ayah bdeir

‘we are middle’ (WAM) is a group of designers, artists, and engineers who are looking to create, curate and publish works, articles, images and thoughts, which contrary to popular media and politics, represent the common in the Middle East rather than difference. We wish to examine and play with new representations of our Middle East through selected themes in which seriousness and humor are each other’s undertones. The themes will be open to contribution from creative makers from around the world.

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.

Here is the truth: this line, at which we must stand until we are allowed to walk across. 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

Aside from exotic Daisy Duck with her dance of the seven veils, and the mute abiding second class citizen in a black burka, not many images spring to mind when thinking of an Arab woman. Arabiia is a caricature of media stereotypes typically associated with arab women. The convertible outfit is equipped with two servo motors and a switch. It enables its wearer to voluntarily choose which of two extreme representations fits her mood and audience.

arabiia from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.

A public intervention, an installation, and an online project that looks to capture a large, closely tied network, the Lebanese diaspora.

kiNET is a deformable, animated surface that uses flexor patterns, microcontroller circuits and solenoids to create movement in otherwise rigid surfaces.

the easier way from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.

A 2 minute movie edited from the Prelinger Archive that looks at the relationship between technology and man: illusion, promise, addiction, consumption…

Discriminatory references in the media used to be a fairly common practice, particularly in American cartoons of the early twentieth century. 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, and procedures were put in place to increase sensitivity in the definition of cartoons. This, however, didn’t always apply to the portrayal of Arabs.

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.

An interactive installation that attempts to turn the relationship we have with spam around. A microcontroller-based Webserver retrieves spam sent over the Internet in real- time, and remotely feeds a continuous shuffled stream of it to public displays. Spam is no longer meaningless, time-consuming junk, but rather a diagnosis of cultural values and an alternate representation of societies.

VoG is a voice over IP application developed as a final project for the BEng in Computer and Communication Engineering (with Rouba Khalil and Christian Khoury). The application employs a network that is not traditionally used for voice, General Packet Radio Service and attempts tp utilize 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).

In wireless signal transmission, adaptive transmission was shown to yield significant benefits. A matlab program simulates the improvement introduced by adaptive PSAM scheme that is 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.

paper