“Land”
Ali Phi
Mohsen Gallery
August 11 – 30, 2017, 4 – 9 pm
Opening Reception: August 11, 2017, 4 – 9 pm
Placeless Utopia
Ancient Romans believed that every place—from a street corner to an entire city-state—possessed a genius loci, a presiding spirit that enlivened it and kept an eye on it. Geography may not be fate, but it comes very close. Our surroundings shape our lives, productivity, happiness, and creativity, all of which are functions of a place. Where we live simply affects how we live. Spatial imagination influences the way we perceive bodies and the place of identity and identification. So, yes, place matters; but what exactly do we mean by “place”? At the most fundamental level, it is topography—the lay of the land.
Spatial imagination is used to hint at imagining alternative ways of living, and broadening the ways in which imagination becomes instrumental in shaping our lives. What truly makes a place, though, is not only topography but also culture. Today, Digital Culture have dissolved the inconsistent limits of the physical world, leaving us free to amuse ourselves in the placeless present.
Ali Phi’s latest project, “Land,” consists of several digital, audiovisual art installations that explore different ways through which land, inhabited land, and motherland affect his creativity, shaping what in turn makes his own version of utopia. Persian architecture, gardens, carpets, and textile patterns: all things based on which his personal and social identity is most particularly established. The main installation is at underground floor, where the audience encounters an interactive real-time generative piece that produces immediately fading patterns. No one is able to capture and stabilize these patterns—they all fade into the dark, black surrounding. Other works are a Point cloud audiovisual installation in an imaginary, nonexistence place and an interactive installation made from lines in an abstract space. Meanwhile, one can hear a track from Ali Phi’s LEFT album: a sound track designed specifically for this digital art installation.
Information for journalists
Ali Phi (b. 1986, Tehran, Iran) is a media artist and a musician. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering. In 2009, he received a certification of filmmaking from “Institute of Young Cinematic Association.” After working in the field of experimental cinema and underground music movement of Tehran, he started using computers as tool for connecting and mixing different media for making new forms of space. He is a self-studied and experienced developer, programmer, and art activist. His career in media arts started with the project “Elemaun” in 2008 by real-time and generative audio-visual performances. The works of Ali Phi depict the relation between point, line, plane, light and darkness. The digital process and flexibility in his works are an interrelation and a diverse and growing alteration between today’s media and capacities of presentation. The flow of his works is a relation that has been made possible between video presentations, programing, converting sounds to images and vice versa, and shifting the process of showing with motion into images and the interconnection between all of these elements and their transformation in computer. He started working with TADAEX in 2011 as an artist and developer, and later as the technical manager for next editions; recently, he has been the creative director and the freelance curator of the festival. He is also the founder of “nullsight”: a media lab based in Tehran. He has participated in more than 13 group exhibitions in addition to a solo show and several media art installations in public spaces. Ali Phi lives and works in Tehran.