practice 2: welcomedance

what: i’ve been practicing this dance in family gatherings. next to my sister and other bold people of my family, we’ve been expected to warm up the party. put a pop song on and go to the middle, break the ice…

when: this dance mostly happens either around birthday cake ritual (a less than a century old ritual which is very popular among my family) , or just after dinner when people have digested their food and the level of alcohol is getting higher in the blood.

how: eye contact and soft invitation for the seated people to join the middle; being funny and not making the dance too intimidating for others; keep on traveling from the middle to the peripheries and create space for newcomers; invitation to clap or snap or standing around(instead of sitting) for the ones who do not want to join; eventually forming a circle which has its own rules of  space management and solo and duet dancing; breaking the circle into smaller duets or trios (not that many solos); de/re centralizing the center of attention and motivation and multiplying it.

#circle dance #pop music (familiar music) #multi centrality #dancing for and with



practice 3: diXite[10] / notebooks / visual essay writing

what: dixite(known also as stogite) is a card game that works with image association. the game works with suggesting a gesture, sound, word, phrase, song, dance for the card picked by a narrator. the goal is not to give too much of a clue but enough for some of the players to guess which card was picked.

when: i’ve initially played this game with a collection of family photos that i have insisted that i did not exist in any of them. i then used this method to temporarily categorize the textual material that i have collected through out my research(keeping the same attitude of taking myself out of the reason of their existence) and to make a surface-assemblage in the form of a text/photo video/book/carpet/instagram page. [11][12]

how: questioning the demand of coherent writing and playing with text as an image and image as text; collecting materials in the form of printed or written and drawn images in a collection of notebooks (so far 23 of them since 2014) which follows the logic of assembling [13] rather than archiving “knowledge” and “memory” of the moments that i have lived through so far. the logic is not yet clear, surprise:)) but it includes loose chronology, more of accumulated text and image and lesser deliberate composition, minimum explanation of what things are and constant negotiation between the ways these accumulated knowledge need to communicate with its reader/observer..

#swimاو : someone who is(n’t) me #surface-choreography #illusion of coherency #photos that aren’t i #rhizoma [14]

practice 1: living two cities

what and when: since 2015 i weirdly (and i mean it not in a spectacular way) got dual citizenship (two passports). since then i have decided to go for the desire of living (with no “in”) both cities of Tehran and Amsterdam at the same time.

how: keeping my work which is a very ambigues thing (my life and my connections), running in both places. Living with empty bank account and feeling bad for the air pollution by flying cheap flights; being a part of both cities daily troubles and daring to identify with the citizens of both; not having a permanent job or a long term commitment for my physical presence; extreme need to be able to commit and not accepting my conditions as an exclusion for that desire; starting to make meaning for presence that does not stop in the border of my own body; observing closely the immigration policies on how bodies are allowed to move in relation to their geographical identity; keep resisting to chose one of the two cities as my base and doing an effort to live them both as my home; learn more about longing, belonging and belongings*; watching birds migration; keep on refusing the words “culture” and “locality”; experiencing a temporal body with a never ending longing for all the ones that i ever cared for.

#no in between but in both #at the same time #unbelievable immigration policies #ogutu’s renouncement of EU residency #natascha suder happelmann ankersentrum[15] #winged migration [16] #shock of no culture shock


practice 7: screen(time) sharing

What and when: to spend time with people online, mostly video chatting, for different reasons. this is a “practice” that i’ve begun in 2008 when i moved to Amsterdam. living online, video chatting and physical isolation has intensely grew in my life in these years. maybe the initial drive was a huge sense of FOMO.

how: being in my phone; doing all the following activities online: saying hi - thinking together - sex chatting - organised lecture - simultaneous events and partying - getting drunk - using eachother’s body to manipulate physical objects - accompanying - spending time - listening to music - sharing a practice - walking down the river - dancing together;

and then being alone physically; not having to share the air, smell, touch, temperature with the other person present in your space; spending lots of time in front of a screen, in and out of a fixed frame; the power of a limited frame; acknowledging glitches and delays; becoming an image (with separate layer of video and audio); creating my avatar; imagining the gaps; enjoying the gaps; searching for things to share; redefining touch, distance and heat; think about solo work, collectivity, borders of perception of one’s own body and the measurement of distance; thought experiments on time sharing and synchronicity;

