Al-Barrah البرَّاح

Al-Barrah (The announcer) is the first artificial intelligence Arabic novel and the first Arabic e-lit work to win the Robert Coover Award’s Honorable Mention. It’s a collaborative, immersive, and digital project between Reham Hosny and Mohamed A. Nasef. Al-Barrah combines augmented reality and hologram technologies with Arabic language text inside the book’s borders to provide the reader with a unique experience and immerse her in the narrative.

The novel is divided into two parts, each part narrates a different story from the other part. The first story discusses the after Arab Spring situation in the Arab World and the second one imagines how the lost continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a day and night.  Each part can be read in the opposite direction of the other part so, the reader will flip the book upside down in order to read the other part, thus the novel can be read from both sides, and in a reverse way.

 The first story happens in contemporary times, while the second story goes back to ancient times, and the world of legends. The two stories converge in the middle of the book, and the reader will be able to create links between the two stories and understand their connotations.

The reader will download an AR application, designed especially for Al-Barrah, on her smart device, opens the application, and then scans the book’s images embedded in the linguistic narration. The digital content starts to come out, which is written in Arabic, English, and in Heiroglyphic in some parts of the novel.

The hologram technology is used in the second story to project the light of a hologram video inside a plastic pyramid, which the reader will create by herself. The reader will watch a hologram video, which complements the general plot of the work. Al-Barrah has been featured and discussed in different conferences and symposiums around the world.

(Source: Artist's Project Description)