacher). But they were a cheerful and attentive bunch, who came up with some interesting proposals of their own for their final assignment: a translation of a previous net.art project to an installation piece. Combined their proposals ironically reflected quotidian Lebanese pre-occupations: politics, relations between the sexes, food, and congested traffic. Cynthia came up with a sound installation piece, which would make it possible to listen to Beirut’s noisy cityscape in different parts of Lebanon. She intended to place microphones on various places in the city which would record the hubbub of traffic and stream that live to a server in music stores, where on a console people could select a specific neighbourhood and listen to traffic as a soundscape. Michèle proposed a type of live performance/urban action painting involving fresh fruit and high buildings. Suzanne took the political games of the country to their literal test, and devised a game where participants’ political choices determines their escape out of a lifesize maze, and their eventual reward. Finally Nanor came up with an installation where the presence and interaction of the audience would influence the proximity of objects to each other in a space.

It was an interesting experience teaching this seminar for the first time. It will be even more interesting to use this initial encounter to design a follow-up seminar planned next autumn.