CYBOTAGE, Zeina Barakeh’s large scale three-channel video with sound installation at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco—which would be a technologically challenging project for a museum, let alone a retail art gallery—at first seems a radical departure from the artist’s previous video animations.

Barakeh’s earlier video works are densely layered, rapidly moving collages, crammed with intriguing textures and eclectically sourced or invented imagery. Frenetically action-packed, meticulously patterned and choreographed, vividly colorful, they obliquely enact complex fictional scenarios of war, colonialism, patriarchy, and other manifestations of human conflict and creative invention.

Human bodies in surprising configurations abound in them, often as human/animal hybrids: centaurs, hippotaynes, fanciful mythological amalgams of human and organic forms. Their nervous electronic soundtracks are integral to the high-energy enigmatic dramas unfolding onscreen. Visually, so much is happening that they’re comfortably viewed on a good-sized video screen.

So, to enter the large, darkened gallery space of CYBOTAGE is a startling encounter with an arresting spectacle by this artist.

Projected on three black-painted walls are small groups of twelve-foot-tall apparitional beings, delineated in grayscale, glowing faintly in the darkness and confronting the viewer. Inexplicably, they’ve emerged from the fathomless void of cyberspace where they were born to make themselves visible to us.

Each group is presented as a 4-minute long digital “slide” show, not synchronized with each other. The figures don’t visibly move or interact. They do morph in shape, though, and shift positions from one slide to the next. Some have a distinct shadow figure or double behind them, as if they exist in more than one dimension simultaneously.

Human in form, these otherworldly entities appear to be members of the same mysterious family. Some are female, some male, some androgynous. One is pregnant. While their faces are indistinct, each is an individual whose body incorporates unique, and grotesque, physical “enhancements” derived from diverse organisms: wings, shell-like exoskeletons as body armor, corals to strengthen their bones. One’s entire head is an octopus, whose tentacles communicate with the heads of others. Another has a jellyfish on its torso that apparently helps it breathe.

Their bodies look severely damaged too, as though they are veterans of terrible wars. As such, their wounds must go deeper still: internal traumas and interventions invisible to the naked eye. While their physical augmentations are entirely organic, Barakeh imagines they harbor digital enhancements within. If they are the walking wounded, it’s unclear whether the battles they’ve survived are in the past, the present, or the future—or possibly ongoing throughout nonlinear time and infinite cyberspace.

Paradoxically, monstrous as they are, they are far from menacing. They seem to come in peace and urgency, as if to warn us of something. They want to be seen.

They themselves are silent and can’t voice their messages, although one feels they’d have plenty to say if they could. Instead, a soundtrack of wordless choral music like a long lament, calibrated to sound both synthesized and human, accompanies their visitation.

Who or what are these creatures? And why are they here?

Barakeh, their creator, is a Palestinian who grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. The horrors of war were an inescapable reality in her life. She carries within herself war’s traumatic impact on the human body and psyche. A central issue in her work is the effort to regain agency, since agency is what war deprives you of.

Her art making is clearly an expression of agency, as are her academic studies in global security, in which she recently earned a master’s degree. Barakeh’s focus is on military research into human enhancement to improve warriors’ performance in combat: cognitive digital enhancement in particular.

Experiments in cyber-enhancement technologies are no longer science fiction. Some are already in use: computer chips implanted in the brain and body, for instance. Digital data can now be stored in organic material.  Which means, Barakeh points out, that you’re controlled by others, like a smart car or home appliance. Your agency is compromised. You can be hacked also: misdirected, even terminated.

We all live in cyberspace now, and cyberspace lives in us. It’s invisible yet ubiquitous and inescapable. Artificial intelligence may be the final frontier for human existence as we know it. How we as humans negotiate this condition is a crucial issue for everyone.

CYBOTAGE grew out of Barakeh’s concern for the implications of these new existential realities. “The CYBOTAGE figures embody an ambiguity—oscillating between threat and protection—that speaks to their role as guardians of cyberspace,” she says, "and, more deeply, as protectors of our humanity.”

In that role, she envisages them as digital colossi, their images to be projected 30 feet high onto the facades and interiors of public buildings, like the monumental ancient Egyptian stone colossi guarding the temple of Abu Simbel.

“They guard the temple that is cyberspace,” she says, where precious, essential things, like our data, are stored. “They invite us to navigate our relationship with technology, which is advancing at an overwhelming pace.”

Since the beginning, Barakeh adds, “technology has been used to solve problems—but also to cause harm. Now, as multiple technologies converge in this moment, the stakes feel higher.

“Without an ethical lens—one that addresses inequity, environmental collapse, and systemic violence—technology risks becoming destructive, even erasing us, or functioning as a techno-settler colonial tool, where the logic of colonization extends into the body itself. The new frontier isn’t land—it’s the human body.”

References

[1] https://zeinabarakeh.com/.