Art of the future?

Haris Ejaz creates art accompanied by music for a live audience.

ISLAMABAD: Technology is a creature with a life of its own, evolving at a pace faster than our consciousness can possibly comprehend. It is an accelerating reality which is simultaneously scary and fascinating.

While some fear the coming of this brave new world or Orwellian nightmare, others are spinning in the whirlwind of new gadgets and innovation. Although the market is constantly bombarding us and making us believe that we must spend huge amounts of money on useless and pointless technology, there are nonetheless countless amazing advancements that are giving life to creative possibilities that have been previously unknown.

Islamabad is small and depending on its mood and various degrees of separation, news travels fast or completely disappears. So when the news reached me that Haris Ejaz a talented local illustrator was going to create a digitised piece live accompanied by live music, I thought it was well worth to leave my slumberous, heated room and venture out to Kuch Khaas, a venue in Islamabad that has been dedicated to providing space to Islamabad’s art and culture starved population.

The audience entered a comfortable but dimly lit room filled with sofas and a few scattered candles. Not knowing quite what to expect, the small crowd of people settled in and the artist, Haris Ejaz, sat behind a huge desk with a computer with his screen projected onto the wall. Wearing a woolly hat and holding an electronic stylus pen over a graphic tablet (an electronic pad that allows you to draw onto the computer screen), Ejaz was reminiscent of a futuristic mad professor with a magic wand.

A few musicians sat across him with a guitar and percussion instruments. The mood was decidedly relaxed and in the same no-fuss way began the night’s event. To the sounds of guitar, melodic singing and bongos, an image started to take form in front of our eyes. At first it was an indeterminate image and the strokes on a screen had the same energy as the brush strokes we associate with artists busy at work. Then the strokes became a woman and then she had features, her mouth appeared as a frown and as the music changed, the bottom lip turned into a gentle smile.

The black outline of her eyes and the definition of her body emerged onto the screen. Sleeping little creatures found their way onto the canvas and there was sunshine yellow and red and purple. The little sleeping wonders had words on them that said ‘As you are’, ‘As you were’ and ‘As I want you to be’.

Then all of a sudden two hours had gone by in a flash and right on time the music faded and like magic a beautiful image had formed right in front of our eyes.

It was a great performance by some wonderful musicians and an extremely talented and skilful artist who has harnessed the digital tools technology has made available to us and made them into his own. It was a joy for the audience to watch the unfolding of this creative process and in a way to have become part of it.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 16^th,  2011.