I am a transdisciplinary artist who employs various technologies to negotiate human experience towards a heightened awareness of estrangement and displacement. Born in Iran and practicing in the U.S., I have developed a unique and eclectic approach to working with people and technology that is influenced by a variety of cultural customs and codified by my personal experiences. I construct hypermediated and highly systematized social architectures through theater, film, and participatory digital forums, encouraging players to search for evidence of the sensual, thereby constructing space for inter and intrapersonal connection. Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies is central to my research, where communication hacking, creative social justice divination, and implicit politics are requisites. 

 

In my work, I amplify distance between people through mediated technologies, compelling my audience to seek association and perform in tandem with their community to collectively author their world. In doing so, the audience becomes a participant in the work and agent of change in their communities. 

Experiential and highly collaborative, my process disavows loyalty to traditional methodologies of the disciplines within which I practice, weaving new networks of mechanization and inviting unfamiliar audiences to resurrect their relationship to curiosity and play among even the most sobering of topics. 

Transnational migration is among one of the most complex global issues of our time and promises to expand its scope in the coming decades. “telepuppet.tv” is a crowd-sourced storytelling platform that combines augmented puppetry with online image sharing and IRL projection performance. “telepuppet.tv” employs the technologies, idioms, and aesthetics of TV News to interweave stories about the experience of immigration with orchestrated conversation and choreographed puppetry in public space. 

 

As an architect of fragmented realities, my work destabilizes and then furnishes space for the byproducts of that destabilization. “Decompensation” is a five-channel virtual reality film that attempts to recreate the psychological stages which refugees pass through when moving and settling into a new socio-cultural context over the span of many years: Early Arrival, Destabilization, Exploration, Return to Normal life, and Decompensation. In this participatory piece, the theme of displacement is communicated through music, performance, and 360-degree video. 

With a professional background in architecture, theater, and film, my work has the capacity to invite a diversity of audiences and participants to engage in themes of migration, diaspora, and home. Whether affecting agency through repurposing theatrical roles among audience and actor, designing environments, or illustrating the emotive and sensual, VR allows me to deconstruct and rearrange reality in the most immediate forums for my participants, as well as satisfying the replacement and reorientation that I work towards as a collective percipience social space - one in which new modes of being can be imagined and histories can be revised.