Salih Albarrak is a designer based in Riyadh, he has a profound interest in the overlap between storytelling, alchemy, and design. This journey has allowed him to construct a fabric of works and techniques, effectively capturing the essence of speculative social and political structures that reside on the fringes of reality.
Salih Albarrak is an architect/artist based in Riyadh, he has a profound interest in the overlap between storytelling, alchemy, and design. This journey has allowed him to construct a fabric of works and techniques, effectively capturing the essence of speculative social and political structures that reside on the fringes of reality. Lulu: Pearls Amidst Pixels (2023)
snippet of procedurally generated hollow pearls
We have turned our digital spaces into clean-room environments where anything irregular gets quarantined immediately. Everything online is sanded down to a standardized finish, as if a single stray pixel or an unpolished corner might break the illusion.
We talk about curation like it is a creative act, but most of the time it is just a form of erasure. We sacrifice the actual friction of being a person—the weird geometry, the unresolved contradictions, the specific tics that don't scale well—just to make ourselves legible to an algorithm.
It mirrors what happens when nature loses its grit. When we optimize a space so thoroughly that every edge is smoothed out and every outcome is anticipated, we kill the life of it. If we polish away every flaw in pursuit of an ideal standard, we aren't building a world anymore. We end up building a cage.
