Egyptian cinema is one of the oldest and largest film industries in the middle east and despite the fact that the Arab world consists of diverse communities, dialects, minorities, and religions, it has contributed to mass popular culture influencing expression, fashion, language and style due to its widespread popularity and distribution. Egyptian movies were a cultural staple in the structure and fabric of Saudi life. Before the advent of video players, broadband and the opening of movie theatres in 2018, a large percentage of the Saudi population relied on renting cinema reels or watching films on the only Saudi channel that existed at that time. It was a family event, a family gathering, a family assembly of all household members young and old waiting in anticipation to watch their idols acting narratives of love stories, heart breaks and social vengeance.

As Historical events unfolded within the past 50 years, the Arab regions went through civil conflicts, invasions, wars and uprising. The glamorous lives that was seen on screen has been eroded by images of news coverage and gruesome depictions of the realities of its time. Contemporary life changed from gatherings and a one TV channel to an unlimited choice of various entertainment watched in isolation, from clicking endless channels on the remote to surfing millions of websites online. The golden era of the Egyptian movie is left with a diminishing audience who reminisce about what was, or more over, films are reduced to tiny clips watched in haste on a mobile device.

This project reflects on the erosion of the collective memory of the past, a cultural memory that is disappearing, the evanescent of a time-gone era full of images and emotions, sensations and sentiments. The focus will be the black and white Egyptian movies between the 1950’s and early 70’s. This was considered the golden era of Egyptian movies, where you can see the influence of Hollywood, western cultures and residues of colonialism after the Egyptian revolution. The Project relies on a Machine Learning architecture called StyleGAN and large dataset of images. The AI training would produce something called a “Latent Walk”, where one can see how the AI produced distorted images from the data set giving the observer a sense of an attrition, disintegration, and fragmentation of a memory. The final moving image clip is the assimilation of many films gathered and layered in one space. It is what memory has become.