#imaging&imagining #surface-choreography #searching for more data #body image #time-image #time-sharing #the avatar #connecting spaces #time vs light #thinking together #physical borders to digital borders #flux of ideas bodies stuck[17] #dance of companionship #Flirting



Practice 4: online solos

what and when: i have done most of this practice in december 2017, where i asked 20 friends to let me dance for them online (even though some of them were in the same city as i was). more than 10 people accepted my invitation. i took max 20 minutes to dance for their eyes. soundescape, the movements, costumes, extra layers were all chosen on the spot depending on what their presence would provoke in me and what mood i was in. i also tried out a performance in Tehran Fajr festival where i did not appear in front of the public audience and only danced from the dressing room for few of them via video chat while the rest could only see the face of that person watching my dance projected on a wall in front of them. later on in swimاو performance i created different spaces for the observers’ eyes to experience the multiple and non-universal gaze. i did that by inviting the audience to observe the show through different platforms.

how: studying how the gaze-presence of the ones that i know can effect the choreography of my moves and moods;  projecting many thoughts and desires on their eyes based on their presence and engagement with the images coming from me and how i know them next to me from other life experiences that we’ve shared together; questioning the idea of public audience in relation to my dance; resisting the desire of a public eye for me to do anything in front of them; rejection of public surveillance , god-eye[18], panoptic[19], absolute gaze, a conquering gaze from nowhere that fucks the world to make techno monsters[20]; create different modes of observation for one event; invite people to just join the music line of the show via an online website or just observe one of the dancers who dances in an imvu[21] chat room (for that they needed to make an account and join the chatroom online) or to watch the show through a whatsapp call with one of the audiences in the room or just look out of their window and see one of the dancers on the rooftop of their neighbour building..

# “dance of the pointy clouds”[22] #no public audience but endless distances and familiarities #dancing for and with #the eye in the frame #welcomedance #invisibility and visibility in the frame #time sharing #flirting #what is my dance when your eyes are looking at it #birthday gifts #god trick[23]

practice 5: dancing for and with you where او is holding the camera and she is watching

what: this is an exercise that takes 4 people, 8 smartphones, music (accessible for everyone), an internet connection and a space to move.

the practice is to dance for (and later on with) the online eye while the framer is taking care of the frame and the observer is looking. there are 4 positions to take: Observer (the outsider eye), Framer (the eye holding the device), Dancer/eye (the body/image in relation to the online/body) , Online eye/dancer (the online participant).

suggested structure:
30 minutes experience X2 *
10 minutes Dance for (Dancer for the Online Eye)
10 minutes Dance for (Online Dancer for the Dancer)
10 minutes Dance with (Dancer and the online Dancer)

*in the second round you can decide to swap positions or stay with the same one.
*let this be just a base to work in and do question everything that is given (the language, timing, etc).


for the Eye on either side:
- your eyes stay in the frame
- if disconnected just reconnect
- no talking as long as it makes sense
-making screenshots or taking photos of your screen and its surrounding is welcome.

for the Dancer on either side:
- no talking as long as it makes sense.
- your whatever understanding of dance from Wedding party to wherever is welcome.

for the Observer:
- you are the time keeper
- no talking as long as it makes sense.
- your story telling is welcome. updating the whatsapp group [24] with photos/videos, voice recordings and text is very welcome.

for the framer:
- if disconnected just reconnect
- try both selfie and non selfie mode
- no talking as long as it makes sense
- you are the host of the eye, see what that can mean for you

How: play with taking or giving the power in each position; think of the differences between for and with and the possibility to add “to” and “from”; stay with one position and think about exquisite care[25]; do the practice with people you know and people you don’t know; do the practice with and for the ones you care for but can not be in the same place as you are; try to describe the nostalgia and sadness that comes with the distance; go beyond nostalgia; do the practice between places that you can have access to and you have actually been in both at some time; reverse; distribute the power between positions; find different balance in the whole time-sharing, image-making process; talk about the camera as a 5th position and video chatting apps as the 6th; find more positions that are already engaged in the exercise; think about “we”; shift i to او and you while shifting roles[26].

