Ali Hossaini

Ali Hossaini (b. West Virginia, 1962) is an American artist, philosopher, theatrical producer, television producer, and businessperson. In 2010, The New York Times described him as a "biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet". In 2017 Hossaini published the Manual of Digital Museum Planning and subsequently became co-director of National Gallery X, a King's College London partnership that explores the future of art and cultural institutions. Prior to National Gallery X Hossaini worked with King's College to develop Connected Culture, an action research programme that tested cultural applications for 5G supported by Ericsson. As a working artist and producer, Hossaini's genre-spanning career includes installations, performances and hundreds of media projects. Since 2018 Hossaini has worked with security think tank Royal United Services Institute and, in a 2019 special edition of its journal, he assessed the threat from AI from the perspective of biology.

Early life and education (1962-1994) The son of an Iraqi father and American mother, Hossaini was born in West Virginia in the United States. Hossaini came of age during the Reagan Era, and became a producer and host (1989–1994) for Alternative Views, a television program that offered progressive news, commentary and interviews. He also produced short films that were distributed by Deep Dish Television and went on to write for the Village Voice and other publications.

Education Hossaini studied at Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University & The University of Texas at Austin where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1994. His thesis – Archaeology Of The Photograph traced the development of optics from Sumer to the Hellenistic period. This thesis would go on to inform much of his subsequent forward-looking work in academic publishing, media technology and optics including contributions to the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography and Vision of The Gods: How Optics Shaped History published by Logos (journal).

Career

Early roles (1994-2001) From 1994 to 1996 Hossaini worked as a sponsoring editor at the University of Texas Press Austin where he academic manuscripts in the humanities, including classics, media studies, and women's studies. Hossaini helped launch The Surrealist Revolution at the University of Texas Press, a book series whose inaugural volume, Surrealist Woman, revealed the suppressed histories of female artists. He also published one of the first electronic books, Istanbul Boy, in 1996. and produced one of the first public webcasts, Come to Me, that same year.

In 1996, Hossaini left Texas to join the staff of The Site, a San Francisco-based television newsmagazine on MSNBC, as a producer and commentator. He did pioneering work in social media by building audience interaction into television. He moved to ZDTV in 1997 where he continued to develop interactive projects that integrated audience tools like chat and webcams into television programs. From 1999 to 2001, Hossaini was a vice president for community at Oxygen Media, he developed applications for video sharing and managed presence to integrate numerous corporate acquisitions into a single network.

Rainbow DBS and Voom HD Networks (2002-2009) As a director of programming and executive producer for Rainbow DBS (later Voom HD Networks) from 2002 until 2009, Hossaini managed production, licensing and broadcast efforts for the first dedicated art documentary and video art television channels – Gallery HD, LAB HD, as well as Equator HD high-definition television channel devoted to travel, culture and natural history until 2009.

Robert Wilson Video Portraits As executive producer of LAB HD, Hossaini fostered the creation of several dozen avant-garde films, including the Voom Portraits Robert Wilson, a project which became well known after Vanity Fair featured one of its subjects, actor Brad Pitt, on its cover. The series of HDTV videos feature performances by Hollywood stars, including Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini and Willem Dafoe, European and Persian royalty and notable artists. The Voom Portraits Robert Wilson exhibition opened in 2007 at Paula Cooper Gallery and Philips de Pury Gallery in New York City.

Hossaini describes the genesis of the project in Robert Wilson Video Portraits, an edited volume published by ZKM. In a separate interview for HD TV Technology Hossaini noted that his early adoption of HD video in the production of Wilson's portrait enabled the conscious evolution of the video art to be consumer akin to other art forms such as painting.

"The other idea of the video portrait is to do a very playful extension of the painting. Wilson is noted for very, very slow movement in all of his theater and film work that he has done before. In this case, he wanted to create these things that almost look like a still life on the wall, but then they started gradually to move. The more you watch them, the more you see in terms of that movement. They sit up on your wall as permanent installations, so video is the perfect medium for this kind of exercise."

Greg Moyer of Voom HD Networks would go on to comment that this production "brought Robert Wilson to high definition in some regards. He'd been using the medium prior, but we facilitated every aspect of the portraits." Hossaini also produced Epitaph an autobiographical short directed by Dennis Hopper shortly before his death.

