Anna Ehrenstein entwines speculative cosmotechnics with Qur'anic epistemologies to explore water as both a spiritual sign and a techno-political site.
Inspired by Surah Al-Anbiya (21:30) — “And We made from water every living thing” — the work navigates Islamic engineering, ecological ethics, and AI-mediated poetics through the lens of Buk-Huis cosmotechnics.
The video unfolds as a visual invocation, where machine-generated Rumi-esque verses dance over slowed footage of in-pipe hydropower systems, irrigation channels, and glimmering desert aqueducts. AI-rewritten reflections—originally composed by Ehrenstein—trace Islamic attitudes toward non-human kinship, technological humility, and water as a threshold between life, ritual, and memory.
Blending documentary fragments with synthetic textures and speculative typography, the video’s aesthetic language hovers between the digital sublime and infrastructural intimacy. Echoing SIMIYYA’s call to articulate alternatives to techno-scientific modernity, Ehrenstein positions water not only as a material resource but as a theological interface, ancestral archive, and site of resistance within global capitalist infrastructures.
SIMIYYA is an interdisciplinary platform connecting the SWANA regio and beyond to explore techno-political aesthetics and cultural production through collaboration and critical imagination.