#seeing but not looking #camera on hand #what “we” are “we” talking about? # with and for / in relation to togetherness #modes of taking power #modes of defining power #appearing/disappearing

Practice 0 : swimاو

what: this is a practice of dancing together with and for 4 other friends of mine from the place that they work and live, regardless of their geographic distance, which took the form of a time-based performance-event[27] .

with Yalda[28] in her studio in Tehran
and Reyhan[29] in her room and rooftop in Karaj
and Nooshin[30] with her avatar (tapkerose) in imvu chatroom (in Frankfurt and then Amsterdam)
and Sne[31] with his music in mixlr.com[32] (in Amsterdam)
and i in studio in Amsterdam
we connected through the images of our cameras in live skype[33] video chat and music that was broadcasted through a mixlr channel.


how: spending time together; creating our avatar inspired by each other’s appearances; putting on a tail and getting inspired by teknolust AIs [34]; feeling the anxiety that comes with fragile connections; finding ways to continue in the moments of disconnection; from FOMO to LOMO[35] and the other way around; framing ourselves not only for the sake of the others; letting our spaces influence each other; being aware of the cables and all the devices that are a part of this connection[36]; copy each other’s spaces; let the light of one space, light the other space; let the beat join us together; copy the glitches; what if the avatar is copying me?; listening to the delays; creating more delays; dance with the parallax; feel the pain of separation but not believing in it; let separation be an external force while dancing together just internally glorify the differences[37]; do not give up on reconnecting; trusting each other that we are all keeping it up until we get more data from each other; imagining the images while imaging what you wish to imagine.

#connecting spaces #time sharing #dancing together #fomo to lomo and the other way around #choreography of opacity and frames # synchronicity[38] # avatars dancing


practice 9: phone hosting

what and when: i have invited friends and colleagues who lived far away to join some of the exercises that i’ve been doing, online via someone’s smartphone. my father was hosted in Abel’s phone, Nooshin was hosted with Noha (they met for the first time), Dorsa was in Eva’s phone, Yalda in Shahrzad’s and Roham in mine. we were reading text, watching videos, dancing and chatting[39]. this led to the desire of having online audiences during the experience of swimاو . they were guests in the phones of the audience who were present physically (hosts). this mode of being extremely affected the experience of the hosts in receiving the performance.

how: creating space for micro-narrations (even dramaturgy) of the event by both hosts and guests; inviting multiple attention in one event which help de(re)centralizing the gaze; working extensively with the idea of care in relation to the person who is hosted in the phone; what does it mean to host and what kind of gaze does the host want to work with (documenter “objective” gaze or peripheral gaze or what else?); how much of the experience is up to both guest and host to be felt?; how can they communicate without so much instruction; how can the images and the way they are present in the image can inform each other about new desires of seeing and looking; what does it mean to be someone’s eye? what does it mean to be someone’s body while not losing yours?; try the experience with someone you know, then do it with a stranger; try doing it in different devices, bigger screens, better sound quality; how much of the experience is about the images you send and receive? and how much of it is about being there is an unusual form but yet sharing time and some light beams?; see the different modes of presence and observation that this practice activates; see how time-difference effects the experience of listening to one music track at the same time with people in different time zones; experience the show from a different timezone together with performers and other audiences who are spread out through different ones as well;

