Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

My Facebook profile image has become a digital canvas of sorts. My profile pictures are almost always doctored in photoshop. At times it’s just a traditional self portrait. In some instances I created a digital montage instead of the traditional self portrait.

Cindy Sherman and Lucas Samaras come to mind while looking at these portraits. They both utilized their own visage in their work. Cindy’s work was more of a cultural critique concerning women’s role in society and Lucas was more of an introspective artist, looking inside himself to explain existence in a sense.

I have a history of drawing and painting portraiture so this comes naturally to me. Below is a selected few of my ‘Facebook Profile Portraits’.

The following semi-doctored and color corrected screenshots are of the World Cup finals that took place yesterday in South Africa (07.11.2010) between the Netherlands & España.

The selected images were carefully chosen to tell my narrative of the match; the side that believes that the Dutch played borderline aggressive/dirty the entire match and were lucky they weren’t given more red cards (disqualifications) throughout play.

This continues my blog series entitled ‘Postmodern: I Take Pictures of Pictures‘. This time i chose the world cup finals match using ESPN’s highlight video footage.

The Red Card (The Ejection)

THE GOAL

I never understood why ‘ma and pa’ cafes had free Wi-Fi and Starbucks never did. They forced their customers to pay for this service. Starbucks is a huge, powerful, and ubiquitous corporation (especially in the U.S.) and making ‘us’ pay for Wi-Fi surely had no effect on their profit margin.

So why did Starbucks wait this long to change their policy regarding the Internet??

Prior to their July 1st, 2010 free Wi-Fi policy change they forced their customers to go through this complicated procces to get “FREE” Internet:

• Purchase a starbucks card
• Fill it up with at least $5.00
• Scratch off a card specific number on the back
• Sign up on the AT & T (Wi-Fi) website using that
  number and input personal information
• Select a Username & Password
• Sign up on Starbucks website with that Username & Password
• Fre Wi-Fi is attained

This complicated and time consuming process seemed to disourage some non-techie folks from even trying to figure out this convoluted roadmap. As a UX Designer I was always asking the question why? Why a multi-billion dollar corporation did not hire a UX designer to make this Internet signing up process simpler? Maybe they hired a UX Designer to make this process purposefully complicated?!?

The question always led me to the same answer: that Starbucks (previously) did not want to make this process easy. For whatever reason[s] (people camping in their stores solely for Internet use and not for buying their products) getting Internet at Starbucks was harder then rocket science.

As of today (07.01.10) the Internet at Starbucks is FREE. This time it’s really free with no * next to the word FREE leading to a fine print explanation. Off-course there is the ‘I agree to the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy‘ which if checked obviously means that the customer is selling their soul to Starbucks; but that’s OK as long as the Internet is free.

Honestly, I stumbled on this interesting and fun of a parade in NYC. I’ve developed this ritual of going to Washington Square Park after work and/or during the weekends. I go there to read, people watch, and record street performances that always seem to take place at this iconic park.

This time when I got out of the subway I was in for a pleasant surprise. Scores of people were lined up behind police barricades off of Avenue of The Americas and the 9th street area. It was the Gay Pride Parade and I instinctually took out my phone video camera and started shooting anything and everything.

I missed out on the big floats but still captured some interesting stuff. I spliced, cut, and pasted some footage with Blur’s 1994 track, “Boys & Girls”.

I DO NOT NECESSARILY SUBSCRIBE TO THE FOLLOWING BELIEFS AND/OR IMAGES but I did find them interesting::::

Sitting in Starbucks @ Astor Place & Lafayette (The biggest Starbucks in NYC) and working on a project. I look to my left and I see a very interesting tattoo of a devil looking figure on a cross. I instinctually take out my camera and snap a couple of photographs without asking the person with the tattoos.

The PICS came out pretty badly so I started a conversation with this guy. It turns out that he has a special website dedicated to this tattoo and he is the owner of funny dress up Jesus magnets; an illustrator by trade.

Behind every sinner there’s a saint and vice versa

I think this simplistic statement holds true in everything in life. Black & White explanations are simply too rigid and unrealistic for us neurotic and complicated homosapiens.

What started out as taking pictures of a tattoo turned out to be a very interesting conversation with a very interesting guy. As a matter of fact, I know a couple of friends who bought his magnets. He has been around for 10 years (his magnets).