Abdallah Ko

www.abdallahko.com

english / français

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BIOGRAPHY

Abdallah Ko is a French and English speaking fiction writer, painter and multimedia artist, web strategist, independent publisher. He was born in in Beirut, Lebanon. He grew up and studied in Paris, France. After aborted Architectural studies in Montreal, Canada, he came back to France where he graduated with a Masters in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne University (Paris IV).

Since 1997, he has been involved in experimental music projects, most often in collaboration with other artists. In 1999, he started publishing texts and visual works independently on his website. In 2005, he had his first solo show in Beirut, entitled 'Paintings' and featuring a selection of 30 paintings and drawings. That same year, his first live music show was an experimental solo performance based on the soundtrack of the popular video game 'Starcraft'. In 2009, the band XEFM (produced by Ziad Nawfal, and featuring Tony Elieh, Charbel Haber, Abdallah Ko and Fadi Tabbal) created and performed original scores for two cult silent films: Dziga Vertov's 'Man with a Movie Camera' and German animated masterpiece 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed'.

In June 2009, he started writing 'Beirut Police', an interactive fiction that uses Facebook. Over a period of more than three continuous months, by posting entertaining, viral and somehow controversial text on the popular social network, he played the character of a self proclaimed prophet on a blitz conversion mission in Lebanon, developing a narrative and animating a semi-improvised reality-game that amused, involved and challenged a large group of semi-public persons in the Lebanese Community. Since then, he has been working on the final edition of this work to be released as a web book on www.beirutpolice.com.

In 2010, Ko started the design of a new project, a form of alternate reality game (ARG). A free and ephemeral event, along with a long-feature documentary that will record and tell the story of that event for a wider audience.