Short Shadows Book Launch at Diwan Bookstore, Zamalek

When exile becomes algorithmic and the machine becomes co-author — what happens to fiction, identity, and art?

On February 22nd, Diwan Publishing ديوان للنشر Diwan Bookstore in Zamalek hosted the launch of my debut literary collection "Short Shadows" (ظلال قصيرة) — a bilingual Arabic-English collection of flash speculative narratives co-created with AI agents.

The evening brought together a conversation I'd been waiting to have publicly: Visual artist, Filmmaker & Author Khaled Hafez Studio moderated a discussion between myself and Dr. Rania Gaafar — media art scholar and author of the book's critical introduction — about what authorship, exile, and creativity mean when the boundary between human and machine dissolves.

We talked about the four-dimensional structure of the book (story, translation, prompt, AI image), about "Algorithmic Exile" as a condition of the post-digital age, about the prompt as a new literary genre, and about glitch as resistance.

The full talk is now available to watch:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdH7iCLIFFlfCkqdpqxfu7UenBJT3J-fF

The book is available at Diwan bookstores and online:

https://diwanegypt.com/product/%D8%B8%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9/

Project page: https://samehaltawil.com/portfolio/short-shadows/

#shortshadows #ظلالقصيرة #AIFiction #generativeart #flashfiction #posthuman #algorithmicexile #transmedialart #booksigningevent #diwanbookstore #ArtAndAI #zamalek #cairo #ديوان #حفلتوقيع #القاهرة

Originally published on Facebook.