FAHRAS.  INSTITUTE FOR WORLDMAKING

Two working demos of FAHRAS

Clickable prototypes of the two surfaces FAHRAS is built around: the desk the research team works from, and the form an artist receives by email after their interview.

Fictional data throughout  ·  nothing here is a live system
→ These are prototypes, not a deployed platform. They run in your browser with invented artists and invented records. Nothing is saved, nothing is sent, and refreshing the page resets everything. They exist so that the intended product can be argued with before it is built.
For the research team

Research Desk

The whole platform as the team uses it: the journey from an email address to a published record, and the index those records accumulate into. Sign in as Researcher, Supervisor or Admin.

  • Outreach, scheduling, interview, transcript review
  • The eleven-section record and the artwork form
  • Supervisor approval, publication, export, withdrawal
  • The index — artists, works, themes, institutions
  • Ask FAHRAS — search that answers from records and cites them
  • Admin registries, merges and access
Open the desk → For the artist

Email Self-Fill

What an artist receives by email after the conversation. Artists have no login and no account — the researcher sends a link, and the link is the whole relationship. Bilingual, built for a phone.

  • Add new information, or request an edit to what is there
  • Every value shows where it came from
  • Nine biographical sections, all skippable
  • Images with photographer credit and licence
  • Five permission questions, including where moments from the conversation may be shared
  • A way to withdraw, at any point
Open the form →
Later — a separate platform

HEKMAT

HEKMAT is not part of FAHRAS. It is a third platform: a bilingual assistant that will sit across several consented indexes — FAHRAS and WRKBK first — and answer questions that no single index can. It is built after FAHRAS and WRKBK are deployed, and it reaches a record only where the artist elected to allow it. There is nothing to click yet.

Not yet built

Three platforms, not one

FAHRAS The index of contemporary Arab cultural production, and the desk the research team documents it from. This is what the two demos above show.Being built now
WRKBK The parallel index for craft industries, workshops and material practice. Same consent architecture, different subject.Parallel build
HEKMAT The assistant layer over both, and over partner indexes that consent to join it. Reads; never writes; never trains.After deployment

How the two connect

The desk comes first. A researcher approaches an artist, holds the interview, and reviews the transcript field by field, accepting or correcting what was extracted from it.
The form follows. Once that review is signed off, the artist is sent a link — in the same email as the participant agreement — carrying those confirmed values back to them. They are checking a page rather than composing one.
Corrections return as evidence. What the artist changes is flagged as coming from them, at the highest source reliability, and kept alongside the original rather than overwriting it.
Nothing publishes without approval. The finished record goes back to the artist exactly as it would appear, and publication is blocked until an approval exists for that version.

What to look at

On the desk: the artists in the pipeline each sit at a different phase, so every step is reachable without working through the whole sequence. The stepper at the top of any record is clickable — past phases open read-only.
The index: the left rail opens the published side of the same data — artist and work records, the theme vocabulary, and institutions as records rather than typed strings, which is what makes “who else studied there” a query rather than a text search.
Ask FAHRAS: search over the index that answers in sentences and cites the record behind every claim. Ask it to rank artists, or for a year it holds nothing on, and it declines rather than inventing. This is FAHRAS searching itself — not HEKMAT.
Roles: FAHRAS has three, as WRKBK does — Researcher, Supervisor, Admin. Sign in as Researcher, then use Switch role. Approval is available only to the Supervisor and the switch is itself logged, which is how self-approval stays visible while one person holds both roles.
Sharing: the fifth permission question is a matrix rather than a yes or no — the artist ticks the places a moment from the conversation may appear, from Instagram to a conference talk to a catalogue essay, and leaves the rest. Ticking a box releases nothing on its own: each use returns to them with the exact quotation or clip for sign-off, and they can refuse one item without changing any of the answers.
On the form: note that there is no sign-in. Artists never hold an account; the link carries the record to them and their answers back. The language toggle in the top right switches the whole form to Arabic with right-to-left layout. Every question can be skipped, and a partial answer is a valid one.