dana-dawud — ethics

INTERVIEW: Dana Dawud

Dubai-based filmmaker, artist, curator, and soundcloud prophet

_

On Monad 5, Internet Cinema, blurring, sharpening, etc.

[TRANSCRIPT]

[07.20.25 @ 10:03 AM EST]

[INSTAGRAM AUDIO] [Outgoing]

[ethics.pdf] Ethics Magazine— [@dansdansrev] Dana Dawud

calling...

calling...

@dansdansrev 00:01

Hello?

Hii

What’s up, how’s it going? What are you doing right now?

I’m just walking in Milan, heading to my place. It’s very hot.

What are you doing in Milan?

My friend is performing, and I just have some friends here and I wanted to see them.

Incredible

How are you? How’s your day going?

It just started it’s like 10am here.

Oh.

Wait, so—Okay, wait. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I feel like you’re one of the busiest people—You’re like this omnipotent spectre of the internet haunting all over the world.

Yeah. Totally. I don’t know. I don’t know how. I think that—because I always thought of myself as an artist, and I didn’t take the conventional route for art, because, you know, I’m an engineer, so I have a double life kind of.

Wait. What?

Yeah. I have a job in construction, like 8-6 pm every day. And—and—I feel like the only place where I found, like… The internet is where I was able to connect people. Because I always–I mean I’ve been reading contemporary art theory and art criticism and stuff and art history since college and I always found the gallery institutional model to be a bit annoying, and I always admired—like I have a lot of musician friends and soundcloud producer friends and I always admired that way of… Horizontality, with the audience, in a way. Like you make art and someone else takes it and makes a remix and then you don’t know each others names and there’s like this interesting kind of access to the work that is a special experience. But at the same time, it appears to be accessible, but it’s not. And I ended up having multiple projects based on that ethos. The first one was Pleasure Helmet, the podcast, and that was during covid because everyone was doing podcast. I just felt like: I love this thing, podcasts, and I love the conversations I have with my friends and this network of artists everywhere, the internet people I’ve gotten to know over the years, because like I said I found this way to connect with artists anywhere. I felt like our conversations are so amazing and I should just do this and it worked. I just put it on soundcloud, I didn’t really advertise it that much but people found it and it worked. And yeah at the same time I was doing a lot of other stuff like writing, making digital art

Do you ever feel like it’s limiting, though? Using the internet for all of these connections. Like is there something missing from these collaborations? Or is it all power?

[GARBLED] [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [STATIC]

Hello?

Can you hear me?

Yeah I think my phone disconnected. I think the internet is bad. So, what were you saying? Limitation? So far I feel like it just opens up things. I haven’t experienced limitations.

None?

I don’t think anything has stopped me.

Interesting. What percentage of the Open Secret screenings do you actually get to go to? It took me a long time to realize you weren’t actually going all these places. I was like how is she fucking everywhere?

I mean I’ve been to... London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Milan, like 5, 6 screenings I think or 7, and the one I organized in Dubai as well. The thing about Open Secret is also that the artists involved are kinda, like, similar to me in their practice. They either have different day jobs or other stuff and then at the same time they have an internet presence and that’s where their most interesting qualities show, I guess. Their thinking, their creativity, their uniqueness, I feel like it’s all… like the internet allows for these qualities to appear as opposed to like other places. Like if I was a gallery artist for instance… I feel like if I took the route for the contemporary artist I would be limited by—I mean the first thing they do to you is make you limit your practice, like you have to define it all the time.

But on the internet you’re sort of encouraged to be esoteric

On the internet I have like 5-6 instagram accounts, all of them are different projects. Sometimes people don’t know it’s me doing them and I can just do it and it’s immediate, the access to people.

Very direct.

It’s direct but on a philosophical, or other levels, you can create work that appears to be immediate but it’s not, you know what I mean? And also like there’s the—like with time, the way how all of these works... layer? And the way they interact with each other, it’s creating their own histories online. That becomes its own landscape or architecture. It becomes like a room in a way

Yeah I’m always saying that I miss when websites were like rooms. Now it feels so rhizomatic. That is true though. I feel like there’s this misconception that internet cinema is easy or fast. I guess because of the aesthetic.

Like when people look at a Rothko and think like: Oh i could do that. But it’s like: No you couldn’t do that, because he did that. And there’s a context, and a history. It’s the same thing for internet cinema, but I don’t want that to be gatekept either. Because there is a part of it that is easy, it is DIY like anyone with a phone can do it.