#modes of seeing [40] #from where do i see #micro-narrators #shared agency #multiple dramaturgy #multiple timezones #what is it that we share? #unusually present #temporal framing #collective gaze

practice 6 : screenshot telling/ temporal framing, focus and opacity

what: 1001nights[41] storytelling is the core of this idea. the one that existed way before it becomes a known written book (known as arabian nights) and being translated in european languages (French and …). this series of stories has been orally (سینه به سینه) travelled through different geographies and time. one story has different variations in different eras and context according to the beliefs and desires of the story tellers. power positions and roles such as female figures, monarchs and peasants got different nuances in their characters according to the context it has been narrated in. therefore stories had the ambiguity that could leave the judgment to the spectator and give them the freedom to re-narrate and question the suggested conclusions.

when: during the phone hosting exercize, i have encouraged screenshot making as a way to receive the event. the quality of screenshots and the impossibility of capturing the moments that ones wish for (because of the delays embedded in the device and in the reflections of the seer), was a great way for me to challenge the idea of documentation, knowledge making and archiving. i then used the same technique as a way to frame the images in swimاو performance. using frames on wheels and different textures as screens to avoid a clear image on the walls and to let images travel from one surface to another and appear in different grades of opacity was the way i was narrating the event among other narrators present in the room. this narration was not horizontal and i could have way more power than the others, the challenge was how to be aware of that power and how to act or not act upon it.

how: try to overcome the impossibility of capturing what eyes see with what hands do when pressing buttons on the phone; what is it that you wish to capture and what frames would you leave out?; what is the reason behind capturing or leaving out?; look at capturing as a form of understanding then as a tool to create a different gaze then as a distraction; look at not capturing in the same way; temporal and simultaneous framing of holes, as a practice of swimming between imaging and imagining; choreographing images; press the button before you decide for the frame; try to capture what you wouldn’t and leave out what you like; be aware of the third or fourth or fifth eyes who might see your frame, how can you include their desire in your choice? practice choreography as “a selection of fragments of an event unusually meaningful (instead of useful) and desirable (instead of entertaining) bits, chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence..”[42]

# storytelling #oral history #ephemeral yet tangible #illusion of coherency #string figures and other ancient algorithms[43] #temporal opacity # no image on one wall #frames on wheels #bed sheets as screens #image-choreography #map of moving in the space

practice 10 : app occupation

what and when and how: i never managed to squat[44] in amsterdam, i did try when i was 24 and momo was the guy with whom i and olivia had a chat in Joe’s garage, where he completely intimidated us. i always appreciated the friends who has done it. i found it amazing to occupy dead spaces with your body and life.  also having to make the space work and not fall on your head and of course changing the landscape of gentrified rich neighborhoods.

i’ve been participating in the elections of a country that i have fundamental problems with its constitution law. i did that with the desire of staying in the game with the hope to bring change from inside, breaking the expectations of the ones in power (which prefer people like me to leave the country and never bother them again), voting for the worse over the worst, to dehomogenize the mentality of the public and at least make lesser abusive people occupy high posts. even if they might not be able to do anything, in this way i prevent more fraud and abuse from the malfunctioning governing system. something like using the gaps and bugs of the system to reform or redefine it.

i think it is way too pretentious for me to say that i’ve been practicing squatting while using apps like skype whatsapp imvu instagram google and so on. maybe i’m squatting that word for something else, something similar in some way. the spaces (empty spaces) that i was occupying , the apps i mentioned and the empty studios in the institution of ahk were not left empty so that i could occupy them. in the contrary they’ve been designed for particular purposes and were made accessible for me to be one of their users. what was left empty was the desires of using those spaces for other purposes or no particular purpose at all. it gets very difficult to overcome the designated roles of those spaces and still be in them. this way of occupation and presence was inspired by the squatting lifestyles and mentalities that i have experienced around me.

i’m aware of the demons that exist inside of those apps and am still questioning what kind of data am i selling them for the sake of spending time with the ones i want, but this does not make me escape from it. i think the more people ignorantly use those apps and consciously boycott them, the more harmful these apps can get.

