Research Catalogue

This paper examines the themes of human perception and participation within the contemporary paradigm and relates the hallmarks of the major paradigm shift which occurred in the mid-20th century from a structural view of the world to a systems view. In this context, the author’s creative practice is described, outlining a methodology for working with the communication networks and interpersonal feedback loops that help to define our relationships to each other and to media since that paradigm shift. This research is framed within a larger field of inquiry into the impact of contemporary New Media Art as we experience it. This thesis proposes generative/cybernetic/systems art as the most appropriate media to model the processes of cultural identity production and networked communication. It reviews brief definitions of the systems paradigm and some key principles of cybernetic theory, with emphasis on generative, indeterminate processes. These definitions provide context for a brief review of precedents for the use of these models in the arts, (especially in process art, experimental video, interactive art, algorithmic composition, and sound art) since the mid-20th century, in direct correlation to the paradigm shift into systems thinking. Research outcomes reported here describe a recent body of generative art performances that have evolved from this intermedial, research-based creative practice, and discuss its use of algorithms, electronic media, and performance to provide audiences with access to an intuitive model of the interpersonal in a networked world.

בין עין חוד לעין הוד אין עוד. מופע דוקו-תיאטרלי

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper serves as a base for understanding the memories on a case of a person with dementia and their connections to the medium of photography. Photography is used as an attempt to retrieve my grandmother’s autobiographical memories which are often hard to retrieve. It is based on the assumption that every memory, no matter how vague, is still accessible by restoring to a proper process, similar to the latent image on the photographic film that becomes visible only after appropriate processing. Based on existing experimental memory research I constructed a method of finding a cue that can trigger specific memories in a conversation. Photographic images from the past were used as a base of the conversation. In most cases, they didn’t directly trigger involuntary memory, but they served as a starting point for a conversation, allowing my grandmother to start actively thinking about a period of her life. Due to dementia, the responses within one conversation were often repeated, yet after some time, the chain reaction of retrieving memories allowed her to remember some specific details. Her understanding of the fragility of memories was constantly present. On multiple occasions, she expressed that an artificial device, such as photography or writing, should be used to preserve them. The research doesn’t give a complete understanding of how memories and their retrieval work in general, but it gives a better understanding of how it can efficiently be done with my grandmother. The process I developed can be applied to other people if properly adjusted to them. I believe that essentially what counts is not what kind of cue we choose, but that we patiently take time to listen and guide conversations with some previous knowledge about their past.

Over the past few years, fires are everywhere. The summer of 2023, the biggest wildfire recorded in Europe torched large swaths of Northern Greece; fire destroyed ecosystems and devastated local communities. This research paper is divided into two parts; the first part is based on fieldwork conducted in the fire-altered landscape in Evros, after spending time in Kirki village, hearing the stories of locals, having conversations with experts, and documenting my experiences living in the post-disaster land. It is a travelogue to a ground considered “ruined”, in a village slowly disappearing. The second part zooms in on Kirki’s cemetery, approaching it as the sole spiritual place for post-disaster relief in an effort to understand its importance for the community as well as the opportunities that arise in this burial ground. My travel was approached with a commitment to flexibility and was shaped by serendipity. In this multilayered condition of Northern Greece, it is an effort to consider the question of what’s left in the post-fire land of Kirki and what emerges in its damaged cemetery.

at the end of the sentence, it rotted gathers written words and photos exploring how language is not purely about communication, but a medium of revealing hierarchy of bodies, as we assign and circulate signs to bodies - none of which are neutral. Moving between auto-theoretical poetry and essays on 104 pages, I write with an I using language to explore language itself from within; appropriating how words are never innocent, when the languages we speak are the ones with political value.