Monad 3-New York

What is internet cinema?

Hm. Well first I just wanted to make like a comparison with music as well with internet cinema it’s like... Now music is being produced by like 13 year olds on soundclouds and then they become mainstream in a few years, and they get the languages and the sounds and everything gets integrated into the industry, and with fashion. I feel like it’s the same thing with internet cinema, where people just make stuff on their phones and, like, DIY, but then I feel like these images work their way upstream and they become part of the conventional cinematic world in a way. I mean I don’t know if that will happen but it feels like it’s already happening. Still a bit, like, derivative or superficial, but it’s happening

Yeah. It’s always jarring though when these things are co-opted by people with actual resources though. Because it’s like, what are you doing?

Actually? I like that. I think it’s interesting that—I mean it’s always that. Like, it’s bottom up in a way? And it’s becoming more that now. Because people have the means to create stuff without having to go through all the steps

I feel like this is also the first generation that was raised with such an awareness of editing. It used to be the least visible element of filmmaking, now it’s, like, hypervisible.

That’s something that redactedcut said too, actually, that the primacy of the editor, with these kinds of things, the entire film is the edit basically. And direction takes new forms as well

Yeah how do you direct people that are gathering footage or recording a monologue for you online?

I just send them scripts and give them like—Hmm. Sometimes I give them very specific directions and sometimes I keep it a bit loose. Um. It’s interesting sometimes I just ask for a type of footage, for example museum footage, and then people go and they record museum footage. I give them a bit of direction but inevitably they do their own thing. And I feel like that’s the interesting part, it’s like this kind of improvisation, and losing control of the process as well. Like as someone making a film, usually you have to be in control of all of the images and the results, but when you work this way you lose control of its quality over so many things.

It’s almost like curation in that way, but within a single film.

Totally.

I was just rewatching Monad actually, or Monad 3, and I’m always so captivated by the Wonderful Cringe section, like in that crawlspace. I mean the whole thing is beautiful but I remember when we screened it here in New York, it was like the end of the night and we had just let everything go on for so long and then at the end it was so nice to be sitting in a dark room with this object of performance, like I could just feel it all wash over me

Aw. That’s really nice. That’s beautiful.

Monad 3-New York

But there’s something about the self mythology of Monad that I think is really interesting.

Yeah.

When you started making it did you know it was going to be an iterative thing? Or did that just happen organically?

No, yeah. So I started with Monad 1 obviously. But I was thinking about The Monad and the multiplicity of them when I was reading Leibniz and stuff, but I was just mostly just curious about starting, like making the first one. And then when I did it was honestly just that thought of “I’m not that satisfied” and I just wanted to open it up next time. But I did—I actually don’t remember if I had like imagined that this was going to be a series or not. I feel like a lot of artists actually work like this, you dont really plan the entire outcome or process and you just basically listen to the work, and see what it demands. Sometimes it’s just too saturated, it can’t be opened up, it can’t be iterated, it’s closed. It doesn’t have that capacity to be opened, it doesn’t have the potential to. Monad, from the start it had that thing where it was like I could make another one and another one.

It’s like a container

Yeah. And now I’m making the fifth one but I’m not sure if like… It might be the last one. I’m not sure.

What’s up with Monad 5?

The next Monad I’ve been thinking about a lot of topics, I want to open it up a bit. I feel like Plus had more themes than just like blur, I feel like integrating stuff from the music world, and stuff from—I mean like the mugshawty meme, for example, and yeah I feel like in the next one I’m mostly focused on cloning, and the image of the self, the selfie, and what that means, what that kind of image means, what happens to it when I put it in a film? Like multiple images of multiple selves. And also dubbing. I really want to dub the film. I don’t know how. But I really want to have scenes that are dubbed, not all of it but definitely some of it. Maybe the scenes where they’re scripted. Also exploring chatGPT and how it’s making us stupid and smart at the same time.

Do you use chatGPT?

I do, I use it all the time.

I can’t get down with it.

It has its uses.

So we’re moving away from the blur?

I think so, yeah. I mean it’s always there, it has its presence. I can say there will be an entire sequence about blurring, there’s... Should I say it? There’s an agency that unblurs people, basically.

An unblur agency! Oh that’s kind of sad.