“ after all, we communicate from and between coordinates that are not only set apart in terms of time zones, but often constitute highly complex political, economic, and social contextual gaps. there are times when the Skype connection bridges what would otherwise be insurmountable gaps or borders. bodies are kept in check and often prevented from crossing borders, depending on which economy they belong to, yet all the while they are allowed to overcome distance through social media and telecommunications”[45].

#walls of institution #ditching borders #app surveillance and privacy #data selling / another price for thinking together and crossing borders #de/re purposing as a way to squat #accessible technology #no to boycotting yes to occupying #where and how do i project #can you project on any surface # screens on wheels



practice 12: عکس دسته جمعی / group photo

what and when: this has been a family ritual since i remember the parties. the moment the first group of guests decide to leave, my parents call for the group photo, this includes either tripod and camera timer or group of several photographers who take turns and make few photos. the photos mostly include a large group of people, very tiny faces and some flowers that guests had brought. since few months and after having to deal with a multitude of projected images, i started to play with over layering them on one wall. as the images were live videos, it created a space for inter video interactions. Y touching R’s shoulder and tapkerose and R holding hands.

how: call everyone with video and project their images on one wall; help everyone see the over layered image and hear each others voices so that they all can communicate; anyone can compose the image by asking others to move or touch or wave or smile; try to take the empty spaces in each others background; play with the scale, touch, light and colors; mimic a group photo moment.

 

#on touching[46] #holding hands through time and space #surface flirting #image-touch #live memory #collective composition #filling up spaces #overlayering #less opacity as a space for more to appear


practice 13: digital experiences to the non-digital presence

the impossibility of translation keeps me excited
how to translate some of the situations that happened because of being online?
what would these terms mean if i was in the same room with the others?
imagine a video chat with someone, then imagine sitting in the same room with that person, what would it then mean:


to be frozen
to call back again
to have my image with no background (Kinect+OF[47] )
to face the camera
to hear someone while seeing someone else’s image
the camera angle
to cover the image
to fast forward sound
to see myself in the corner of the image
to have my image always clear but seeing glitches on the image from the other side
to have the filter on my image and knowing others also have that (smoothing down the skin)
different webcam quality
different laptops
to nod while the speaker can not see you
to separate image and sound,
to have my sound next to the ear of the speaker
someone holding the phone for me to hear
to mute my voice or the other’s
to hear through the image
to be in the border of the frame
memory full
to take different distance from the screen
to put the screen on different surfaces (Kitchen, front yard, toilet)
to project the image on different surfaces (cabinets, walls, small pieces of cloth)
to put the phone in a pot. hearing from a pot
others taking turn in fixing the frame for the image that i can see better
to check in if i am still there without talking and moving or am i just frozen
not to have a video in the other space and vice versa
not to have sound in the other space and vice versa
to start at the screen
to represent more than one body
to watch people in big or small scale
to have to be present in the frame to confirm my presence
to have to write a story together/ everyone writes a sentence on a blackboard in the other space (the choice of chalkboard vs google docs)
to experience different glitches on my view and knowing this is only what we see from this side
to make a shelter in the room and staying together with the ones in their shelter in the other space[48]


practice 11: making avatar

what and when: this one was an invitation for Nooshin to join the swimاو dance with her avatar tapkerose which she had bought and designed in imvu app. this app is a chatroom app with very simple 3D designed environment. it is actually causing the illusion of a 3D space with attaching 2D images to a 3D structure. all the walls, objects, bodies are just surfaces of images warped into perspective of 3d objects. the avatars are limited into two sexuality, male (with 6 packs, no breast) and female (big breast and round ass). clothes that you can buy for each of them is designed for either of these two sexes so if you like a “male” sweater for a “female” avatar, it would not fit. avatars can not surf the space they can be located to specific spots in the chatrooms designed by the creators. in those spots the avatar can do movements that are made for those spots. next to those movements, you can buy movement package and add it to your avatars moves. imvu is a popular and in my opinion hetro normative app , designed for sex chatting and hanging out.