Through Pantar Productions Hossaini realised the first iteration his Ouroboros: The History of The Universe art installation at the Ise Cultural Foundation Ise Cultural Foundation in Soho, New York. In a review for The New York Times Dennis Overbye remarked that the work "bypass the rational part of the brain and head straight for someplace deeper, to make us experience the universe not as a concatenation of forces but as a poem."

Ouroboros would set a trend for much of Hossaini's subsequent artistic and professional activity, ostensibly exploring how art and technology can, in his words (2016), "help facilitate a shift from authentic objects to authentic experiences."

Luminaria (2012-2014) In 2012 Hossaini was approached by the City of San Antonio to develop a five-year strategic plan to transform their Lumniaria Arts festival into a globally significant festival of arts and ideas. Hossaini's preliminary plan developed with Dissident Industries, a New York-based firm, would be to alternate the festival annually with a workshop or "a participatory lab for festival development and experimentation.". The plan advocated the expansion of the new biannual event into a ten-day festival and was credited with aligning the festival with downtown development initiatives and the city's strategic ambitions.

In a 2014 interview Hossaini commented that the goal was to convert Luminaria from a "by San Antonio, for San Antonio" event into a "by San Antonio, for San Antonio, and for the rest of the world" The president of the Luminaria board credited the report with a helping to instigate paradigm shift for the organisation – "Living event to event isn't working.. Now we're talking about Luminaria as a concept, as an organization (instead of a once-a-year event)" Cinema Arts Network completed a national broadband "Network for the arts" in 2014, and in 2015 Hossaini announced CAN 2.0, an initiative to engage audiences via smartphones in sixteen UK arts venues. Hossaini remarked at the Johannesberg Summit of Global Congress of the Wireless Broadband Alliance technological convergence allows initiatives like this Cinema Arts Network to proflierate, nothing that connectivity alone is a "transformative factor that catalyses transformative changes in society."

Manual of Digital Museum Planning In 2017, Hossaini coedited the Manual of Digital Museum Planning with Ngaire Blankenberg which the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, describe as the comprehensive guide to digital planning, development, and operations for museum professionals and students of museums studies and arts administration.

King's College Since 2017 Hossaini has been visiting research fellow in the Department of Informatics at King's College London. In 2019 he co-founded National Gallery X, a joint research studio maintained by the National Gallery and King's College London. In 2020 Hossaini was promoted to visiting senior research fellow in the Department of Engineering at King's College London. In this capacity, he serves as co-director of National Gallery X, and his responsibilities include curating and collaborating with studio residents and building creative links between the Gallery and King's College London researchers.

Connected Culture In 2016 Ericsson and King's College London announced that Hossaini would lead Connected Culture, a joint project that applies 5G networking techniques to immersive media. Connected Culture examined how vision, hearing and touch perform over 5G networks. Public workshops were held at National Theatre Studio, RADA and Sadler's Wells, and Hossaini tested a new spatial audio system Soundscapes within his 3D video installation Ouroboros. As a result of Hossaini's project in June 2018 the city of London announced they would be hosting the world's first 5G connected theatre in collaboration with Berlin. The project report contains details on how to manage art-science collaborations and reports on perceptual tolerances to network faults.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 Ericsson explored work of the connected culture initiative noting the way that well before an event like COVID-19 the Hossaini's vision "had the ambition to show how the three sensory elements of touch, sight and sound could be heightened to make any experience much more immersive.". In a virtual panel as a part of the Ericsson UnBoxed Office social series , "5G: Connecting Culture", Hosseini noted that with 5G, independent artists will have the same kind of access that major cultural institutions do and suggested that this will help drive a major cultural explosion in small towns around the world as creativity is going to be one of the primary ways of maintaining connection to others. of NGX Hossaini describes the goal of the undertaking is to "spark a modern renaissance" by bringing together people who are cross-trained artists, scientists and engineers to create "new forms of spatialised experience that our predecessors couldn't have dreamed of". National Gallery X was launched in September 2019 by Gabriele Finaldi and speakers included Tim Berners-Lee.

