ABADIR | Melting

Abadir | Melting

This master thesis consists of two parts, a radio piece and a theoretical investigation about the implications of late capitalism’s nostalgia. Through a non-linear structure and collage techniques, the radio piece titled “Melting” explores how people can remember moments from the past in a fragmented, blurry way. It argues that ‘the past’ is not merely a stagnant, happy moment. In this paper, I aim to highlight the theoretical background behind the piece, how theory and sound also melt together and feed back into each other to unfold my own theoretical take on the consumerist vision of the past, memory, and nostalgia.

The radio piece is split into two episodes. The choice of the sound collage is intentional, since in my view collage represents how people remember and connect things, how the human brain can jump from one time to another and from one emotion to another in a zig-zag manner, how the human mind is unpredictable and in perpetual motion. I also use collage as a fictional and playful tool to recontextualize many moments from the past.

The piece is a meeting point between collective memory, which late capitalism feeds on, and my personal memory. The result is a collage of manipulated audio material; micro-edited snippets from different eras which are not bound to one geographical region. By melting about 500 cuts from TV and radio archives, found footage, commercials, forgotten songs, movies, pop trends, internet culture, and other sources of sound that whisper or shout in listeners’ ears, “Melting” engages with the romanticized consumerist vision of the past as portrayed by big corporations, capitalist entities, and authoritarian regimes. I incorporate snippets from podcasts and lectures by theorists Grafton Tanner, Mark Fisher and Nick Srnicek, whose theoretical frameworks resonate with the concept of my radio piece. To bring the piece to a full circle, I provide my own analysis through narrations of text fragments from my theoretical undertaking.

“Melting” is an antidote to the false promises of capitalism and an invitation to engage with the past in a non-romanticized way. This radio piece is not about celebrating the past by completely submitting to nostalgia, reviving it through (sonic) citation and mourning for the ‘glorious old days.’ Rather, it is about artistically exploring the effect of late capitalism’s nostalgia and thereby criticizing it. On a conceptual level, it is a call to reclaim agency over the past; an attempt to connect with people through shared experiences and collective memory manifested through a mesh of sounds. Melting is jumping from one mental state to another, a flat archive of distant and close memories. It is a blend of humor and darkness, nightmare and joy; a trip through different human emotions that listeners are invited to connect with.

The theoretical framework of this paper and the piece operates within left leaning accelerationism and its subversive tendency. In addition, I rely mainly on Grafton Tanner’s take on nostalgia and the conceptual stance behind Vaporwave and one of its founders, music producer Oneohtrix Point Never. In the first section I trace the origin of the master thesis from my encounter with consumerist nostalgia over the past decade. I go through the impact of the latter on my practice as a music producer interested in media theory. In the second section, I explain how I revisited my relationship with the past with the aim of synthesizing music and sound works not trapped in nostalgia. In the same section, I highlight the main inspirations behind the radio piece. Finally, in the third section I clarify how I conveyed the theory into practice within the radio piece. I start from showing how nostalgia infiltrates the present in various media, then I analyze the various parts of the piece, explain how it is acting as anti-thesis to the late capitalism narrative of a pure, innocent past, and conclude with the accelerationist tendency of the piece.

This thesis is deeply rooted in my love for sound production and theory. It is how I conclude three years of my master’s study, where I have been conceptualizing and developing my music and sound works. I am a native to Egypt and I had been working as an engineer in a corporate for years before quitting and moving to Germany to study my master’s in digital media. During my study, I delivered conceptual music and sound projects shaped by my sonic experience in Cairo, reflecting its noise and chaos by means of field recordings and using Egyptian cultural artifacts. In addition, I became interested in linguistic phenomena and tied it to my music work as in my master’ project titled Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat 1. The thesis also sheds the light on my writings as a music critic and editor of the electronic music section in the online music magazine Ma3azef, where I always aim to make theory and my writing style accessible to readers who are not familiar with theory.

