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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoأحْرُف وكَلِمَاتْ وقِصَصْ A Multi-Script Type Design Program2023-04-05T16:45:55+00:00
https://futuress.org/stories/letters-words-stories/
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https://www.are.na/blog/with-and-without-a-firm-grasp
robertogrecoMy own view is that translation—never complete, always only an approach—is an essential element of human existence. Even among those who speak our own language, we often find we have interpreted a word in a way other than it was intended. We can never fully capture or seize the perfected meaning. If we could grasp or seize it, we would soon find that the meaning has lost its magic in captivity.1
I want to embrace translation as something that is process-oriented and impossible to perfect — something that reflects our human nature, a work-in-progress that’s perpetually and beautifully flawed. For the remainder of this essay, I’ll continue to translate a handful of words, expressions, and religious practices with the understanding that my translations are, in Sells’s words, only approaches and never complete. My translations are not definitive or authoritative; they instead aim to arrive at a conceptual throughline that positions language, warts and all, at the heart of this discussion."
...
"The circulation of printed Ramadan calendars reflects an ongoing exchange of designed data that I find interesting for a handful of reasons. Two pillars of Islam are beautifully championed in these eclectic calendars: prayer and fasting. Several languages are reflected throughout these timetables and in many instances a combination of scripts coexist side-by-side. Scale, font selection, color, and format are stretched in different directions, resulting in a wide range of typographic moves and decorative devices that effortlessly balance humanist expression with the expected functionality of a spreadsheet-calendar.
Of course, there is another reason for my interest in these printed calendars that points to technology as both an important engine in Islamic history and a more recent threat to Islamic society. Many Muslims today rely on apps and websites when seeking prayer times, since they deliver this data with speed and accuracy. Like a lot of things that have transitioned from print to web, salah apps offer a blend of convenience, immediacy, and dependability, especially for those of us who live in areas where the azan is not heard everyday. But the trade-off for this convenience is loss of privacy through data extraction and the active surveillance of Muslim communities.
Thinking back to the word amsak, today’s technology might reveal an uglier side of holding, one that comes with strings attached. Our computers, phones, and devices offer information that’s immediately available for our consumption, and while this information helps us organize our day and practice our faith, it also reinforces oppressive power dynamics that rely so heavily on capturing and controlling Muslim communities. In contrast to prayer apps and websites, imsaakiyat Ramadan is localized and handed out in-person, making it less accessible to people outside of the served community and more difficult to track and trace in real time.
Printed Ramadan calendars still pull from data that’s sourced online, so they are by no means a perfect remedy to the larger problem of tracking and surveillance. But they at least prompt people to gather and seek salah times within their immediate communities, rather than searching for prayer times on an app and in isolation. Perhaps this means that the printed calendars are like Sudani salads and the apps are like dips — easy to find, easy to contain, easy to consume without cooking. While I’m trying to distance myself from the dips, I can’t avoid them entirely, and I can’t deny their relation to our salads. Dips and salads, America and Sudan, and English and Arabic operate within a continuum that loops and fluctuates with time. These things function and fall apart and function again, taking new form at the start of each cycle and reintroducing themselves to me with an anxiety that’s rooted in optimism.
I’m holding all sides of me with and without a firm grasp as I continue this effort at approaching myself."
[Part II here:
https://www.are.na/blog/with-and-without-a-firm-grasp-part-ii
[Forough] "It wasn’t until I stepped out of my trained mindset when my design started resonating with the original references."
...
[Shiraz] "My hope is that we’re honoring and celebrating that work, not appropriating it."
...
"Forough: A valuable conversation we had early on was about visual adaptation. There’s a fine line between appreciating and appropriating design references. We were talking about to what extent we can borrow from these calendars. As designers, we need to be conscious that the visual materials we encounter and approach are informed by their complex cultural and subcultural dynamics. We need to reference those visuals consciously.
