Shaheer Zazai, Trajan Pro 10 - New New Finale, 2014. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist.
Here are a few things about the Word document in general: it is a receptacle for information; a storage unit for things that are creative and not; a language; a place for undoing and redoing; a site for error and perfection. When the document is complete, its appearance is rarely surprising. A white page marked with script, words, margins, paragraphs, punctuation, indentations. These are typical functions and objects for any Word user, but in Shaheer Zazai’s practice, they are his creative materials.
On January 1, 2013, Shaheer Zazai sat down at his computer, having challenged himself to type 2,013 dots and spaces into a blank Word document. As continues to be his practice now, Zazai diligently typed. As he worked, punctuation amassed on the page into a thick formation of characters, but, as he mentioned to me this did not seem to amount to much, it was simply a set of 2,013 dots and spaces.
The next time he faced his screen, he laid out his materials, space by space, dot by dot, then painted the field using colour from the highlighter tool. The second of his experiments recalls that familiar relic of broadcast TV, the test pattern that plays bars of colour when there is no scheduled programming.
As an extension of his practice, Zazai’s time-based animations are a deeply personal record of his process. The moving-image work Trajan Pro 10 – New New Finale (2014), accumulates colour, contour, and design before being razed, giving way to a process of destruction in which the materials visually break down. Through a cycle of undoing and redoing, the animation shows the ways an image can be built, destroyed, and rebuilt piece by piece, enacting a process of worlding, unworlding, and reworlding that is tenderly tied to the artist’s hand.
As we watch, a ghostly cursor, guided by the artist, fills the screen with stuff. First, a repeated character pattern, backlit by cyan highlighter, runs across the page until it is packed from top to bottom. Then, as if by hand, other colours and pathways begin to loop and cross each other, creating the impression of a dense weaving.
What follows looks like algorithmic choreography but do not be fooled by the video’s appearance.
When the animation starts to jitter, it would be fair to assume Zazai created the effect by fractal calculation, but this is his own painstaking work. He learned to make the text rattle when he pressed the tab key, manually shifting the form and distorting it completely, enlivening what is there by pushing the software to its limits, or rather, by mobilizing its functions to excess.
Zazai ends the film by completely undoing his work. As the coloured lines trace their way back to the beginning, the artwork recedes into itself, back into the blank page it was. The finished animations are screen recordings that document the hours it takes for Zazai to build and destroy his Word textiles. Once he hits “record,” he can’t stop. His only abstraction is the time-lapse function, which allows him to condense these hours of work into two or four minutes.
The process of assemblage and ruin offers the video a kind of looping temporality that is deceptively abstract. The animation is linear because the medium is linear. Yet, we are confronted by a strange juxtaposition between Zazai’s time-based distortions and the precision of the Word medium—the rhythm of the animation competes with the code of the interface. Our conditioned expectations of the software and how to read it are distorted.
The pixelated appearance of Zazai’s still and animated pieces recalls the design of intricate textiles. They speak the language of the carpet—those of Turkish and Persian traditions, and those of Afghanistan, where Zazai was born before moving to Canada—whereby the accumulation of knots produces an image as a matrix structure just like the binary assemblage of zeros and ones in the pixel grid. Each pattern Zazai crafts is evidence of a colossal task that involves methodically typing and highlighting miniscule characters, counting them, counting spaces, colouring them individually, and aligning a design along multiple pages to create a work of art that is continuous from one panel to the next.
Once a design is complete, Zazai takes a screenshot and deletes the Word file, cutting off the urge to revise by totally removing the possibility. His computer houses hundreds of files like these: screenshots of Word documents that are only differentiated by their timestamps, a precious chronological ordering of his creative process.
In Zazai’s work, blank space is nothing more than perception. But this is also data that has simply faded inside the colour saturation, thus only appearing empty when the text and highlighter are the same colour. The effect is a document so crammed with information that it can no longer be read traditionally, demanding instead that we recognize and take into account the dynamics that produce it. It becomes aesthetic.
Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian artist whose practice focuses on exploring and the cultural identity in the current geopolitical climate and diaspora. Over the years Zazai’s material vocabulary has expanded into textile work, site-specific public art installations and video works through a self-reflective lens. He was a finalist for EQ Bank’s Emerging Digital Artist Award in 2018, and has participated in CAFKA 19 and several exhibitions including solo presentations at the Aga Khan Museum (2022), Owens Art Gallery (2022), and the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga (2021).
Yani Kong is a writer, editor, and scholar of contemporary art in Vancouver, Canada. She has recently published essays for the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation and Freedman Gallery, and is a regular contributor to Galleries West. Kong is SSHRC Doctoral Fellow of Contemporary Art at the School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA), Simon Fraser University, researching reception aesthetics and contemporary art history. As a member of the Low Carbon Research Methods Working Group, she explores sustainable practices in streaming media. Kong is a faculty member in the Department of Art History & Religious Studies at Langara College.