[electronica music]
MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI: I think genius is a word that gets used
so much more for men, and I've always found
that were very problematic.
I'm here to change that, I guess.
Here we are.
I was doing a lot of 3D animation and 3D modeling.
But just like seeing something that you modeled in a virtual
space coming to life from this digital space to a physical
space layer by layer, I just thought that's-- that's crazy
that you can just do that.
I was doing a lot of research around how
oil relates to both jihad, but also, like, capitalism.
And then the video of ISIS destroying the artifacts
at Mosul Museum came out.
I was like, OK, how-- how can I, like, relate this?
Because everything that I'm reading right now,
everything that I'm working on is--
is about this, like, destruction and how the 3D
printer then become this-- this machine
that rebirthed these things.
We were recreating them based on images.
And once I started to do research on these artifacts
that were destroyed, I realized that there was such a lack
of information about them.
I contacted so many historians and scholars that specifically
work on Hatral or Mosul.
I wanted to find a way that I would share that, give access
both to kind of the sculptures, but also this information
that I gathered.
So inside each artifact, there is a memory card
and a flash drive that is embedded that contains
all the information--
PDF files, images, videos, even my email correspondence
with different scholars.
The more people read about it, the more people
printed those pieces, the more people have saved it
on their computers, the more these things
will get saved and remembered.
I was really interested in figuring out,
what are the material that I can use I would be the closest
to the original material, which was,
like, actually like a stone more like dense material, right?
I just thought, resin would be cool, because, like,
it almost looks like a ghost of these objects.
I only had seen at that point the object in a digital space,
in a virtual space.
And then seeing it in a physical space
is a very different experience.
So I just remember opening the door of the 3D printer
and having this thing printed, but it would be so much,
like, support material around it,
so it almost felt like dug in the ground.
It was very, like, archaeological in some ways.
There's really no way to replace these objects
that were destroyed.
To me, that's where, like, the beauty of that project
was, when I could just use the technology
to archive something that was meant to be lost or destroyed.
All the stories of superheroes are 99% about men.
We have, like, very little figures that
are superheroes that are women.
And I was looking to find these female dark goddess figures
from different mythical narratives
based in the Middle East, bringing them back.
Not just reappropriating their form and sculpture,
but also refiguring their stories.
If you want to, like, imagine other kind of futures,
I think you need new figures, new stories, new histories
to use as a point of departure.
I obviously, like, use technologies.
I have a lot of hope around that and what's possible with it.
But I also think there's like a very dark side of it, which
is that who gets to have access to what technology
and use it in what way?
But also, you can make small changes.
I-- I really, really do believe in the power of micro changes
for macro influences.