Alumnus to create technological retelling of Middle Eastern, South Asian stories
"For Osman Khan, flying carpets are no longer a figment of the imagination.
Alumnus Osman Khan plans to use his Guggenheim Fellowship for the fine arts toward a project that retells "One Thousand and One Nights" through technology. The creation will also fuse these tales of the past with immigrant stories of the present. (Photo Illustration by Kanishka Mehra/Assistant Photo editor and Shari Wei/Daily Bruin) The alumnus and current director of the University of Michigan’s Master of Fine Arts program received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of study of fine arts this year. As of right now, Khan is conceptualizing his newest project by depicting “One Thousand and One Nights” – a collection of Middle Eastern folktales – as well as other Middle Eastern and South Asian mythologies through emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and drones.
“I realized that society was being affected by (new technologies),” Khan said. “I wanted to not just be the maker of this technology but also be critical of it … to reflect back on society a little bit.”
Khan’s projects have included a technological system that ranks viewers of his exhibition based on the number of Google search hits their name incurs, and now he said he’s working to partially recreate tales of the past using AI, drones and contemporary technologies. Media art is an evolving art form just like any other, but Khan said it is nebulous in forms of materiality. Although it is a vast form of artistic expression, Khan said its ability to allow audience participation is a distinctive aspect of media arts.
“With technology, a certain type of interactivity is allowed that I’d like to say a painting or sculpture didn’t allow,” Khan said. “You could say the audience completes the work in their interaction.”
But definitions of the evolving art form are quite complicated, said Casey Reas, a professor of design media arts at UCLA. New media arts is an artistic practice that dates back to the 1920s, Khan said. The artistic expression itself in new media arts is much more amorphous and difficult to define than other art forms because of the ever-changing materiality of the technology, Reas added.
“In the same way that ideas in painting are continuously moving and changing, ideas in media are also changing,” Reas said. “But the medium itself, how software operates or works or what it’s capable of doing also changes. … (It’s) a little more difficult to pin down.”
Khan said he is concretizing his project by incorporating ancient stories through AI oral storytellers that embody Scheherazade – the narrator of “One Thousand and One Nights” – and a carpet that flies with the assistance of drones. As the project is in development, Khan said he is still evolving the specifics of the art, but he hopes digital art can provide him a pre-colonial perspective of Middle Eastern and South Asian history."— Tara Oldenburg, May 21, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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