Iblīs dwells a Line

Launched in 2017 as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic diversification plan, NEOM is envisioned as a futuristic city powered by renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and zero-carbon infrastructure. Its promotional campaign is constructed through AI-enhanced renderings and immersive narratives, showcasing unprecedented architectural forms, gleaming towers, and solarpunk-style green corridors, offering a vision of what is described as “sustainable luxury.” Beyond these speculative futures, NEOM raises complex questions around territory, governance, and the role of image-making in urban development. The project intersects with sensitive issues such as large-scale infrastructural transformation and ecological reconfiguration. It also aligns with broader geopolitical currents and image strategies that reflect shifting regional dynamics. 
 

This research approaches NEOM not as a traditional urban plan, but as a visual apparatus: a set of codes that pre-enact and project how the future is prophesied, sold, and enforced. The digital visualizations that circulate globally do more than illustrate: they shape perceptions, normalize narratives, and perform protocols of representation. In this light, NEOM becomes a case study for examining how contemporary nation-building intersects with institutional futurism and the aestheticization of policy. By analyzing its imagery, language, and distribution tactics, my project seeks to unpack the visual mechanisms of shaping perception through which the future is imagined, constructed, and made desirable. 
 

The project begins by gathering and analyzing a wide range of NEOM-related images, including official renderings, promotional videos, and AI-generated renders, to identify common themes and visual strategies. Based on these insights, the image-based research seeks to develop speculative design prompts to explore the potential of weird futures. Leveraging the collaborative framework of the residency, the project will employ design fiction methodologies to engage with NEOM’s aesthetics and the narratives they support. Making use of diagrams, mock-ups, and digital collages, the work aims to make visible the systems shaping NEOM’s imagery. 
 

Finally, a performative presentation, such as a lecture or video essay, will bring together these explorations into a cohesive narrative, tested and refined through collaborative prototyping.  
 

About Noura Tafeche 
 

Visual artist, “onomaturge”, and independent researcher whose practice moves across installation, archival methodologies, experimental labs, videos, neologism creation, and miniature drawing. Her research explores visual culture and its techno-political entanglements, with a focus on digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, and meme culture. She is also engaged in language experimentation and the visual articulation of contemporary imaginaries.  
 

She holds an MA in New Technologies for Art from the Brera Academy, with a particular focus on the field of net.art but The Influencers Festival has been her real education. She has exhibited, lectured, and led laboratories at Aksioma (Ljubljana), transmediale (Berlin), Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Aarhus Kunsthal (Aarhus), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Design Museum (Helsinki), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan), Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), Triennale Milano (Milan), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milano), Almanac Inn (Turin), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), and the European Union Representative Centre (Al Quds, Palestine). 
 

Potential collaborators (skills, background, interests) 
 

The project seeks collaborators with expertise in video production, 3D animation, and speculative/experimental design.  

Specifically, it would benefit from animators skilled in CGI and motion graphics, capable of deconstructing the aesthetic language of architectural renderings and techno-futurist urban imagery.  

Filmmakers or video editors with experience in experimental documentary or essay film formats could support the development of audiovisual storytelling.  

Designers engaged in speculative design practices are essential to help create conceptual objects, fictional devices, or counter-prototypes that respond to the project’s themes. 

Ideal collaborators are interested in the intersection of visual culture, geopolitics, and anticolonial studies, and are open to interdisciplinary and research-based methods.