Created for Asian Art Biennial 2021, this two-channel vertical video is one of the works revolving around the fictitious space Surisol Underwater Lab. It is a prequel to Surisol Underwater Lab, a past that arrived later than the main event. If one considers “the present” depicted in At the Surisol Underwater Lab as a near-future or a possible world departed from our reality, what emerges from this work is a “retroactive temporality” or a “retroactive present”, as it gazes at the past event from the timeframe of At the Surisol Underwater Lab, and that can be “the present” for us. This also can be seen as a basic function of “extrapolation”, a methodology that is frequently deployed in sci-fi and speculative fiction.

It shows the interview that a young Muslim Mavel El Desuky undergoes under Surisol’s direction to become a researcher at the Surisol Underwater Lab. Here the cliché sci-fi roles are reversed between the interviewing AI Surisol and its human interviewee as it attempts to select an employee to work at the underwater lab. The interview/test is meant for the Surisol to determine whether the human is suited to the isolated deep-sea laboratory environment.

“There’s a typhoon one evening, and someone identical to you shows up at the lab identifying herself as Mabel El Desuky.
Your colleagues are all astonished and keep staring back and forth between the two of you.
What evidence would you use to prove to them that you are Mabel El Desuky?”

The conception of this interview/test process is based on the clichés of the sort of psychological response tests seen in sci-fi and cyberpunk work like the film Blade Runner (1982).
————–