Nima Bahrehmand is an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist and educator. His artistic research explores bodies, archives, and places that became suppressed and desertified due to being subjugated by political, economic, and technological progress. Via a digital voyage, he builds worlds that allow relocating the desertified from their initial setting into a new environment or platform, thus allowing the creation of new stories about them. Working with emergent media, he interrogates technology that claims accessibility, fairness, and welfare. He creates discursive ties around redefining and reworking data, unraveling how the databasing apparatuses service the dominance of the Global North in order to extract and manipulate the dignity of the Global South.
His artworks have been included in exhibitions and venues, including Digital Native as part of the Tbilisi Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia; ISEA, International Symposium for Electronic Arts, Barcelona; Denver Digerati, Denver; Kandovan Gallery, Tehran, Iran; Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin; Marres, Maastricht, Netherland; Kiosk, Ghent, Belgium; VAC, Austin and AG Gallery, Tehran; among others. He also published some of his writing in outlets such as xCoAx, Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, Porto; Institute of Network Culture, Amsterdam; and RAI, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Nima received his BFA from the University of Kerman, Iran; MA from the School of Art, Ghent, Belgium; MFA in studio art (Transmedia) from the University of Texas at Austin, and Ph.D. in Emergent Technology and Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Website and links: https://nimabahrehmand.com
Project:
//TODO: Cons–true
How often do we, driven by a desperate thirst to know, call upon AI to make things knowable to us? How often do we wander, lost in our dreamiest daydreams, and ask a machine to make these thoughts concrete? AI as that ethereal entity that makes our fragmented and complex thoughts seem much more concrete. AI as a simplifier. How does an abstract algorithm take these ridiculous and impossible thoughts we seem to think and normalize them into an almost knowable state? How does it keep running, even when we haven’t really asked it to make anything for us? When the interpretive activity of the machine is operated in the register of nonvisual temporality, what happens to the control? What happens to human organizational autonomy in digital time?
The point of departure of this project is a point of the unknown – a kind of double ignorance, where we are not just unaware of certain things but unaware of what we don’t know. It is about folding into that ambiguity and using its facility to build a new world. In this world, the generative faincipience of human thought and the interpretative movement of AI collide…
This project is about querying the extent to which we allow AI to permeate our perceptions, our creativity, and our construal of the world, and what of what it construes is a reflection of us, and what of its interpretations are of its own discourse? This project is not just an inquiry into the capabilities of AI but a deeper dive into our relentless quest for understanding in an increasingly complex world. Are we ready for the unknown unknowns to be interpreted, dissected even, by the very machines we’ve created? I DON’T KNOW. It might be as abstract as the technology we’re trying to decipher.
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