As a continuation of my conceptual work and based on my own personal background, my master’s thesis is informed by the distrust of nostalgia in general and how late capitalism takes advantage of people’s memory (and resulting nostalgia) to manipulate them.

One of the earliest negative encounters I had with exploiting nostalgia in a local context was in 2013. Back then, Egypt was going through a critical political phase, as the army had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood regime. While Egyptian people were divided between pro-army and pro-Muslim Brotherhood, with a small minority in between, I noticed that big corporations started to dig in the past and play on the nostalgic sentiment, capitalizing on the past, as a refuge, a representation of innocence and purity. As they made profit by investing in people’s nostalgia, they assured the viewers that the past had always been joyful. For instance, Pepsi has been following this path since 2013 in its yearly commercial campaigns for the month of Ramadan 2. Their campaigns have been featuring actors and singers from the eighties and nineties who haven’t been active recently or have already died. I have been frustrated by the general reception of these commercials, which has been largely positive and enthusiastic on the popular level. While Pepsi has been using CGI and advanced technology to recreate the past in high definition 3, other companies 4 invested in the sense of togetherness, positivity, and family gatherings which people used to have in the ‘good old days.’ Such campaigns were charged with fake optimism in a country facing extreme economic, political, and social turmoil.

Meanwhile, my feelings towards the eighties and nineties were more complex. I was convinced that there was no turning back, despite the good moments I had lived collectively and personally. I refused to long for them, I was aware of the social, technological, and aesthetic changes. Instead, I became interested in the nostalgic theme in and of itself, and I started to look beyond the local context then realized how late capitalism manipulates people’s memory and makes money out of it. I noticed that it is a global phenomenon when I started thinking critically about Hollywood movies, and pop trends in music. A few years later, I became interested in critical writings dealing with the lack (and the possibility) of cultural production in late capitalism. These writings included theorists like Frederic Jameson, Franco "Bifo" Berardi and especially Mark Fisher. Although the latter engages with the British context, I was largely drawn to his theorizations dealing with memory, the past and the future, such as “hauntology,” “lost futures,” “popular modernism,” and “the slow cancellation of the future.”5 Through these concepts, Fisher was able to focus his longing for the future and its possibility, and on the possibility of new cultural production in the current neoliberal reality. As a result, I became interested in art works (especially music) that have a futuristic tendency, neither tied to the past nor to the present and capable of generating progress leading to novelty. I was interested in defining novelty and the process behind it, which had a direct influence on me on the practical level, as a music producer and critic.

This has led me to explore the critical discussion about the infrastructure of capitalism; technology, A.I., big data, and social media platforms. I have been particularly interested in how we can use technology in a subversive way, while maintaining a critical view towards capitalism. Being skeptical about technology does not necessarily mean giving up on it. My thinking is that by maintaining a balance between criticizing and benefiting from technology, one can indeed break away from escapism and nostalgia. During that time, I came across left leaning accelerationism, which claims that “the hope driving [it] is that, in fully expressing the potentialities of capitalism, we will be able to exhaust it and hereby open up access to something beyond it” (Shaviro, 2015, p. 3). To better understand the context of accelerationism, it is important to identify its broad spectrum, which moves between two extremes: one with a destructive tendency as found within the camp of Nick Land, and another subversive one as in the camp of Srnicek and Williams. According to Shaviro’s analysis, accelerationism “may just as well result in the horrific intensification of ‘actually existing’ capitalist relations (Land), as in the radical displacement and transmutation of these relations (Williams and Srnicek)” (Shaviro, p. 20).

I have become influenced by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ writings on automation, post-capitalism, their criticism of folk politics 6, and how they offer a critical vision towards the left, where they call for a subversive use of the infrastructure of capitalism to move beyond it. This has influenced my relationship with technology, online music platforms, social media, and music production tools. In practice, my work started to gravitate towards futuristic themes. Additionally, I became more focused on generative music and complex sound design with the aim of looking for new sounds within the electronic music scene. I refused to engage with the past by any means.

