. <random> search-

Master's Thesis Project

At the frontier, our liberty is stripped away... we enter the universe of control....We submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect.

—Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line

<random> search is a subtle, reactive undergarment. It records, shares and analyses the experience of invasive airport searches on behalf of our silent, abiding, fearful bodies.

<random> search website

1st prototype of <random> search at Seamless Computational Couture

. arabiia-

October 2005

Across societies and countries, dress has always played a pivotal role in cultural and political expression. Attire, especially when it comes to women's attire, figures in many parts of the world as a means of representing and expressing oneself (undressing religion, Linda Arthur).

Arabiia is a convertible outfit that looks at two opposing images of the Arab woman: the sexualized belly dancer and the veiled opressed woman. The costume is equipped with two servo motors and a switch. It enables the woman to flip modes between two extreme stereotypical representations typically attributed to arab women.

arabiia website

Seamless v2.0 fashion show website

OpenStitch runway show website

. 20 million-

April 2005- Public Arts Seminar

A series of projects that look to capture a large, closely tied network, the Lebanese diaspora: www.20million.com.

20 million consists so far of two related projects:

20 envelopes: a mail art project that retraces part of the community of Lebanese expatriates in the U.S.

Lebanese absentees: an installation that addresses the role of the Lebanese diaspora in the May parliamentary elections and the future of the country.

. That's All Sheikh- Arab representation in U.S. cartoons-

January 2005- CMS.790 Media Theories and Methods I

Discriminatory references in the media used to be a fairly common practice, particularly in American cartoons of the early twentieth century. Cartoons of the thirties and forties reflected the social tensions of their time. In the forties, the "evil guys" were Nazis, during the Cold War, they were "Commies", Soviets, Korean, and Vietnamese. At other times, they had less to do with direct political events, more with social issues: African Americans, Jews, Asians, Arabs were either "the bad guy" or were simply gratuitously made fun of, ridiculed, or misrepresented.
Subsequently, many groups and lobbies have made efforts to put an end to such portrayal of racist attitudes. Many cartoons were taken off the air, and some characters were altered. In general, there has been considerable sensitivity in the redefinition of cartoons. This, however, didn't always apply to the portrayal of Arabs.

How did the misrepresentations of Arabs occur in cartoons? What is the effect of these stereotypes on contemporary Western society, and how do they reflect social relations between the East and West? During the reevaluation regarding animated cartoons in the twentieth century, why were images of Arabs overlooked and the cartoons which contained them remain in circulation?

While censorship is an unfortunate practice in all its forms, examining the motives and reactions of censorship can provide us with valuable insight as to racist attitudes in society. That's all Sheikh is a research paper that looks at the discrepancies in the way producers and distributors of cartoons dealt with discriminatory images of Arabs versus those of other ethnic groups; discrepancies that can be viewed as a diagnosis of deeper issues in Arab-American relations.

That's All Sheikh: Arab representation in U.S. cartoons

. The Easier Way-

December 2004

The Easier Way is a 2 minute movie edited from archive.org.

It looks at the relationship between technology and man: illusion, promise, addiction, consumption...

EasierWay.mpg (29MB)

. SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW?-

November 2004

SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? does exactly the opposite of spam screening services and spam filters.

By taking spam out of its private, 1 on 1 context, and displaying it in a public space, SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? attempts to show spam as an informative diagnosis of values/problems/interests in contemporary cultures.

SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? website

The Art and Politics of Netporn conference website

SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? video presentation:

spamdoc.mov (43MB)

. kiNET- an animated surface-

Fall 04- MAS 863. How to make (almost) anything

This is a project I worked on with Sergio Araya, from architecture and computing.

kiNET is a deformable surface that uses a specific pattern design and strategically placed solenoids to create movement regardless of the surface material used. The movement patterns are driven by microcontrollers and ultimately, they would be created in response to commands or to the environment of kiNET.

kiNETmovie.avi (9.4 MB)

The website of kiNET: a progression from idea to project is here

Game Set and Match II conference website

. No number left behind-A look into the bias in the news-

October 2004

No numbers left behind examines the news bias in the media, through an automated system that retrieves RSS feeds from various sources, parses them and obtains the number of reported deaths in the Iraqi war. The system attempts to use visual and graphic tools to expose the discrepancy among the numbers reported by different news sources.

. VoG- Voice over GPRS in Lebanon-

May 2004- American University of Beirut

As a final project during my studies in Computer and Communication Engineering, our group (Rouba Khalil, Christian Khoury and I) developed VoG, a voice over IP application that employs a network that is not traditionally used for voice, General Packet Radio Service. VoG is an attempt at accelerating the shift towards a seamless, unified network that can carry both voice and data. Also, VoG makes its best effort to benefit from the available bandwidth in GPRS to enhance communication in underprivileged communities. VoG uses a low cost network infrastructure and provides IP telephony services for countries where alternate communication networks are either very costly (GSM) or very inefficient (internet).

. Power Allocation Schemes for Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation over Rayleigh fading channels with no feedback-

September 2003- MIT LIDS lab, IEEE ICC2004

In wireless signal transmission, adaptive transmission was shown to yield significant benefits. In this paper, we show that the adaptive PSAM scheme can be further improved if power and rate are jointly adapted to the quality of the channel measurement at the receiver, rather than to the quality of the channel. In time-varying, no feedback Rayleigh fading channels, we find the optimal power distribution scheme, without adding any complexity at the receiver.

full paper (9 pages, 112KB)

camera ready paper (5 pages, 79KB)