Yeah. It’s called Antigone Blurring Expert Services and people call them. I already have some scenes done by Jill and Renee for that, and I asked my other friends in Ukraine to do it so I’m waiting on some scenes, and that’s also another thing I’m doing, I think I talked about this on the post I posted on my story, my editing notes, like Out 1, the Rivette film, has all of these scenes of theatre groups rehearsing for Prometheus, and they bring different texts, different renditions of Prometheus and they keep doing it in different ways, different texts, and I feel like Monad incorporates a lot of that in it

Yeah you have a very similar sense of discovery and chaos to that film

Yeah it’s like how do people, like, if you send them the same script what kind of different iterations and copies and clones... What will happen?

I feel like in your film, like once you get to the third repetition or so of the same monologue it becomes a different... It’s like, oh okay now something’s coming out of this, something opens up. I mean this goes back to, like, Meisner but I feel like people go a specific type of crazy when you make them repeat something enough, there’s this like intangible quality.

Yeah. There’s this thing with repetition. Like, with Deleuze, there’s this thing with art where it’s not a science experiment, you know how if you repeat a science experiment from A to Z you’re supposed to get the same result.

But with performance it’s completely different.

It is different, there’s the difference, Différence, or whatever, that happens, and that’s something I’m also exploring in this one.

Monad 3-New York

So where did the blurring thing come from?

I’ll tell you.

[LONG PAUSE]

So one day I was scrolling my stories. This girl posts a, like, fake schedule of different types of experts. And I had had blurring elements in there already, I mean I was doing research on levitation and most of the videos on youtube of people who claim to have levitated, they all have their faces blurred while they’re levitating. It’s so funny. Its like all of these guys with faces blurred out and theyre like, oh we’re gonna do this thing, it’s so dangerous, don’t try it, were gonna levitate. Every single video their faces were blurred and I was like, OK, there’s something here. There’s a connection. And then this girl post this schedule, I don’t know where she got it from, and one of them says blurring expert, and I was like, oh fuck I need to have it. I need to use it. I just thought that’s interesting. It’s just a process. But also, like, with the blurring expert, it becomes, like, it’s a professional thing

You’re attaching a corporate entity to it.

Yeah it’s like a doctor or something.

Like you have to go to a place and get blurred.

Yeah, yeah.

And also incorporating the government documents into it.

Well when I was researching levitation, a lot of the gravity or anti-gravity scientists are like oh the government doesn’t want us to do this, they don’t want us doing this research. I want to include this archive—maybe I will include it in this one. There’s all this stuff on internet archive, videos of people like, oh the government doesn't want us to research gravity they don't want you to know that you can defy gravity.

Crazy. Who are these people?

Just some scientists.

There’s a paranoia to it that I guess we all understand.

I’m really into this. Paranoia. My favorite film of all time is Burn After Reading. Have you seen?

Oh yeah.

It’s so funny. It also has this paranoid vibe to it.

There’s this awareness of the surveillance state now, like we’re all so exposed to it we’re all so used to it. It’s just accepted. It almost doesn’t bear mentioning. But the aesthetics are great. Like the internet creates this schizophrenia, all the watching and being watched. It’s too much. Or not enough, maybe. I don’t know, there’s images there.

I love that. Yeah.

So you started Monad at a retreat in the desert?

Yeah. So at the start of Monad, a lot of it was inspired by Chris Kraus’ novel Aliens and Anorexia

Oh totally. I see it.

Because it’s all about her failure in making a film and how Gravity and Grace was a bad film that she made. And I’m a big Chris Kraus fan.

Well yeah she’s the ultimate failed filmmaker who found a way to give her films success by writing about the failure.

Yeah, and there’s the interesting thing of, like you said, how did you self mythologize Monad, oh you just talk about your film. And you learn that online because like after being online for years you just have no shame promoting yourself.

No, you have to.

No one else will do it for you.

The worst is when someone’s trying to like, couch the self promotion or pretend they’re not doing it, it’s like, no, you’re advertising, just be proud of it.

We’re all doing it. I got the Dazed feature. It’s funny. I’ve been laughing about it since yesterday. Like what the fuck?

I saw that. It’s a great article. Do you ever feel limited with the way people read your film or what they get out of it?

I don’t mind it. To me I was like, it’s about gender and the post-genderness of being online. I was talking about the 2hollis song, like, I love you like a sister.

I love the scene in the Plus cut where they’re just reading those lyrics.

Yeah, like, once it’s read by a guy, and once it’s by a girl it could be read by anyone. That’s the beauty of Monad, it’s not trying to be about the girl or the girl’s face. That could be one reading.

