In the modern age of smart phones and constant internet access, we are inundated with data, information and news. We have become addicted to the lure of endless connection, unaware of the myriad ways it influences our lives.
This is the theme of Spanish multidisciplinary artist Daniel Canogar's first solo exhibition in the region — following from his work at Spain's national pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. Called Loose Threads, the show at Galloire gallery in Dubai's City Walk opened this week and runs until February 24.
It is an unexpectedly beautiful and ethereal examination of the constant flow of data that we consume through technology. Canogar, who splits his time between living in Madrid and Los Angeles, not only creates data-driven artworks, but uses data as a medium itself.
“There used to be these really specific news cycles,” Canogar tells The National. “You'd buy the newspaper in the morning, then at night you'd catch the evening news. But now it's incessant, it never stops. I'm very interested in trying to capture that incessant flow.”
The show includes a 2016 work called Ripple — a rectangular screen hung in portrait format on the wall. At first glance, the surface looks like a multicoloured, finely woven textile, until three adjacent horizontal lines cascade from the top at varying speeds, leaving behind a striking coloured path.
Each of these moving lines represent a new video being uploaded on to CNN’s website. When a new video is uploaded, a large thumbnail of that clip appears and makes its way down the screen, leaving behind a ripple of colour based on the hues that appear on the video.
Once the video reaches the bottom of the screen, it reappears at the top as a collapsed line trickling down again. These uploads make up the archive of videos from CNN from the past hour, and as new clips come in, the oldest ones are kicked out.
“I’m just creating this algorithm that’s creating this very patterned fabric,” says Canogar. “Somebody told me it looks like a Missoni fabric and I do like that idea that it has pleats and the folds of this fabric.”
Canogar first made the connection between fabric and technology when he saw a private collection of pre-Columbian textiles. “I was just so affected by the beauty and mystery, the complexity of some of these [pieces],” he says.
The artist found himself drawn to how different weaving techniques had different meanings. And while the textiles used symbols to represent different ideas, Canogar observed something beyond that. “The way textile craftsmen and craftswomen were referencing their own medium … that takes a very sophisticated mind, a very modern mind,” he says.
“In a way, you're thinking about the act of making a textile as part of the subject matter of the textile. And that's where I connected to my working with technology and referencing technology.”
For the next few years, Canogar researched the concept and fleshed out the connections he saw between technology and fabric.
He was fascinated to discover that the Jacquard loom, a machine that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles that was patented in 1804, is considered the first computer. Patterns are created on the fabric using punch cards carved with holes, which are inserted into the loom.
Canogar saw these punch cards as a kind of primitive algorithm. He saw how television screens use interlaced lines, as if taken from textiles, to create images.
“I think of screens as a modern forms of textiles, the way we think about screens, the way we use screens to represent our world,” he says. “The way we're beginning to cover buildings, particularly here in Dubai, with screens … it has a membrane skin-like aspect, which is very textile.”
While visually mesmerising, Canogar’s work goes beyond aesthetics. These digital textiles thread different kinds of data together, which also inform the visual quality of the works.
All the pieces in the exhibition, bar one, are connected to the internet and use live data to create digital fabrics of information, resulting in abstract, moving graphic shapes and colours.
One work, Chyron, depicts a collection of entangled, thin ribbons of various colours floating as if in water. Each has a series of words running across it. These are actually the “tickers” seen at the bottom of screens from real-time broadcasts on CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News and more.
The most powerful of his works is Tunica. In comparison to the others, it is a much smaller screen, set in a different, darker space in the gallery. Thin, horizontal white and golden threads are woven through with silver vertical ones. They move like a dial, synchronously expanding and shrinking in size.
The vertical lines also represent the names of people who died in Madrid during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the horizontal ones reflect those born in the city during the same period.
Through each work, Canogar takes us out of the minutiae of news and data, which are embedded into our lives and, through the metaphoric and symbolic use of digital textiles, makes us rethink our relationship with technology and news.
“I want to use the news to create art and to see it almost from a different perspective,” he says.
“My works allow me to process the news and to find some kind of mysterious beauty, the inner calmness, within the island storm.”
Daniel Canogar’s exhibition Loose Threads runs until February 24 at Galloire gallery in City Walk, Dubai
Results:
6.30pm: Al Maktoum Challenge Round-2 (PA) | Group 1 US$75,000 (Dirt) | 2,200 metres
Winner: Goshawke, Fernando Jara (jockey), Ali Rashid Al Raihe (trainer)
7.05pm: UAE 1000 Guineas (TB) | Listed $250,000 (D) | 1,600m
Winner: Silva, Oisin Murphy, Pia Brendt
7.40pm: Meydan Classic Trial (TB) | Conditions $100,000 (Turf) | 1,400m
Winner: Golden Jaguar, Connor Beasley, Ahmad bin Harmash
8.15pm: Al Shindagha Sprint (TB) | Group 3 $200,000 (D) | 1,200m
Winner: Drafted, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson
8.50pm: Handicap (TB) | $175,000 (D) | 1,600m
Winner: Capezzano, Mickael Barzalona, Sandeep Jadhav
9.25pm: Handicap (TB) | $175,000 (T) | 2,000m
Winner: Oasis Charm, William Buick, Charlie Appleby
10pm: Handicap (TB) | $135,000 (T) | 1,600m
Winner: Escalator, Christopher Hayes, Charlie Fellowes
Meydan racecard:
6.30pm: Al Maktoum Challenge Round 2 (PA) Group 1 | US$75,000 (Dirt) | 2,200 metres
7.05pm: UAE 1000 Guineas (TB) Listed | $250,000 (D) | 1,600m
7.40pm: Meydan Classic Trial (TB) Conditions | $100,000 (Turf) | 1,400m
8.15pm: Al Shindagha Sprint (TB) Group 3 | $200,000 (D) | 1,200m
8.50pm: Handicap (TB) | $175,000 (D) | 1,600m
9.25pm: Handicap (TB) | $175,000 (T) | 2,000m
10pm: Handicap (TB) | $135,000 (T) | 1,600m
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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UFC Fight Night 2
1am – Early prelims
2am – Prelims
4am-7am – Main card
7:30am-9am – press cons
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RESULT
Valencia 3
Kevin Gameiro 21', 51'
Ferran Torres 67'
Atlanta 4
Josip Llicic 3' (P), 43' (P), 71', 82'
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'Top Gun: Maverick'
Rating: 4/5
Directed by: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Ed Harris
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Engine: Electric motor generating 54.2kWh (Cooper SE and Aceman SE), 64.6kW (Countryman All4 SE)
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'Morbius'
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Stars: Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona
Rating: 2/5
EA Sports FC 26
Publisher: EA Sports
Consoles: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S
Rating: 3/5
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