NERD_FUNK
In the current climate of the Internet, we have reached an irreversible state in our social life and inherently the way we think and comprehend our reality. It’s a situation we have all dived into, floating and yet struggling to find ourselves in it. To investigate this phenomenon and allow others to investigate it with us, we decided to create a virtual identity called “nerd_funk”, a hybrid between a person and a collective, who exists in Instagram and follows contemporary digital culture.
Through the lens of this profile, the user will set out on a journey that represents an archive of collected moments and stories shared by others. Bringing the user into an interactive journey composed and directed on the basis of nerd_funk’s Instagram stories feed.
The experience will be a confrontation of the user with different sets of curated social media contents, which transforms participants between the chaos of information and order. By providing an alternate hyper-reality, we attempt to compare and thus better perceive our current state of existence in social media. A dynamic that represents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the present that can provide an alternative perspective on the reality of ourselves and our societies.
THE TEAM
Mamali Shahafi, Co-director
Biography
Mamali Shahafi is interested in how the internet and emerging technologies have transformed everything – from what’s real or unreal, to our relations with the world and other people, objects and images and how we use them. He is also interested in the effects these developments have had on art and the role of the artist. He believes the role of the artist is no longer to create and comment, or offer ideal visions from a pinnacle, but to sift, analyse, edit, juxtapose and present without comment. Mamali’s work brings together diverse media: drawing, painting, photography, film, installation and performance, in long-term themed projects, which as they progress, may give rise to intermediate exhibitions in various media at different stages of the project.
Ali Eslami, Co-director and VR Artist
Biography
Ali is a VR Artist and Practitioner. He has been working with VR technology since 2014. He develops and designs VR experiences to explore new pathways in this emerging medium and further than that, re-imagine and construct alternative futures through speculative design of virtual realities. Ali has self-taught 3D for Architectural Viz since 2005 and spanned his focus to various fields like creative coding, data-viz, 3D art, and programming. In 2016, his VR project won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive non-fiction. Besides content production and artistic research, Ali is active in running VR Masterclasses and workshops.