Ahmed El Shaer

Behind the glass, images of the divine appear: depictions of Heaven from holy texts imagined by artificial intelligence. In this work of
media archeology, Ahmed El Shaer re-mediates the medieval experiments of The Father of Optics, Hassan Ibn Al-Haytham. Al-Haytham
was the first to use devices to see, magnifying and projecting with shadows, glass, light and water while under house-arrest in
ancient Cairo. A pioneer of the new media art scene in Egypt, El Shaer uses remediation to signal the manipulation of sight within
the digital world. What we see today in the metaverse is not determined by light, or the brain, or the eyes, but by algorithms that
commodify sight. El Shaer mines ancient poetry and science to explore the limits of machine learning and human understanding of
things unseen.

Curator: Sara Angel Gurrero