Being raised as a Baha’i half-Iranian woman in an Evangelical Texan suburb created a sense of disassociation from and confusion about my cultural heritage and identity. “You’re not brown, just tan,” investigates these perceptions of cultural heritage through exploring childhood memories, family legacy, and media imagery. The project proposes new forms of hybridity via Iranian memory objects and videos created out of the material of the Texan suburbs where I grew up.

These components will manifest in a comprehensive multimedia installation, recreating an imagined Iranian/suburban home space. The sculptures in the space are suburban/Iranian mash-up memory objects: a Persian rug made of suburban couch upholstery, roses made of Christmas wrapping paper, a backgammon board made from my childhood Monopoly board, and calligraphy designed using kid’s Crayola markers. I also have created a series of videos to screen in the space on a television set I am constructing. These videos are designed in different television styles (cooking show, horror movie trailer, music video) for consumption in the medium I consumed while shaping my identity.

Below are stills from the videos I created. Click on the link to view an excerpt of each video.

stills from ItaliaIrania!, dv, 2009, total running time: 5:30.
ItaliaIrania! is a short film created in the style of a television fusion cooking show. Through inhabiting my parents to cook a meal together as a family, I draw from childhood memories and personal emotional states to reconfigure an emotionally void media format while exploring the notion of how culture is iconized via its food.

still from The Djinns Will Eat You, dv, 2009, total running time: 1:15.
The Djinns Will Eat You is a horror movie trailer set to the Persian black metal band Zantoor.  It explores the idea of interior/exterior space.

still from KhaliKoobeh, dv, 2009, total running time: 2:00.
KhaliKoobeh is created in the style of a Persian music video using composited images from the Texan suburbs where I grew up. Singing the only 5 words I remember in Farsi (very good, why, grapes, goodbye), I explore not only the idea of being an outsider to both cultures, but also the power of language as a divisive or unifying device.

A link to my presentation is coming soon…

assignment 1!

Visual
iranian alliances
bi-racial buddiez!
mj.

Film
my demo reel
laying the foundation
period
trans
marianne faithfull VOOM portrait
last days of judas iscariot
o! dancing bears

Sound
geothenergy
piano
prepare
speak + math

Commercial
volvo
british airways
downtown for democracy
blue cross blue shield
van de kamps ]]> http://www.tinyscissors.com/blog2/?feed=rss2&p=736 http://www.tinyscissors.com/blog2/?p=713 http://www.tinyscissors.com/blog2/?p=713#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:50:12 +0000 admin http://www.tinyscissors.com/blog2/?p=713

Semiotech has a booth in the ITP [Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU] Winter Show this year from Dec 17-18, 5-9pm @ 721 Broadway, 4th floor. If you’re around and interested, come check it out! We have a couple of demos explaining the conceptual framework behind the performance tools we make, and Dream Squawk & the Shadow Puppet Sequencer (the instruments we performed with for NIME) are on display for you to play with as well. Lots of things are covered in felt! yay! come see!

Semiotech performed with our instruments, Dream Squawk and the Shadow Puppet Sequencer at Exit Art on Monday, December 15th for the NIME (New Instruments in Musical Expression) final performance. We created a world of fun and fear for the audience with our love bird narrative, chase sequence, and layered soundscapes. We are excited to perform with these instruments again, and video/pics of the performance are coming soon!

The Perceptual Expansion Space/Suit was asked to be a part of Art Continu, a festival of interactive arts happening in Marrakech, Morocco April 3-5, 2009. Other former ITPers work will be shown there as well, which we’re excited about! This event is organized by Island 6 Arts Center, which is located in Marrakech, Shanghai, and Paris. More details to come…

to see where we’re at now with this theory, read the current schema first.

the beginning of Semiotech in its current form started over a year ago when Michael Clemow and I started creating wearable performance tools. We were playing with the notion of creating a symbolic performative language via gestural movement. We visualized and sonified a kick, slap, and hug and created expanded iconic albeit cartoonish mini-performances for each one. The gestures themselves of the  kick, slap, and hug became performative by mapping the movements in the gestures to visuals and sound via wearable sensors. This notion of transferring one kind of sensory input into another sensory output (movement to visual, visual to sound, etc) began the narrative of Semiotech that we have carried from then until now.

We started on this path by granularizing each movement, visual and audio stimulus into a single unit. We originally called this unit a Light-Sound Entity. From that unit, we would build each experience- the different configurations of these units created different experiences. At this point in time, each “experience” was meant not only in a performative sense, but in a perceptual sense as well. We were getting into the nature of perception and started drawing from semiotics, phenomenology, science of perception, quantum mechanics, and performance techniques. At first upon building our vernacular around this burgeoning school of thought, we decided Semiotech as a whole should be a performance in itself to embue our actions and thoughts with a notion of “expertness.” For some reason, making the whole paradigm we were creating fictional seemed to allow us more freedom of expression. At first Semiotech wasn’t formally created yet,  we decided we were researchers working for an organization called SALSER (The Society for the Advancement of Light-Sound Entity Research). We hadn’t expanded our notion of a granularized unit of experience into the realms of all 5 senses, we were still stuck on light and sound.

From there, things have changed a lot, we changed our notion of LSE into a phenomenal atom, which is more than just light and sound- it is the smallest unit of experience, which includes all of the senses we utilize to build an experience. To build an experience out of the phenomenal atom, you would have different configurations of these units, which would represent different meanings and contexts. Take the pixel of an image for example- one pixel on its own doesn’t denote, but if you have the pixels in a certain configuration you see a cat in the image. In another configuration, something completely different appears. However, these atoms are not just parts of an image, they’re parts of an experience as a whole, with all of your utilizable senses at play. The different configurations of phenomenal atoms to create meaning, we called phenomenal atom clouds.

As time passed and we tried conveying this idea to people over and over to no avail, we decided to simplify our terms. We had created a whole vernacular around our ideas instead of really fleshing out the ideas themselves. So where we’re at now is in the current schema link. We are now calling the unit a phemel, or phenomenal element. But that word is not nearly as important as the meaning behind it.