Since the start of the pandemic, I have experienced an altered sense of time: my memory from 2020 onwards has stagnated, as if it has all been one long year. Despite this time of uncertainty, I noticed that many artists in the electronic music scene kept on moving forward with their futuristic themes, clubbing, trying to maintain the same pre-pandemic environment through online simulation. This seemed absurd to me, like another form of escapism, but this time escaping towards the future. Since time had slowed down for me, and I could not see the motivation to rush into the future, I took a break and stepped back.

In fact, my curiosity was redirected towards the past: I wanted to revise my relationship with it. By maintaining the same accelerationist spirit of infiltrating and subverting capitalism, I started to consider how I could creatively synthesize music and sound works and a vision engaged with the past without being nostalgic or submitting to the capitalist nostalgia industry. In other words, I wanted to exploit nostalgia for another purpose. This resonates with the view of writer and musician Grafton Tanner, who sees nostalgia as an emotion “like any emotion, appropriate in some contexts and dangerous in others.” (Tanner, 2021, p. 245), therefore, “we can take elements from the past and put them to use in the present – and perhaps, as a result, work towards a more habitable future” (p. 234).

As I was reading Tanner and negotiating my position towards nostalgia as an emotive force, I was also getting immersed in Vaporwave music. The aesthetics of Vaporwave are confusing: while the use of pop music and Musak makes them familiar, they become twisted and even nightmarish in some tracks, and there is a sense of absurdity generated by repetition. In Tanner’s words, Vaporwave “[spits] in the face of late capitalism and mocks the very methods used to sell us the things we don’t need, all while problematizing our understanding of history” (Tanner, 2016, p. 49). In a way, this helped me rediscover the works of Oneohtrix Point Never and see how they clash critically with nostalgia while attempting to reclaim the past.

My aim in “Melting” is not to reproduce the previously mentioned Vaporwave and Oneohtrix Point Never’s aesthetics, but rather to use their conceptual angle in producing the piece. In terms of technique, in this radio piece I am also inspired by “Plunderphonics”, a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative”. While sampling is a common technique in Hip Hop and electronic music among other sources of sound, sampling is the only sound source in Plunderphonics. Another source of inspiration is William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique, which he introduced in the sixties. Burroughs used this technique in literature to create a new text by cutting up and rearranging an old one. To apply these techniques to the piece, I cut up small snippets from a wide spectrum of audio source materials and recontextualize them to produce a collage-based radio piece which repurposes capitalism’s romanticized and appealing narrative of the past.

I aim in this thesis to create a conversation between theory and practice: 1) by conveying theoretical layers into the sound practice, and 2) by allowing the sound materials in the piece to shape my theoretical take. Writing this paper does not only serve to conceptualize the radio piece but has also served as a tool to create a sonic narrative and a flow for the radio piece. The sonic narrative includes sound materials which have a personal or collective signification, and the flow relates to production techniques, i.e., how I cut, combine, deconstruct, recontextualize, process, and manipulate those sound materials. On the other hand, by theorizing around the source sound materials, the piece materializes on the writing of this paper.

In my view, being trapped in nostalgia can be interpreted as a sign of a lack in cultural production that represents the present as well as a failure to envision the future. This interpretation draws on several cultural theorists engaging with nostalgia. Looking at Frederic Jameson’s term “Nostalgia Film,” it can be assumed that capitalism’s relationship with nostalgia goes back several decades ago, when a movie evoking nostalgia “was never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but instead approached the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion” (Jameson, 1989, p. 19). But the more technology has progressed, the more nostalgia has become an industry which “traffics in retro, rebooting old televisions shows, writing prequels and sequels to bygone films, and turning them into franchises and worlds of their owns” (Tanner, 2021, p. 19). When manipulated in certain ways, nostalgia can turn “any decade of nightmares into ‘the good old day’” (p. 105). It seems paradoxical that “some of the most complex technologies ever invented induce nostalgia for the past” (Tanner, 2020, p. 9). This resonates with Mark Fisher’s argument that being in the 21st-century is to have the 20th-century culture on high-resolution screens, distributed by high-speed internet (pmilat, 2014).