Shiraz: That’s such an important point, because it begins to address the risk of us extracting visual materials that we are inspired by (which happens a lot in graphic design). In this case, I grew up with these salah tables. I look at them as important design precedents because they stem directly from my upbringing, my childhood, my relationship to Islam. I’m not at all removed from the communities that produce these prayer timetables, but I still worry about the role I play when I’m participating in the process of designing them. There’s an interesting exchange that might be happening, a translation of different design processes maybe.
With that in mind, I’m wondering what role translation played in your process. What did you need to translate in order to design the calendar? What wasn’t familiar in the beginning, and what did you learn in the end?"
Forough: I think of translation here as both linguistic translation and cultural translation, or, more specifically, an act of religious translation. In Twelver Shi’ism, Muslims combine prayers, like midday and afternoon prayer, so many Shi'a Muslims end up praying three times a day rather than five. This calendar has all the five prayer times. So I had to double check the differences there, and make sure that I understood them correctly — to me that’s a cultural/religious translation.
We also included the Arabic and English translations of the weekdays. I looked up the Arabic translation and found some variations. In a few translations, I would see diacritic marks but in others I wouldn’t. With the central calligraphy, Ramadan Kareem, which is set in Thuluth script, I found examples where I couldn’t tell the difference between short vowel diacritics and ornamental marks. I asked a student in my class who’s fluent in Arabic to help me with this.
Another interesting thing was the numbering systems. In Arabic, four, five, and six are different from how we write those numbers in Farsi.
Shiraz: All of this brings up the question of, why Arabic and English? What languages do we use on a calendar like this, for a community that includes many different people who speak many different languages? Arabic obviously plays a big role in the Islamic faith, and a lot of the terms on Ramadan calendars are either translated or transliterated Arabic terms. But there are real questions surrounding who dominates discussions on Islamic practice, who remains more privileged, and how can we counteract or challenge that?
Forough: I think including Arabic on the calendar — even if I don’t read it or understand it — is more of a symbolic act. Even as a non-native speaker, I can recognize the form.
Shiraz: I agree, especially when we think of the role that Arabic calligraphy plays in Islamic art and architecture and how it often is preferred over pictorial images and iconography.
Forough: What is your relationship to Islam, and how has it developed and evolved throughout the years?
Shiraz: I’m an American Muslim who toggled between living in the States and visiting Sudan as a child. As I spent more time in Sudan and compared those experiences with living in the US, I found that American Muslim communities have a heightened sense of identity that is informed by our vulnerability in this country. We’re very vulnerable to different policies and threats posed against us. Because of that — because we live in the margins of American society where we are regular targets, where we’re not, you know, governed by a body that reflects us — there’s a lot that we have to preserve and protect for the sake of survival, or even for the sake of feeling grounded in our day-to-day happenings.
In the first blog post that we published at the launch of this project, I reference the word amsak, which means “to hold,” and I feel like that word is relevant here. American Muslims (as well as immigrants and diasporic folks in general) are holding onto themselves in a distinctive way. We are preserving aspects of our faith, culture, and personhood that are vulnerable to erasure and attack.
I’m wondering about your relationship to Islam and Ramadan, more specifically. Can you elaborate on your background in relation to the practices that are reflected on our calendar?
Forough: Growing up in Iran, I had a different experience of Ramadan from many practicing Muslims. In my family, a lot of religious practices and holidays received less attention than other cultural events and traditions. In my experience, I found that Muharram and more specifically Ashura held more cultural significance than Ramadan back home. The Persian New Year, which is based on the religion of Zoroastrianism, is another example that has similar, if not more significance, in my country.
It wasn’t until I started hanging out with friends in Dubai that I saw Ramadan as a religious and spiritual journey that’s experienced on a personal, internal, interpersonal, and communal level. In many Muslim countries, the everyday living experience changes slightly to accommodate Ramadan. The working hours would end by 2 pm, and the city would quiet down until iftar, becoming alive afterward until dawn."
