Roy Samaha
About This Book
Roy Samaha is a book about an artist who turned a lost smartphone into a question about digital memory. In June 2014, Roy Samaha travelled through the Aegean, stopping at Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos while searching for locations for a feature film. There he came across a folk tale claiming that revenants cannot cross salt water. A year later, back in Beirut and still working on the film, Samaha saw images of overturned refugee boats in the Mediterranean and read accounts of people drowning there. Remembering the legend, he left the smartphone he had used on the Lesbos trip submerged in seawater for forty days. The photographs, videos and messages stored on it were destroyed. The same saltwater that stopped revenants and refugees also cut off access to everything the device had held. The book develops the research that grew out of that first journey and asks how digital media can represent historical events, particularly those involving vanishings and spectral returns. Can digital tools help capture the fleeting, ghostlike character of present-day migration? And what is left when the commemorative object speaks less of missing images than of the failure of digital technology to meet profound loss?
ISBN: 9783956795756
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