Jameson also referred to a historical or temporal crisis, where artworks no longer belong to their time of production, but rather to an older point in time (Jameson, 1989, pp. 66-68). In that sense, the past cannot be differentiated from the present, because the reproduction of the forms and equations of the past continues in the present. Perhaps the best contemporary example of this is Hollywood's reproduction of Star Wars and Alien film series. In addition, the revival of cyber-punk dystopian films, such as Planet of The Apes, Mad Max, Terminator and Blade Runner, reveals a limited and dim view of the future. Many of these films are products of the eighties which depict a future as anticipated back then. Nevertheless, due to the dominant nostalgic tendency and the stagnant contemporary experiences, the revival of these films after thirty years still derived its speculation about the future through an outdated perception. Despite all the technological developments which affected the film industry meanwhile, the ‘futuristic’ vision remained trapped in the past, especially within the cyberpunk wave.

It’s interesting how nostalgia industry is subject to a nostalgic feedback loop, because “the more a franchise spins away from its original versions, . . . the more fans will yearn for the original” (Tanner, 2021, p. 124). This “culture echo chamber” takes shape in cultures where “[f]amiliarity is prized over novelty” and “the same ideas circulate, trapping consumers in a frozen state of nostalgia” (p. 124). Another form of feedback loop exists where people drown in their nostalgia to seek a refuge or an escape from capitalism, which in turn invests in nostalgia.

Apart from movies, we can also find nostalgia in music, especially in pop (however, from my observation, this nostalgic effect has decreased in the last couple of years in music). In this context, Fisher proposed a thought experiment in which an imagined person from the year 1995 listens to music produced in the 2000’s, like Arctic Monkeys or Amy Winehouse (Fisher, 2014, pp. 9-11). He suggested that this person would find the music familiar, and that this music produced in the future would never surprise them despite the twenty-year-lapse between the two periods. On the other hand, a listener from the year 1989 would be rather astonished and shocked when listening to a Jungle track from the year 1993. To highlight these ideas sonically, the piece includes Tanner (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:06:54) and Fisher’s (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:14:58) views on nostalgia through some excerpts from different podcasts and sessions.

In addition, nostalgia can materialize in Big Tech, for instance, in the growing number of filters used on social media to mimic the eighties, or the simplistic “vintage” aesthetic of Big Tech logos. This can be aggravated by the algorithm designed specifically to lock people in a one-dimensional world. Should one person choose to engage shortly with nostalgia, they will be trapped as a consumer in old content due to the repetitive nature of algorithm which keeps on suggesting similar old content.

However, the radio piece is not a call to abandon the past completely. Rather, it is a call to find an anti-thesis to the late capitalism’s narrative of a pure, innocent, and joyful past. Vaporwave, which could be perceived as a derivative from John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, has played a key role here. According to Tanner, the slowed and pitched down hissing tracks in Vaporwave evoke feelings of eeriness and emptiness, and it “often tends to emphasize the uncanniness of glitches via repetition or audio effects such as distortion, pitch shifting and high doses of compression” (Tanner, 2016, p. 10). This is directly projected in the visual representation of the covers of many vaporwave albums: haunted shopping malls, empty streets at night with neon lights or empty airports which are all meant “to evoke a place in which their warped music could be heard” (p. 39) and act as signifiers of capitalist consumption. Vaporwave infiltrates capitalism and even feeds on its aesthetic like a parasite, as it “takes the fit, smiling, white-teethed mask off Muzak and replaces it with a more sinister face – the dead stare of unfettered capitalism” (p. 41).

Daniel Lopatin kicked off the genre in the early 2010’s in his album Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1. He continued to produce some of Vaporwave’s aesthetic in his later albums, under the alias Oneohtrix Point Never, such as Age Of and The Magical Oneohtrix Point Never. In these albums, Lopatin uses old segments in a twisted sinister way to emphasize the idea that our memory is unclear, foggy, and the opposite of its commodified version. In Garden of Delete, Lopatin mutates and corrupts children’s voices to challenge the cultural embodiment of purity and innocence (Frankel, 2019, p. 170).

