Fanāʾ فنا

The project examines the representation of our presence in a discordant network of computational systems. It’s a speculative confrontation with the algorithms that work behind the shiny interfaces of mobile applications, smart homes, and smart cities. The system that is meant to act as a digital mirror, displaying a human-readable digital representation of its surroundings becomes a real-time abstraction and representation machine that samples the flows of the physical world in order to produce data flows for its internal means while keeping human perception and agency out of the loop. Fanāʾ creates a sublime mystical apparatus that interacts with the world, beyond human subjectivity to investigate our resistance towards this alienation through sense-making.
*In Persian Irfan, Fanāʾ is interpreted as breaking down of the individual ego and obtaining absolute awareness of an intrinsic unity between all that exists and the reality beyond sensory experience.
It was premiered at Uncloud Festival 2023, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Video: Guillaume Versteeg.
Photo: Paul van Dorsten