Artist and curator Dana Dawud joins Disintegrator to talk about Open Secret, her touring platform for internet cinema, and her evolving film series Monad.

We discuss the blur as a visual device and trend, the impossibility of representing Palestine, being trained by AI and building myth in the age of the feed.

The audio is laced with reflections by collaborators orbiting Open Secret: redactedcut @redactedcut, Palais Sinclaire @palais.sinclaire, Mischa Dols @mischaapje, 0nty @the.ontological.turnt, Angel Kether @user_goes_to_kether.

References mentioned:

• Gore Layer by Alex Quicho in Spike (July 2024): https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho,
• The novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus: https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition,
• Further reading on CoreCore by 0nty (July 2023): https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty,
• We spoke about Serge Daney’s observation that “there is no image of Palestine” (or, more precisely, that there is “no complex image of Palestinian reality”) which arises from his deep engagement with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly in the context of Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere). Read more in Serge Daney’s seminal ‘Before and After the Image’ (1999): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528.,
• Watch ‘The Sight is a Wound’ (2025), a visual essay by Parham Ghalamdar: https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw,
• ‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’ (1988). In this work, Deleuze interprets monads not as isolated points but as folds of space, movement, and time, each containing the world within itself as a unique point of view.,
• Jaques Rivette’s almost-13hr-long-film: ‘Out 1’ (1971),
• Sven Loven at No Gallery: https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release,

Links to explore Dana’s work:

• Monad+ : https://hybrida.space/monad,
• PalCoreCore: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-palcorecore,
• Pleasure Helmet Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/pleasure-helmet-977951874,
• https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/,
• https://www.instagram.com/_opensecrett_/