Ruba Al Sweel

An incisive and disturbing meditation, vista in the sky involves the viewer in a journey to the dark heart of contemporary society’s ambitions of growth and success under capitalism. The meditation is guided by Dhātu-Ba'dan*, a spiritual healer named after an ancient Himyarite goddess of the oasis and worshiped at tree-circled pools. Dhātu-Ba'dan was said to forbid any invocation to her without a priestess in her sanctuary, employing a khalimah (i.e. 'Dreamer') who would sleep to receive an oracle in the form of a prophetic dream. Today, tarot card readers take on this mediating role, inhabiting the damp, leaky corners of the web and using network technology to mediate the relationship with their earnest followers.

Drawing on influences from Abbasid astronomer Thābit Ibn Qurra in "On Talismans" and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment and the hand, the film brings together a cast of media personalities to shed light on voices from the subaltern [the internet], following a fictional palm reading session taking place in Dubai’s rococo vintage hotels of the Deira district [old town]. Hotels in the region are associated with the privilege of anonymity. Patrons often take solace in occupying this neutral space to perform illicit or secretive conduct: from romantic rendezvous to transactions often too esoteric to be recognized within the structures of commerce today. Characters in the film include TikTok fortune-tellers, female islamic scholars and current US presidential candidate Marriane Williamson -- Williamson's interest in wellness has landed her in unpredictable cyber spaces, where she gained popularity amongst a new generation of e-girls and podcast dwellers.

What is it like to experience living through climate change and geopolitical unrest from specific vantage point of the screen? As NPCs during epoch-making events that are incoherent but full of affect and memetics? Tragedy is indifferent to geography. This video essay employs a visual and textual language that responds to the current threat of extinction. This type of compact metalanguage emerges as a by-product of new technologies such as deep learning and neural nets. Narrated by a disarticulate AI egregore, FIRST PHONE plays like a more-than-human stream of consciousness, laying in sharp relief a reality that decenters humans in its imaginary. The video draws parallels between the indifferent machine and Red Sea hostilities of political and ecological nature, coming to grips with a world plunged deep in the era of chaos.

The films ventriloquize the machine, tracing the movement of people, things and ideas across precarious value chains as a way of understanding how the world works. Moscow Hotel is Sick of Your Tears observes the migration of the sacred onto platforms — from 9th-century Sabian talismans to TikTok divinatory filters, the sky has yielded to the screen and algorithmic feeds now function as constellations one consults to seek advice, demand justice, curse or heal. First Phone then summons an NPC animated by an AI egregore, observing climate collapse and geopolitical violence as background noise within the data stream. Finally, Plastic Pilgrims takes this logic to its conclusion: a stolen, resold and repaired phone narrates its long journey in the first person, circulating between Shenzhen's electronics architectures, second-hand markets, repair workshops, smuggling networks and streaming platforms.