You remove your identity when you get online. I guess that’s like blurring your face

Exactly. And then if you want to unblur your face that means that actually you want to show your face. It’s the dance between the sharpness and the blur, between wanting to show your face and not show your face, and having the ability to do it. I feel like that’s… It’s not a moralizing story about blurring, it’s not favoring blurring over other modes. Honestly like before monad if you watch any, there are so many music videos, so many campaigns, if you look at pinterest, it became a whole aesthetic. It’s lke part of the whole indie sleaze y2k. You understand.

And it gets back to the aesthetics of surveillance and the paranoia. But also it’s just vibed out.

Yeah it’s also just beautiful when you blur something on an image. There’s something sexy about it.

I feel like a blurring expert sometimes. When I open photoshop or whatever.

You are. I remember you did blur my friends nipples. In the music video?

Oh! Right. I literally was a blurring expert. For you. What a special moment.

Her name’s Chloe Landau, you can write about this. It’s on vimeo

I was looking back through our DMs to try and figure out how we met and you just cold messaged me like hey I want to publish my film in your magazine and I just thought that was so awesome.

I think I saw some of my friends were submitting stuff to you guys and I just wanted to do it too

I was really on drugs during that issue. I hadn’t slept in like four days when we released it. That was a super spiritual time. Everything meant so much. And I was still trying to make the Ethics film.

It never happened?

I mean I have like 30 hours of footage for it. I made a lot of deeply necessary connections. It was all so important. But I was out of my mind. Sometimes I still get the impulse to edit it.

You have to. It’s your Gravity and Grace

How much of Monad is scripted? How much is improvised?

The Peter Vack monologue was just prompted. I just told him to do this crazy schizo monologue, like all over the place, being paranoid about blurring experts and stuff, and he did that and it was amazing. The Kaiotei one too, in the middle when he says that blurring experts are snake oil salesmen and charlatans, that was like, him. The other stuff is me. Now the next one will be 100% scripted. Except for some voice notes of friends that I like to include in stuff, like when I’m talking through my ideas with them and then I tell them okay I’m going to include this. But it’s going to be more scripted. More structured. Longer, maybe.

How much of the footage from the previous cuts is going to be in there?

Maybe just the opening.

Monad 3-New York

The opening is so good. I’m struck by it every time.

I spent hours on that. And when I got it I was like fuck. This hits.

It hits. And when the sound cuts out and the date comes on screen. The sound in general.

The sound is genius. My friend cutspace, this music producer, he’s doing really well. His work is just crazy and I love that these artists are actually enthusiastic to make stuff for my work. Like I message soundcloud producers that I love and ask them to make something for my film and they do. They’re actually very generous about it and actually really into it

I feel like people are way more willing to help with your work than you think they’re going to be. People want to give you things. They want to help. There’s so much power in a cold ask.

Yeah.

What do you make of the current cinema landscape? You’re tapped into all these networks of filmmakers, do you think we’re in a renaissance or a drought? Is it over or is it back?

I’m really excited still. I’m still making mine. We had a redactedcut RNG screening at discord. It was amazing. Very beautiful experience. Xafya [Lovecraft] made another film, and her film is very interesting, she’s a musician and when I asked her to send something she was like yeah I have something. And she lied like she had nothing. And she just edited this for open secret. And her film is doing very well, it was mentioned in—What is that New York thing that talks about movies.

Screenslate?

Yes, Screenslate. It was mentioned there and a lot of people find her film very moving, very current. And her voice, anyways, her presence online, the way she speaks the way she presents herself, the way she posts, it’s just like dialectics all the time, it’s insane and she’s such a good, like, visionary, like visual artist. She’s a visual artist, anyway. Xafya Lovecraft. She just made a new version of her film that is gorgeous and I can’t wait. I think it will screen in Brooklyn.

Oh yeah you’re doing a screening on the 2nd, right?

Yeah.

It’s in my calendar.

Honestly I literally don’t know how these screenings happen.

Aren’t you organizing them?

No. People message and say they want to organize a screening and I say go for it. And some of the artists like also say oh I wanna do it in my city, like we have a person from Australia, I think, she’s organizing a screening in Melbourne as well in August. Like, the first one happened like that, like Paul messaged me, and then I was like yeah let’s do it. Eliskajah has done a couple in Vienna, Prague, Graz. No actually Graz was organized by Becoming Press, who we also work a lot with. So it’s a lot of generosity from—Well not just generosity. People want to see it. They just want it to happen.

Yeah, you’ve made something that people care about and want to spread.

That’s the thing is I didn’t make it. Also it was an accident. That this happened.

What?