Leading the COVID-19 pandemic Response In 2020 National Gallery X and Hossaini commissioned and released their first commission as a virtual versions of an art installation that reveals the sounds of colour in paintings virtual in response the COVID-19 pandemic. KIMA: Colour in 360 by Analema Group launched on the second of June 2020 and consists of three video works that transform colour data from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Monet series), and Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses into 360-degree light and sound experiences. Two of these were made immediately available to view on YouTube and the National Gallery website with the van Eyck-inspired work following later. The virtual artist residency by Analema Group was a part of a revised programme that takes the lockdown as its context and subject and offers a series of creative and philosophical responses to the new world coronavirus has created.

In an interview on the project Hossaini commented that the COVID-19 pandemic had radically accelerated the nature of artistic expression as well as shifted the fundamental core value propositions of museums as well as augmented their underlying architectonic logic:Covid-19 slammed the accelerator on long-term trends. Since the 90s I’ve staked my career on convergence: the idea that the Internet will absorb every other medium. It started with mail then print. I remember when people said no one will watch TV on their computer let alone their phone. I prefer making the future to predicting it, but I think the next wave of convergence is architecture. I call KIMA: Colour in 360 a ‘boundless meditation on the essence of art’, but it is also a meditation on walls and the intersection of physical and virtual space. During the Covid-19 lockdown, artist's tools have evolved at warp speed, and more importantly, so have people's habits. As the National Gallery and other cultural places re-open, they’ll have access to vigorous new tech that make buildings more like websites while distributing key features of architecture over media channels. Interactivity, personalization and other features we take for granted online will become part of places, and distinctions between physical and virtual will fade as architecture comes online. Subsequently, on the 16th of June 2020, the NGX launched their digital events programme in collaboration with the London media art platform Art in Flux. Art in Flux‘ART IN FLUX @ NGX - GENDER*UCK - Media art beyond and between concepts of Gender "Epiphany: the Cycle of Life" was made by Hossaini, composer Paola Prestini, librettist Niloufar Talebi and choral master Francisco Nunez Produced for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The multi-media experience attempted to re-imagine the concert-going experience by employing interactive methods to explore the relationship between performers and observers, the limits of the human voice, and the possibilities of music and image. Hossaini writes that he began working on the performance in 2006 and it was irrevocably formed by the experience of being with his mother as she died.

2016

Ouroboros, video installation, Art for Tomorrow, Doha, Qatar

2017

Ouroboros, Video Installation, Click Festival, Helsingør, Denmark Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, Video Director, Young Vic, London

2018

Epiphany, Video Installation, Guildhall, London, 2018 4 Monkeys, Video Triptych, Galerie W, Paris, 2018

Filmography 1986 Sometimes a Blessing Can Be a Curse, director Ich bin Du, director Abstraction 1, director

Video Portrait: Robert Downey Jr., director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Jeanne Moreau, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Isabelle Huppert, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Juliette Binoche, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Marianne Faithfull, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Zhang Huan, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Steve Buscemi, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Noah Khoshbin

