Imagine strolling past a computer shop and one catches your eye, glistening with potential through the glass windows. It could be a Macintosh, or a Dell, or an Acer. You buy it. You use it for a while. It breaks down. You move on.
For Samia Halaby, an artist native to Jerusalem (see Samia Halaby), the first personal computer she encountered was a Commodore Amiga 1000 in the mid-1980s, and it propelled her into the world of digital art.
Through Halaby’s use, this low-cost machine was a tool of abstraction: “It had obviously underwhelmed the financial community, but to me it was magic. I sat at home with my two manuals and got lost in a new world of thought. For three years, all I did was program that computer, making abstract paintings that I term ‘kinetic painting.’ My aesthetic life had shifted.”1 For many of us, computers are akin to appliances—machines used to complete daily tasks or to consume entertainment. For Halaby, her computer was her canvas.
By the time she purchased her first Commodore, she was an established painter in her own right. She picked up digital art easily, her first pieces featuring complex geometric forms that represented motion and sound. She called this series of images “kinetic paintings.”
Halaby’s inclination toward digital art was inspired by an IBM exhibition that she attended during her student years. It piqued her interest largely because it promised exploration and experimentation. By that point, Halaby had already learned an easy coding language, LOGO, on her sister’s Apple II. Later, her kinetic paintings were coded in C and BASIC, which she also taught herself. Halaby developed her own program that allowed her to create her digital paintings. It operated as a keyboard, each key adding an image to a sound. “Once my app began running, the keyboard became an abstract painting piano,” Halaby says. With one of her students from Yale, Kevin Nathaniel, Halaby formed the Kinetic Painting Group and performed across New York.
Her excitement at discovering the power of computers in art creation almost leaps out from this description:
The computer adds to the visual language of painting. It also creates an amazing picture plane, which is the envelope that contains a painting and which separates art from reality. In the past, painters prepared a white surface and dreamed of deep space. But the computer’s surface is almost alive. It also has memory, which allows you to bring things back and add sound. The computer gave new attributes to the language of painting and I want to be an artist at the edge of its investigation.2
Through digital art, Halaby tried to capture her environment, representing scenes and landscapes as geometric forms. Her Yafa series, for example, pays tribute to a city she remembers fondly from her childhood:
Yafa, an important Palestinian port known as “Bride of the Sea,” it is where I spent the formative years of my childhood. Crisp bright enjoyable memories remain with me and deeply affect my painting and writing. The blue sky over the blue Mediterranean, private gardens full of flowers, my sister in a baby carriage while my mother stops to talk to a beautiful friend wearing a yellow chiffon scarf fashionably veiling her face. And as the years of the Nakbe approached, I remember experiences of growing Zionist terrorism.3
Another series is dedicated to Jerusalem, which she worked on in the late 1990s. Similar to her other digital work, this collection functions as a visual diary of the city; the visual diary is frequently complemented by text from her actual (written) diary, used as a caption. Her digital art gives these memories dimensions of sound and motion, bringing them to life. That’s why she believed coding was a beautiful language that imitated the city—it imitated life itself.4