In “Melting,” I draw on the same subversive tendency from the conceptual framework of Vaporwave and OPN to highlight capitalism’s absurdity, its manipulative use of memory, the commodification of the past, and nostalgia’s escapism. For instance, in a metaphoric segment, the joy of Ronald McDonald and his fake optimism mutate into the eerie and twisted image of Pennywise (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:20:06). In other segments, I tend to vaporize pop music and its mainstream glamour by transforming Madonna, Toto, The Police and Queen into ghosts, through audio processed cuts from their hits (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:03:10). In addition, I highlight the absurdity of commercials and TV and radio shows by including micro-edited cuts from the eighties and the nineties which belong to various geographical regions (Melting – Episode 2, 2022, 00:00:51). In other parts, I seek to evoke a hazy memory of good moments from the collective memory as a temporary refuge, by manipulating old Arabic songs, Egyptian TV introduction themes, club tracks, and movie snippets (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:04:13).

On the backdrop of collective nostalgia and capitalist manipulation of people’s memory, my own memories of my experience with late capitalism add more complex layers. I dig into my personal memory when I was working in a corporate environment. I recall the bureaucratic, inefficient, and absurd conversations, the fake optimistic spirit by senior managers, and their emotionally charged motivational speeches encouraging employees to believe in themselves and enhance their skills to achieve their end-of-year target. Trapped with them in the same room, I aim to transpose my experience into a dark, hallucinogenic sonic atmosphere where their voices transform into viscous utterances, and fake smiles turn into slime (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:12:44).

Collage is a great tool to create fiction. In the radio piece, many non-linear cuts are meshed together to twist and recontextualize moments, people, and occasions from different times and places. The resulting contrasts are not only humorous, but also add additional layers to the absurdity of the original context. Imagine Lady Gaga citing an emotional speech while the Red Army Choir is supporting her (Melting – Episode 2, 2022, 00:13:04), or the king of Iraq giving a speech by whistling (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:03:32), or Sting “watching you” in your corporate job, or when you make a call, and the customer service leaves you on hold with Mohamed Ramadan 7 and Puff Daddy (Melting – Episode 2, 2022, 00:05:50).

I am convinced that corporations will keep on capitalizing on people’s nostalgia even by using the latest advanced technology—which is paradoxical since technology is theoretically supposed to serve for progress. But on the other hand, by being too skeptical towards technology and how capitalism and authoritarian regimes exploit it to control the people, people also risk falling into nostalgia and mourning a “simpler” life in the past. Technology manifested in the everyday growth of the Internet, the rapid development in programming, and the abundance of accessible programs and tools, generates potential cultural forms in a surplus. This potential cultural excess can, in part, overwhelm capitalism and large institutions, make cultural appropriation and control more challenging, and create loopholes in the hegemonic system. In that sense, “capitalism ironically creates the very conditions for, and even necessitates, its own supersession” (Shaviro, 2015, p. 5). In other words, capitalism offers unintentionally a way out of itself, which is a core idea adopted by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Mark Fisher, among many theoreticians and philosophers under the umbrella of left leaning accelerationism. The idea here is to “try not to involve retreating from capitalist modernity but trying to go all the way through it” (Fisher, 2020, p. 43).

According to Srnicek and Williams, technology is not exclusively expressive of capitalist values, and it is not value free and neutral either. Technology can be repurposed beyond capitalism, therefore “the existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism” (p. 15). The left accelerationist project has been crucial for reconfiguring the left’s discourse and its folk politics (Srnicek & Williams, 2015, pp. 9-13). It opposes the use of the same exhausted reactionary techniques to fight capitalism and yearning for a pre-capitalist society. In this way, accelerationism can challenge political or social nostalgia. Tanner clarifies that if “we hide away in nostalgia’s warmth forever, then we risk losing the present to capitalism, which just might eliminate the future for all of us” (Tanner, 2021, p. 230).