...
"Forough: Sometimes graphic design can be an isolating process, because we don't always see our work come to life after we submit it. I can imagine distributing the Ramadan calendars in person gave you a better understanding of why this project was made and what purpose it served. It also gives you a different perspective, that graphic design is just one component of a bigger social engine.
Shiraz: Right. I try to remind myself that our work is a small scale gesture. In projects like this, graphic design helps signal or point to things that people might need to talk about. For example: do we want to rely so heavily on today’s technology for things like prayer and fasting? Or do we want to find other routes of seeking and supplying this information that gets us offline and perhaps brings us in closer physical proximity to one another? I think these are important questions that go beyond graphic design, but also directly involve graphic design. "]]]>2023 shirazabdullahigallab food language translation arabic form time ramadan calendars numbers numbering farsi appropriation iran sudan religion islam society us immigration migration holding culture community dubai diaspora survival design graphicdesign charts technology fasting prayer information infoviz visualization conversation foroughabadianhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:bee69c06cfcd/A Resource Hub for Decolonizing Typography2022-09-18T23:48:18+00:00
https://futuress.org/stories/decolonizing-typography-resources/
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https://twitter.com/monakareem/status/1443223855435223041
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https://www.pinkjinn.com/2021/08/04/pink-jinn-august-blog-immersion-itinerary-modern-standard-arabic-edition/
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https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-for-and-from-communities-bahia-shehab-on-a-history-of-arab-graphic-design/
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https://brooklynrail.org/2021/04/art_books/Bahia-Shehab-and-Haytham-Nawars-A-History-of-Arab-Graphic-Design
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https://www.are.na/blog/tools-for-cultural-production-the-practice-of-preserving-voice-culture-and
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https://www.pinkjinn.com/2018/01/24/the-best-cities-to-study-arabic-in-the-middle-east/
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https://www.pinkjinn.com/2021/03/31/12-essential-youtube-channels-to-watch-if-youre-learning-arabic/
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https://www.talkinarabic.com/
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https://web.archive.org/web/20120930070322/http://www.indiana.edu/~arabic/arabic_history.htm
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https://www.instagram.com/tptqarabic/
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http://clementvalette.fr/M/memoire/
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https://vimeo.com/48810377
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http://work.waelmorcos.com/Azer
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https://chantaljahchan.work/en-Route-Detail
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https://www.catranslation.org/blog-post/translation-blogs-we-think-you-should-be-reading/
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https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/vbadyy/makimakkuk-palestine-boiler-room-music-interview
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https://twitter.com/marwahelal/status/980497988199084032
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/how-the-appetite-for-emojis-complicates-the-effort-to-standardize-the-worlds-alphabets.html
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https://backchannel.com/how-fonts-are-fueling-the-culture-wars-f9d692101fea
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https://worksthatwork.com/6/unified-arabic
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/t-magazine/design/middle-eastern-fonts-letters-graphics.html
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https://prezi.com/pv2_qgwc2wq1/multiplicative-unselfing-the-case-of-khatibi/
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https://fold.cm/read/anxiaostudio/translation-and-the-newscrossing-languages-in-the-age-of-networked-journalism-CvhpGQLT
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http://fusion.net/story/270135/the-english-speaking-web-creates-digital-ghettos/
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http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!analytic-lexicography/pliik
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw&feature=youtu.be
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/world/africa/stella-gaitano-south-sudan.html
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http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/adapting-to-a-more-global-more-diverse-internet/
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http://arablit.org/2015/11/30/moroccan-writer-and-scholar-fatema-mernissi-75/
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https://nuqta.com/
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http://booktwo.org/notebook/reading-right-to-left/
robertogreco“One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a decent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.”
