The Arab Summer: A Digital public

“If you please - draw me a sheep...” said the little Prince, thinking not about a real sheep, but a virtual one. For virtual sheep requires very little space and can live a long time. 

 -The Little Prince (1943)  

 

The cyber-port assesses the extent to which freedom of expression is enhanced or undermined in the digital age where computer systems are fundamentally reshaping our urban experience and the cultures of our cities. My project seeks to create an entirely new “public” and takes  the form of an online ‘place’ - loose from all the trappings and ceremony of any town square, and drawing on digital research and online tendencies in Morocco. What would this new digital place, which is home to many functions that are not allowed in the physical city allow? In a region with a highly curtailed public space, my project becomes a speculation of a new type of public space that exists entirely in the digital realm. 

 

The Arab Summer speculates on an optimistic, celebratory, digital public - a public entitled to and allowed access into a world they fought to bring into existence in the Arab Spring. My project is both a spectacle (making the invisible visible) and performative, it is digital (as a website) and ‘real’ (it draws on real places in Morocco’s economic centre, Casablanca)