Launching FAHRAS: The Futurist Arab Index
FAHRAS is a research platform, publishing initiative, and public tool built to document and support Arab artists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural producers working with futurist and speculative modes. It is part of our broader effort at the MIT Institute for Worldmaking to design the infrastructures Arab futures require — not only through imagination, but through systems of recognition, support, and critical visibility.
At its core, FAHRAS operates through two interconnected activities. First, it produces a digital index of works and people engaged in worldmaking practices across the Arab world and its diasporas, encompassing contemporary art, literature, film, and most importantly: people—individuals or collectives who are pushing conceptual, material, or speculative boundaries in their fields. Second, it publishes a curated series of digital books, each focusing on a specific artist, thinker, or initiative. These books are not isolated outputs. They are fully integrated into the FAHRAS system: every artist name, quote, thematic keyword, and contextual reference is indexed and connected to the wider database, enabling a versatile and customizable research dashboard represented in the prototype below.
This means a book about a speculative architecture studio in Cairo becomes not just a standalone publication, but an entry point into a wider network — of ideas, movements, aesthetic genealogies, institutional acquisition patterns, and missing links. FAHRAS makes it possible to search and filter content by region, theme, artist, exhibition history, institutional framing, and more. You can ask: What artists from the Gulf are working with interspecies futurisms? What museums have acquired Arab ecological fiction over the last 20 years? What speculative films have never been shown in institutional settings? What are some topics that have not been tackled in such creative production? And why?
FAHRAS tracks creative work across contemporary art, literature, film, and biographical narratives — all centered on Arab cultural producers engaging with futurism and speculation. From Larissa Sansour’s cinematic futures to Monira Al Qadiri’s ecological mythologies, Rania Ghosn’s territorial imaginaries, and the architectural storytelling of Elias and Yousef Anastas, FAHRAS documents and connects individuals and projects that challenge dominant narratives and expand the boundaries of what Arab cultural production can be. It includes writers crafting alternate histories, filmmakers reimagining temporal collapse, and designers building prototypes for worlds that do not yet exist. These practices challenge dominant narratives and open new conceptual ground. FAHRAS provides a structure to hold, analyze, and connect them.
Gallery scroll: Design Earth, Cosmorama , 2018; Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, Utopia, 2008; Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate, 2012; Monira Al Qadiri, Benzene Float, 2023; Mounia Akl, Submarine, 2016
In FAHRAS, everything is connected. Through its metadata architecture, the platform doesn’t just archive — it generates new knowledge, links and avenues for research. By linking texts, people, objects, and institutions, FAHRAS helps surface patterns, gaps, and emergent solidarities across disciplines and borders. It invites contribution, questioning, and iteration — from artists, curators, students, and institutions alike.
As the database grows, the information gathered through FAHRAS — including artist metadata, curatorial language, thematic tags, and institutional histories — will be transformed into training datasets for machine learning models to better represent Arab cultural production in Alternative Intelligence frameworks. These datasets will be used as the basis for workshops with AI researchers, designers, and cultural practitioners to explore how this knowledge can reshape data hierarchies, classification systems, and model training itself.
By embedding these futures directly into the development of technology, we are making a long-term intervention into the cultural logic of computation. This data infrastructure will directly support the Institute’s mission to enrich AI systems with culturally grounded, regionally nuanced, and creatively expansive knowledge drawn from Arab cultural production.