My series Material Speculation: ISIS is a 3D modeling and 3D printing project focused on the reconstruction of 12 selected statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015 in a series of highly-publicized YouTube videos. The series goes beyond metaphoric gestures and digital and material forms of the artifacts by including a flash drive and a memory card inside the body of each 3D-printed object. Like time capsules, each object is sealed (though accessible) for future civilizations. The information in these flash drives includes images, maps, PDF files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that were destroyed. Thus Material Speculation: ISIS creates a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool for resistance and documentation.

Material Speculation inspects Petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D Printing, Plastic, Oil, Technocapitalism and Jihad.

On February 26, 2016, I published one of my reconstructions from “Material Speculation: ISIS,” as well as a dossier of my research, as part of Rhizome‘s series The Download.[15] Through this commission, my object file for King Uthal was made openly available to anyone for 3D printing.

I am currently working on finding a platform/museum for the release and the preservation of all the digital files and models from this project. If you are interested a museum, in the Middle-East, please contact me for more information.

In 2016, I was the recipient of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinker award and the Digital Sculpture 2016 Award by The Institute of Digital Art for Material Speculation: ISIS. The series led to a great deal of press and reviews, and has been continuously on loan for exhibition since I completed it, to venues including the Biennale Architettura (Venice, 2016), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017), Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (Sydney, 2017), among others.