Dana Dawud's Monad 5 at Reference Point
January 18, 2026
I went to the London premiere of Dana Dawud’s Monad 5 at Reference Point, co-organised by Open Secret and Fetchish.
From the event blurb:
Monad 5 is the latest in Dana Dawud’s evolving film project Monad. This particular Monad is her personal history of the year of 2025, including traces of her love life, internet clones and the main IG filter she used throughout the year, the Joker filter.
Dana Dawud is an artist and writer whose practice navigates the intersections of film, montage, and sound design. Engaging with the fluidity of internet cinema, her work expands across online and offline spaces, tracing the ruptures and reverberations of digital culture.
I think I first came across Dana’s work through PalCoreCore in 2023:
Palcorecore assembles a montage of archival material, war reporting, and online dance videos to explore how violence and resilience vibrate together. Against the refrain that “there’s no image of Palestine”, Dana Dawud crafts a poetics of presence — one that resists erasure not by confrontation but through desire, repetition, and aesthetic pleasure as a conduit for politics.
In 2024 I went to the first Open Secret event in London, a “touring screening of internet cinema” that Dana curates:
The works showcased integrate current and emerging technologies within internet culture such as AI, deep fakes, video games, and internet-found footage, showcasing videos that bring into question contemporary states of ‘post’-being: post-discipline, post-irony, post-net, post-shitpost.
Throughout the works a formal tension emerges between the frictionless existence promised by web interfaces and the clunky, vernacular methods of contemporary filmmaking, which increasingly deviate from ‘industry-standard’ practices, opting instead to fold in the process to the outcome: screen recordings and app interfaces leave their traces throughout.
This common technical grounding also builds a ubiquitous framework for more open, diffuse, poetic articulations voiced in the featured works.
I much look forward to seeing further Open Secret internet cinema screenings in London - as well as future parts of Monad.
As part of my research leave exploring intersections between internet art and internet research, I’ve been gathering links and materials on this are.na channel on internet cinemas.
Some further links about Dana’s work are also copied below.
More about Dana’s work