Socio-Technical Imaginaries of the Middle East: Petropolitics and Digital Colonialism

• In Event: Performing Socio-Technical Imaginaries - II

Abstract

This paper re-narrates the historical roots and prospected futures of computational technologies in the context of the Middle East through the lens of colonial practices of the West including from the extraction of resources (e.g. oil) to the production of knowledge (e.g. archaeology). The systems enabled by computational technologies, whether military or financial, cannot be grasped in isolation from the petro-politics taking place in the Middle East. Those systems operate through investments in wars, real estate, arts and high-tech industry in the region. By drawing upon the artistic works of Moreshin Allahyari, this paper investigates the changing socio-technical imaginaries in the region that cut across the dialectical conditions of the finitude of oil and digital colonialism. Allahyari’s “Material Speculation: ISIS” adopts 3D printing, whose raw material is plastic/oil, in order to build selected artifacts from the ancient sites that ISIS had recently destroyed. Many ancient artifacts, smuggled by ISIS, are expected to end up being in private collections or perhaps even cultural institutions in the Western or Gulf countries. It is necessary to trace infrastructural and political connections that underlie complex networks of complicity at a global scale. In her latest works, she appropriates dark goddesses, monstrous female figures of Middle-Eastern myths for developing a speculative storytelling about the utopic and dystopic futures that await the region, while enacting feminist and de-colonizing narratives. Ultimately, this paper investigates the multitude of the socio-technical imaginaries of the Middle East at the intersection of petropolitics and digital colonialism.

Author

• Ozgun Eylul Iscen, Duke University