Jeddah’s 'Al Attarin' Street...History from Artistic Perspective

Papers from the 'Roaming Walls' art work displayed at the Amaken Exhibition at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) - Asharq Al-Awsat
Papers from the 'Roaming Walls' art work displayed at the Amaken Exhibition at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) - Asharq Al-Awsat
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Jeddah’s 'Al Attarin' Street...History from Artistic Perspective

Papers from the 'Roaming Walls' art work displayed at the Amaken Exhibition at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) - Asharq Al-Awsat
Papers from the 'Roaming Walls' art work displayed at the Amaken Exhibition at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) - Asharq Al-Awsat

Saudi artist Asma Bahmim takes part in the Amaken Exhibition held at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) with her special work “Roaming Walls,” which depicts scenes from her childhood in the heart of Jeddah.

“Long time ago, people in Hejaz used to put papers that feature Quran verses and holy texts inside walls’ cracks in respect of the words written on them. They also used to hide love letters inside the walls, which had long caught my attention as a kid in Al Attarin street,” she told Asharq Al-Awsat.

About the idea, she said: “I thought I knew myself through time, but I discovered that my knowledge was formed of scattered memory pieces that assembled with past events that took place in my hometown. My idea is inspired from the house I was born in, its walls that are filled with my dreams, thoughts, and scraps featuring verses from our holy book that were folded and preserved between stones’ cracks. That collection of successive pictures in my head has long provided me with balance.”

In her work, the Saudi artist focuses on the tradition of placing papers between the cracks of walls, and bricks. Bahmim noticed this tradition for the first time when she was visiting her aunt’s house in the historic region, which motivated her to document it in a work inspired by her spatial memory.

- Al Attarin Street -

Asma Bahmim holds a lot of memories from Al Attarin street. “I know all the places there, and I remember many prominent figures that I used to see in that street, where I studied in a language institute. All these things engraved the street in my memory,” she explained.

The artist took advantage of the demolition of the random properties in that region to collect ancient stones, which she used as a major part in her newest artwork “Roaming Walls” made of wastes of construction materials from the historic region of Jeddah, including pieces of bleached coral, stones, and wood.

- Paper making -

Interestingly, Bahmim has long worked in handmade paper. She makes her own papers using banana leaves she dries on the roof of her house, and color them with natural dyes. When asked about the craft, she said her mother used palm leaves in paper making, like a lot of people did at the time.

“Paper making in Hejaz is almost extinct, but I am trying to keep it alive using banana leaves, and I hope to expand it, but the project requires large potentials.”

Bahmim’s works reflect her interest in Islamic arts, such as medieval manuscripts including ‘Maqamat Al Hariri’ and the Panchatantra stories. Her project consists of collecting paper scraps to build a wall with cracks in which she plans to put her personal letters with hand-written words or gold papers.

Asma Bahamim was born in Jeddah, 1979, and studied fine arts at the Jeddah University, where she currently works as a professor. She also partook in the 2018 Islamic Art Festival in Sharjah.



A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It "converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences," said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.

This is "a pretty big advance in our field," said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a "streaming approach," Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a recorder.

"It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish," Anumanchipalli said. "It’s processing it on the fly."

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, "would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech."

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn't affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with "sustained investments," it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.