how: get an account and have a look around in endless but still limited possibilities for body postures, faces, shapes, clothes, hair, accessories, moves, gestures and chose one to start; see how you still can bend the idea of gender binary within the possibilities of the app; explore the chatrooms (basically their space and kind of actions you can do in them); get some credit and explore movement packages and choreographies and buy some to play with; have a look at the creator site and see how far you’d like to go with creating new spaces and bodies for this app; think of every live image that represented us in the swimاو dance as the avatar of the person that it belongs to; what if the space-image-body that each person brings in the dance is the avatar? also think of avatar behaviour (I mean the tapkerose in imvu) as a model (instead of “human" body being a model for the avatar, the way it appropriates that model in his digital pixalated, algorithmic manner becomes a model for you to copy); what does it mean to be dropped into a position and immediately be in the dance? what does it mean to repeat? what does it mean to to pass through the camera?

#imvu #female figures # accessible technology #lo fi apps #human figure #space-image-body as avatar #reversing the behavioural model #being dropped #enter the dance with no delay #faking glitches




practice 8: surface-choreography

what: in continuation of the questions that i had in a former research project , bodilessheads [49], after all the online dances that i’ve done, the body-image became very present in understanding the borders of my body and presence. my body became a surface, from wherever it was looked at, depth became the accumulation of surfaces synchronised in an unusual way, time became the measure for distance. wherever the gaze was, او was , you were, that was the front...

dancing backward رقص عقب عقب

what if the thing that i’m dancing withfor (be it the camera lense, a painting on the wall , or their eyes) is behind me the way future is for the Quechua speaking people of Andes, over your shoulders, where you can’t see unless you turn around and snatch a glimpse[50].


circle dance

how can our avatars , the surfaces, our body-images, face eachother like in lots of traditional group dances? what if we all face an imaginary center or we all have our backs to it?When the circle appears the cruciality of that distance comes clear. when i formed the circle i was looking for an intimate space for all of our avatars to be next to each other without the interference of other bodies. this desire amplification the parallax effect that was existing in the room throughout the whole performance, the illusion of facing each other stayed quite representational. nevertheless the clarity of the space between the screens and the positioning of the cameras created a different form of interaction with the gaze of the others which has influenced our dance. as our cameras were facing each others avatars and even i in the space had my back to the outside of the circle, the gaze of the others stepped back which has created a kind of intimacy. on the other hand as our avatar images did not have a back and were simultaneously facing inside and outside, the game of exclusion was actually creating another inclusivity for the outside gaze. we were dancing for and with ourselves and somehow our intimacy was shared with whoever approached our images from the other side.


glitch dance

in this game i included the quality of the images in the dance that we were doing..slow motions and sudden fast buffering of the missing images, stuttering and pauses were mostly the thing that we added to the dance that we were doing. it is fun to create confusion on where the source of a glitch is, is the internet cutting off or are the dancers dancing slow and what kind of slow motion is suggested by each of them.


avatar has to dance  آواتار باید برقصه 

in many cases to sync with the avatar we needed to copy her. we found a particular choreography in one of the chatrooms and everyone learned the moves and did it together with the avatar. the fixed timing of her moves and the exact repetition of the same move and the fact that she was either doing it or not, she was either in it or not, were the qualities that we’ve added to our dance. us starting the dance before her, made it look like she's following our moves.

anti dance

music was a glue, a non-spacial, direct source of connection, a thread that each of us could hold onto regardless of other connection and disconnection. the non-existent present that was constantly felt as future/past, an aural temporality that shaped the experience of being together[51]. to let that be felt by our bodies, to not to fall into a projection of what we might have known about the rhythms that was yet to come, we tried the anti dance, which was an effort of doing anything but the dance that might have come automatically to accompany the music, to occupy the space to fill the time.




#measurement of depth, distance, touch #peripheral vision #back surface #time-image #double frontality #synchronicity as a thread #in or out #inclusivity through exclusivity #non existent present #backward dancing #anti dance #circle dance #copying the glitches