Well this guy, he, okay. This can’t go in the interview actually. I’ll tell you what goes. He asked me to curate a screening and I’ve never done that in my life. So that was the start of open secret. I was like who do I put in the screening? Xafya, redactedcut, poorspigga, people I know, y’know. Like. These are my friends that I work with. I think their work is interesting. And I just put it together. And then I realized ohhh this is internet cinema. Before I didn’t really think like that.

But now you’re kind of tapped out of it? Are you still actively putting together screenings or is it just pretty much people that come to you and want to do one?

Yeah for now. We have one, we have a big event in Brussels that, uhm, my friend Mischa who’s also part of this open secret screenings is working on. But it’s more, what I like is that it’s not just limited to open secret, like they’re doing something about internet cinema. They’re doing a big festival, they got like funding. They’re inviting 0nty to come talk, and I might join in remotely. And they’re also giving a course at a cinema school there, like an internet cinema workshop. And I told them, like I don’t care about if it’s open secret, it can be a part of it but it’s cool to see people take it and open it up to different formats. The key here is that other people are thinking about this and have been thinking about this, like way before open secret.

It’s so organic the way these things grow and people find their place in it.

Yeah and like, we don’t take ownership over it. But I think what makes people relate internet cinema to open secret is first of all the way the events have been happening like five events every month in different cities, that’s an aspect of it. And also like the nature of the art and the artists involved, like they’re all kind of like their own—they’re very independent in the way they operate. There’s something about it, the community has this energy that I just can’t explain, I don’t know.

It creates this like monolithic facelessness that feels like it’s everywhere and not just one thing. There’s a mystery to it that’s very alluring and I think people are really attracted to.

Yeah. I’m in Chinatown Milan here which is very interesting.

What’s Chinatown there like?

It’s very Chinese, actually.

Well I’d hope so.

The best Chinese food in Europe is here.

I’ll have to go sometime. You know I still don’t have a passport.

You haven’t applied for one?

I don’t know why I don’t do that.

What? You’re traveling this week how are you going to get into Montreal?

I think it works. So are you working on anything else right now? Obviously you have your job and Monad and open secret

Monad 5, today I need to start working on a mix for NTS that’s coming out on the 23rd, and I haven’t done anything about that yet.

Like in 3 days?

Yeah. I need to start working on it. I was supposed to start today but I just went out and did some stuff. Maybe I’ll start soon. But yeah trying to finish Monad 5 in August. End of August.

Whoa. Soon.

Yeah I have to just lock in and edit

Do you wanna maybe screen it at the release for the next issue?

Oh I’d love that. I’m editing a magazine as well. L’amour La Mort. I love the Swedish New York connection.

What’s the process like for doing that remotely?

Editing a magazine? We just call each other.

What do you think is going to save us?

Nothing. We’re irredeemable. Humanity’s… I don’t know, just. I really have so much passion for making art. I don’t know anything else. I don’t think it’s a solution, I don’t think it will save anyone. I just want to communicate to everyone. To hundreds of people. I just want to talk. I love people. I have a few friends. But I want thousands of people to see my work.

You’ve definitely found a way to do that.

Yeah I mean it just worked. I really don’t know how. Really, really, it’s out of the constraints of my life, really.

These things work out the way they’re supposed to. We have very little control.

If you force it people will feel it. They will know.

They can feel it when you’re trying and they don’t like it.

No one likes it. Haters. People are haters.

People are haters.

I don’t hate. I don’t know if I hate anything strongly. I just get bored by stuff. It just doesn’t move me, it doesn’t hit.

And that’s worse, actually.

Like I was thinking about German rap I think it needs to end. I just feel like it’s a psyop like german rap is not real. It just doesn’t make sense to me like why germans be rapping? Hip hop culture like seriously?

It’s the language least suitable to rhythm. And they look so stupid.

I don’t hate it so much but thats one of the things I’m hating on recently, I guess.

What’s your take on [REDACTED]

Oh, that can’t go in the interview

I’ll blur it out.

Blur blur blur blurrr blur blurrrr blur blurrrr blur blur blur bluyrrr blur blru rbrlru brur;ryr

blur blur blur

blurrrrrr rbrlrur bluyr rbrlrur blur blur blur blur blur bliur

blur

blur blur

blurrrr blurring blurring blurring blur blrur blur blur blur

BLURR blur blur and well alsoi blur because blur and blur and there is blur but there was blur or there has been blur but when there wasnt there is and there is and there alwasy is but there isnt and i love you and blur and a blur and i love you

I love you

I love you.