Well its now the month of Google, so I can’t Google, Google or Google between the hours of Google and Google…thirty more Googles then it’ll be the end of Google, I’ll celebrate Google and then it’ll be back to Google again.
After recent patent filings on socialnetworks, moonbases, gigamail, photos, muniwireless and maps, seems that Google has designs on Islam.
Next up – WikiQuran.
Cheeky. Today BBC News covered Banksy’s alternative guerilla attack on Israel’s ‘security fence’ (see Art prankster sprays Israeli wall). Along various sections of the fence, Banksy’s trip to the ‘ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers’ has punctured the fence with:
At one point Banksy was threatened by Israeli soldiers as warning shots were fired into the air…Ali joked that ‘imagine if i did that…they woulda defo shot me dead lol’.
Perhaps this is the form of non-violent Jihad we need in the Islamic world – combating the tyrranical stupidity of Israeli occupiers with the message that the souls of men cannot be crushed with tanks and bombs. Banksy’s Balloon Girl image pictured here simultaneously expresses a poignant yearning for freedom coupled with a playful ‘f*ck you – we’re better than this’ message to the occupiers. Art can lift the souls of the oppressed and motivate activism more than any suicide bomber.
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Banksy’s website relates a hilarious exchange with a Ramallah local – You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful – Thanks – We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home. Priceless.
(Incidentally, Artsy’s artist page for Banksy is pretty good…)
Ali’s work for Sony’s UK launch of the PSP finally debuted at the Dray Walk Gallery as part of the PSP The Beautiful Script exhibition.
I was in London for a few meetings yesterday and decided to catch the show while it was still running…I’ve uploaded my photos of the event, and the area around Brick Lane, to my Flickr account.
Earlier today Ali and I were riffing on Sony’s motivation to align the work of emerging British Islamic artists with the PSP launch…and we still couldn’t figure it out! Either, the British Muslim demographic is hugely desirable to Sony or they see urban art such as Ali’s being close the brand values for PSP?
In either case, seeing the artists work slideshow on a kiosk’d PSP I understood the themes of freedom, beauty and desire as embodied by the aesthetic of the PSP…and, as a Muslim, its simply flattering to know that someone somewhere in Sony drew a connecting line between those aesthetics and Islam 🙂