The conference speaker contrasted this way of seeing, and the assumptions explicit within it, with the Japanese way of reading, which may be right-to-left, or vertical:
[image]
One might also, in the context of today’s military operations consider the right-to-leftness of Hebrew and Arabic script (and Farsi, and Urdu) – and from there consider the verticality and three-dimensionality of text and thought online, the way it branches and deepens, how it recedes through the screen, through hyperlinks, into an endless chain of connections and relationships.
This reversal and inversion of language patterns has many historical and thus military uses. In Reality is Plenty, Kevin Slavin relates a tale told to him by a photography professor, who was trained as a World War II radar operator.
When radar signals were received aboard an aircraft carrier, they were displayed on a radar oscilloscope. But in order for this information be used in the midst of battle, the positions needed to be transcribed to a large glass viewing pane, and as part of this process they needed to be inverted and reversed. To perform this operation quickly and accurately, the radar operators were trained and drilled extensively in “upside down and backwards town”, a classified location where everything from newspapers to street signs were printed upside down and backwards. This experience would not so much create a new ability for the radar operators, as break down their existing biases towards left-to-right text, allowing them to operate in multiple dimensions at once.
[image]
This process, in Kevin’s reading and in mine, is akin to much of our experience of new technology, when our existing frameworks of reference, both literary and otherwise, are broken down, and we must learn over once again how to operate in the world, how to transform and transliterate information, how to absorb it, think it, search for it and deploy it. We must relearn our relationship not only with information, but with knowledge itself.
And I was reminded of this once again when I found myself at the weekend defending, for the first time in a long time, but certainly not for the first time ever, the kind of thinking and knowledge production which is native to the internet. In this oft-rehearsed argument, whether it be about ebooks or social media or news cycles or or or, the central thrust is that x technology is somehow bad for us, for our thought, our attention, our cognitive processes etc., where x always tends towards “the internet”, as the ur-technology of our time.
And the truth is that I cannot abide this kind of talk. I know people don’t read books like they used to, and they don’t think like they used to, but I struggle to care. Most of this talk is pure nostalgia, a kind of mostly knee-jerk, mostly uncritical (although not thoughtless) response to entirely rational fears about technological opacity and complexity (this nostalgia, of course, was the basis for the New Aesthetic). But this understandable reaction also erases all the new and different modes of attention and thought which, while they are difficult to articulate because we are still developing and discovering the language to articulate them with, are nonetheless present and growing within us. And I simply do not see the damage that is ascribed to this perceived “loss” – I don’t see the generations coming up being any less engaged in culture and society, reading less, thinking less, acting less, even when they are by any measure poorer, less supported, forced to struggle harder for education and employment, and, to compound the injury, derided at every opportunity as feckless, distracted, and disengaged. I see the opposite.
I’m getting more radical in my view of the internet, this unconsciously-generated machine for unconscious generation. I’m feeling more sure of its cultural value and legacy, and more assertive about stating it. We built this thing, and like all directed culture of the past, it has an agency and a desire, and if you pay attention to it you can see which way it wants to go, and what it wants to fight. We made that, all of us, in time, but we don’t have full control of it. Rather, like the grain of wood, it’s something to be worked with and shaped, but also thought about and conceptualised, both matter and metaphor.
It’s possible, despite the faults of data and design, to be an unchurched follower of the internet: undogmatic, non-sectarian, wary of its faults, all too conscious of its occupation by the forces of capital and control, but retaining a deep faith in its message and meaning. A meaning which it is still up to us to explore and enact, to defend where possible and oppose when necessary. If there is progress, if things can be improved, then they must be improved by new inventions, by the things we have not tried before. No going backwards to the future."]]>culture knowledge internet japanese arabic howweread understanding noticing books reading meadia online socialmedia newaesthetic future bookfuturism control change data design technology criticalthinking kevinslavin observation seeing howwesee waysofseeing perspective rewiring attention knowledgeproduction society difference cv canonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5d93f4b57cad/Maryam Saleh: A Musical Nebula2015-09-15T05:53:26+00:00
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