Srnicek and Williams accelerationist politics seek to “preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structure, and mass pathologies will allow” (Srnicek & Williams, 2019, p. 298). This resonates with Fisher’s view on post-capitalism, which “develops from capitalism and moves beyond capitalism” (Fisher, 2020, p. 53). In my view, longing for pre-capitalist times can lead to a kind of primitivism, which in turn might have reactionary consequences, not only culturally, but also on political and social levels. I find it alarming to long for a time when nationalist, patriarchal, sexist, and racist ideals prevailed. To convey these ideas in the radio piece, I used recordings of Srnicek discussing aspects of accelerationism (Melting – Episode 1, 2022, 00:22:05). I also chose excerpts from this paper to clarify my position and construct a dialogue between the sound work, theorists, and myself, aiming to test theory through art practice (Melting – Episode 2, 2022, 00:15:30).

Rather than seeking a utopian world and boycotting a world infiltrated by capitalism, or mourning a primitivist pre-capitalist society, I suggest facing capitalism and infiltrating it like a virus; here the virus takes the form of a sound work. The hegemonic capitalist structure is a reality, but I claim that, from a left accelerationist point of view, there is always room for “novelty” and to generate “progress” in it. Capitalism is full of loopholes, and we can offer a critical view of capitalism without shying away from exploiting its foundations and infra-structure. On the other hand, I think one needs to admit that the past hasn’t always been joyful. It is rather a twisted, ambiguous, and unstable timeline, charged with both distress and good moments. I believe that revisiting the past in a reflective way and identifying experiences which still have potential in our present can offer an alternative approach to the past that is not focused on escapism. Part of how the late capitalist era functions is based on promises of false optimism and imposing nostalgia as a cure. One way to counter this is to accept the past as a battlefield; a territory to be reclaimed and subverted. By conveying the theory in practice in my thesis, I intend to create a viral effect through the radio piece, which would infect the (digital) airwaves to reach the listeners. I hope my sonic virus would inspire listeners to regain control over their memories, reclaim the past and deconstruct capitalism’s seductive use of nostalgia.

Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Fisher, M. (2020). Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater.
Frankel, E. (2019). Hearing The Cloud. Winchester: Zero Books.
Jameson, F. (1989). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Melting - Episode 1.(2022). Retreived from https://abadir-melting.netlify.app/
Melting - Episode 2.(2022). Retreived from https://abadir-melting.netlify.app/
pmilat. (2014, May 22). Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future. Retrieved from YouTube: https://youtu.be/aCgkLICTskQ
Shaviro, S. (2015). No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Srnicek, N. W. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso Books.
Srnicek, N. W. (2019). #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. In R. A. Mackay, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (pp. 292-306). Urbanomic.
Tanner, G. (2016). Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. Winchester: Zero Books.
Tanner, G. (2020). The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. Winchester: Zero Books.
Tanner, G. (2021). The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia. London: Repeater.

1. Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat was released in July 2021 via Genot Centre: https://genot.bandcamp.com/album/pause-stutter-uh-repeat
2. In Egypt and the Arab region, the month of Ramadan is marked by increasing rates of consumerism and advertising campaigns, in way similar to seasonal campaigns over Christmas or Easter holidays.
3. Advertising campaign by Pepsi and Chipsy in 2013: https://youtu.be/bdn_3vNAUME
4. Advertising campaign by Orange in 2013: https://youtu.be/m0jRuKgACq4
5. For the scope of this thesis, I will not expand on any of these concepts here. More on this can be found in the introduction chapter of Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014).
6. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define folk politics “as a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power.” For more information, see the first chapter of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015).
7. An Egyptian actor and singer.

I would like to thank my supervisors Petra Klusmeyer and Dennis Paul for their generous support throughout the process of working on my thesis. I would also like to thank Iulia Radu for her great work on the website and the time she spent with me on this project, and Nabeela Roshdy for creating the artwork of the website. Finally, I would like to thank Amira Elmasry for her support and motivation during the thesis and throughout the whole master’s program.