DKB VR Art Prize

Springe direkt zu:

Nominated for VR ART PRIZE 2023

#

MohsenHazrati

Mohsen Hazrati (*1987 in Shiraz, Iran) lives and works in Berlin. He graduated with a BA in graphic design from Shiraz Art Institute of Higher Education in 2012, minoring in new media and digital art. His works focus on Literature and digital technologies and have been presented at various conferences such as; Universität der Künste Berlin, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, IAM weekend Barcelona, EVA, and UCL mal London, Elo University of Central Florida, TEDx Mollasadra St, and exhibitions by Grafikenshus museum, Peer to Space, Radiance VR, synthesis, Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach, Transfer gallery, etc.

Since 2013, in collaboration with Milad Forouzande, he has been the co-founder and curatorof “Dar-AlHokoomeh Project”; a new media art project and activity, based in Shiraz, Iran.

Fãl Project [none-AI], 2022 (in production)

Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. Hazrati uses the poetry book Hafiz Divan for this purpose. The words of a randomly selected poem are converted into codes. The resulting algorithms create a data collection of text based on an internet search. From this data, users can interpret individual predictions about the future, based on an old Iranian tradition. This is how AI is used as a fortune-telling element: centuries-old literature and culture are transferred into the digital realm. In doing so, the artist tries to keep his own influence on the databases and the functioning of the AI as low as possible in order to preserve the specificity of the original Iranian tradition: divination is given the space it needs to unfold, unaffected by humans.

 

Intelligence has been described in many Iranian poems as the opposite of the symbol of wine, since drunkenness is understood as the deactivation of intelligence.The word وش†NN بی†ه†, means „without intelligence“ and is an example of this metaphor, describing a spiritual state. The scene depicted tries to imagine an AI that is based on logical data processing in a fight with an AI in this drunken, spiritual state of mind. In contrast to the commercial use of AI, the goal of the creation of the drunken AI is the attempt to transfer the control to spiritual divination.

 

The Fishes and Folders depicted each stand for a divination made by the audience as a part of the Fãl project (AR Book Installation) at the Fellbach Triennial. The names that are written on the folders are names submitted by the audience and the words are the important words selected by the AI system for their divination. These data have been chosen randomly from the project database and presented in the VR Application in Realtime.