Video Portrait: Sean Penn, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Willem Dafoe, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Robin Wright Penn, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: J T Leroy, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: William Pope L, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Gabriella Orenstein, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Lucinda Childs, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin2006 , experimental feature, director: Ali Hossaini Unperception Now, director: Ali Hossaini Video Portrait: Princess Caroline: of Monaco, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: * Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Queen Farah Diba, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Prince Alexis Schleswig-Holstein, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Video Portrait: Gao Xingjian, director: Robert Wilson, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer Esther Gordon & Noah Khoshbin Rite of the Black Sun, director: Bradley Eros, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Aquarium, director: Pavel Wojtasik, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Landfill, director: Pavel Wojtasik, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin, HDTV Sahara Mohave, director: Leslie Thornton, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Portrait of Shanghai, director: Lili Chin, HDTV, experimental short Sorry, director: Gail Vachon, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Meredith Salient Field, director: Theo Angell, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Spectropia (episode), director: Toni Dove 25 Letters (3 episodes), director: Grahame Weinbren, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Tension Building, director: Erika Beckman, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Mythmakers, directors: Sabine Gruffat & Ben Russell, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Poem, director: Mary Lucier, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin, HDTV Light Mood Disorder, director: Jennifer Reeves, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Bridge, director: Fred Taylor, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Urban Sonata, director: Jud Yalkut, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Stiff, director: Jenny Reeder, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin Carrara Landscape, director: Angie Eng, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin The Shadow Lords, director: Jose Figeroa, executive producer: Ali Hossaini, producer: Lili Chin2007 Medicine Woman, 13 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Ultimate Tourist Scams, 13 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Wildlife Nannies, 20 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Penny Revolution, 6 x 60' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Green Wheels, 13 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Video Portrait: Renée Fleming, director: Robert Wilson, HDTV, experimental short, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Video Portrait: Skunk, director: Robert Wilson, HDTV, experimental short, executive producer: Ali Hossaini2008 Mario's Green House, 8 x 30' HDTV series, director: Mario Van Peebles, executive producer: Ali Hossaini The Monkey Thieves, 13 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Lost in China, 6 x 60' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Wildlife Nannies 2, 20 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Earthtripping, 6 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Natural Born Traveler, 4 x 30' HDTV series, executive producer: Ali Hossaini 4Monkeys, multichannel video installation, artist: Ali Hossaini The River, theater and video, writer: Ali Hossaini Noumena, theater and video, writer: Ali Hossaini Time is the Moving Image, theater and video, writer: Ali Hossaini Beethoven's Toothpaste, experimental video, director: Camille Morin, executive producer: Ali Hossaini Story/Time, 3D HD feature, director: Bill T Jones, producer: Ali Hossaini Engineering Standardisation Practice Hossaini's practice has led him to help produce consolidated standards to help promote the effective, ethical, creative and considered creation of AI systems, complex systems and system design. These include:

IEEE 7000-2021 - IEEE Standard Model Process for Addressing Ethical Concerns during System Design This is a set of processes by which organizations can include consideration of ethical values throughout the stages of concept exploration and development is established by this standard. Management and engineering in transparent communication with selected stakeholders for ethical values elicitation and prioritization is supported by this standard, involving traceability of ethical values through an operational concept, value propositions, and value dispositions in the system design. Processes that provide for traceability of ethical values in the concept of operations, ethical requirements, and ethical risk-based design are described in the standard. All sizes and types of organizations using their own life cycle models are relevant to this standard.

IEEE 7001-2021 - IEEE Approved Draft Standard for Transparency of Autonomous Systems The aim of this standard is to describe measurable, testable levels of transparency, so that autonomous systems can be objectively assessed and levels of compliance determined.

IEEE 2731 - Standard for a Unified Terminology for Brain-Computer Interfaces The standard establishes terminologies and definitions used in the description of Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Select Peer-Review Publications (Incl Standardisation Work)

A Functional BCI Model by the P2731 working group: Physiology, Hossaini, A., Valeriani D., Nam C. S., Ferrante, R., Mufti Mahmud M., 5 Sep 2021, Brain Computer Interfaces Modelling the Threat from AI: Putting Agency on the Agenda, Hossaini, A., 29 Nov 2019, RUSI Journal The AI Special Issue: An Introduction, Dear, K., Hossaini, A., 29 Nov 2019, RUSI Journal A functional BCI model by the P2731 working group: control interface, Easttom, C., Bianchi, L., Nam, C. S., Hossaini, A., Zapala, D., 8 Dec 2021, Brain Computer Interfaces A Functional Model for Unifying Brain Computer Interface Terminology, Easttom, C., Bianchi, L., Davide Valeriani, D., Chang S. Nam, Hossaini, A., Zapała, D., Roman-Gonzalez, A., Singh, A. K., Antonietti, A., Sahonero-Alvarez, G., and Balachandran, P., 17 March 2021, IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology A functional BCI model by the P2731 working group: Psychology, Zapała, D., Hossaini, A., Kianpour, M., Sahonero-Alvarez, G., Ayesh, A., 22 Jun 2021, Brain Computer Interfaces The BCI Glossary: a first proposal for a community review, Antonietti, A., Balachandran, P., Hossaini A., Hu Y., Valeriani, D., 3 Sep 2021, Brain Computer Interfaces'' The Manual of Digital Museum Planning, Hossaini, A., Blankenberg, N., Lord, G. D., Michaels, C., 1 Apr 2017,