budubud|بادآباد - art-sci statements

A Postcard From Tehran|A group exhibition by ANTiPODE
In collaboration with Saina Heshmati

After a month in this cloudy city I realized “nice” means sunny. In juxtaposition, it’s “nice” in Tehran when it rains, or after it has just rained. A year in Seattle and I finally built a bridge: No matter where you are, a day is nice when you see the mountains–stratovolcanoes to be exact. Now to see Damavand in Tehran, you need a good amount of rain, enough to improve the air quality from “very unhealthy” to “unhealthy for the sensitive groups”; conversely, to see Tahoma (Rainier) in Seattle, you need a good amount of sun, enough to kill the light pollution of all those therapy lamps. A decade in Seattle and I am a bridge...

We are often attracted to people with opposite personalities and looks, opposite imperfections, perhaps to cancel out our own imbalances. Not because a tall morning person is the best partner for a short night owl but because, as the grumpy German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer puts it, the will-to-life force inside us wants us only cares about giving birth to balanced babies. Forget about how wrong Schopenhauer might be for a second and let’s extend his theory of attraction to cities. Yes, cities and not countries. Because, unlike countries, cities are not just dead myths whose agents end our romantic relationships, waste our lives with mandatory military services, reject our visas, and ban us from dancing in our friends’ weddings or holding our parents’ hands after chemo sessions. Unlike countries, cities are real; They have meanings and personalities. We can love them, hate them, live them, leave them, and they can live together inside us jetlagged immigrants who never fully leave and never fully arrive. We, like children of divorce, force cities to transform their differences into commonalities; we keep living the double life, with all its advantages and traumas, and become bridges that house their long-distance relationships.

Being that bridge for over a decade we believe that Seattle and Tehran share the requisite opposite imperfections to have strong feelings for each other: Tehran: an unintentional aimless train that is often cruel and always late; Seattle: an intentional healthy high-tech canoe that is sometimes naive and always in motion. Tehran: a concrete jungle full of hopelessness and past, wherein randomness murders tomorrow and pain and pleasure walk hand in hand; Seattle: a calm lake full of control and productivity, wherein minutes are important and tomorrow is the main object of worship. They would be strongly into each other, don’t you agree?

In “Postcard from Tehran”, ANTiPODE explores this potentially charged relationship by presenting video art, experimental music, short/long films, drawing, paintings, prints and posters from leading artists who still live in Tehran (either physically or in heart) to force Seattle and Tehran to interact, so they can give birth to balance, we feel at home for a while, and like-minded artists in Tehran and Seattle create meaningful long-term connections. We invite you to join us on this exciting and challenging journey by attending our events which will include gallery visits, jazz nights, electronic music shows, and video/film events. Let’s use this opportunity as an excuse to talk about what it feels to be a jetlagged immigrant and what it takes to feel at home in a new city.

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Chimera|An album statement
In collaboration with artsaves

In an identity coded ecosystem, how much authenticity we are willing to lose to experience the sense of belonging? And how far we are willing to go to be our authentic self? In a world full of labels, how much of our identity is our own creation and how much of it is just our response to expectations?

How we define ourselves in relation to our environment subconsciously rules our preferences and intentions? In an extreme view, we are nothing but a collection of broken mirrors replicating our environment. This environment once used to be our local tribe where real needs were met, our local community where we naturally belonged. But today, in our over-connected world, our broken mirrors detect a much larger radius, leaving us with many unanswered questions: As artists, how much of our efforts here in the Middle East are a response to some sort of need in the other side of the world? How much of our artistic journey is walking towards someone else’s carrot? Or moving away from it?

In the hyper-individualistic world we live in today, we desperately go on internal searches for authenticity to create a meaning for our lives. But in reality, it is the bridge between the self and the other where we find true connection, freedom, and meaning. With this dilemma between authenticity and belonging, can we define our own authentic role while still being relevant to our environment? Can we liberate from fixed and expected identities, traditional or progressive, and still feel accepted? Can we be our individual unique image and still fulfill our social duties?

In Greek mythology, Chimera is a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body, and a serpent’s tale and refers to a thing which is hoped for but it is impossible to achieve. This album is a self made story about a human chimera that comes to life: a combination of many things and yet not belonging to anything. The story has five chapters starting with creation. The creator then presents the results and the whole town starts to celebrate. People gradually start analyzing the new creature and expect the Chimera to behave in a certain way according to the things they can see and relate to. The creature then decides to leave its homeland in search for similar creatures and to create an independent isolated colony. Before leaving, it plants a seed in the homeland with it’s DNA code for the future. This all happens in a kind of post-apocalyptic setting but the idea is a reference to present time, to an artist in search for his identity, to anyone who doesn’t belong to their time and place and hopes to achieve the impossible somewhere else in future.

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On Immigrants and the Art of Transforming an Unfamiliar Space into a Home
From an unpublished short story collection formerly called as "Seattle art sucks"

When we move, when we break free of all constraints, lose connections with everything that reminds us of home–things we later feel nostalgic for—it feels light at first, right? But then, when the unboxing begins and the luggage remains open for days, when freedom morphs into a burden and solitude becomes loneliness, when it becomes evident that the walls no longer speak to us and the streets don't remember us—then feeling at home becomes a fundamental need, like clean air; but what do we do to feel at home after we move?

Let’s think of a small move first. You know, like from one apartment full of memories to another full of potential. To make the new apartment home we start filling its rooms with objects. Now even if we purchase the best bed, the room is not going to feel like home with only one bed. It’ll feel half-assed, right? We need a curated collection of objects that makes sense as a whole. But even that’s not enough for generating the meaning of home. I mean, a hotel room, no matter how full and luxurious, never quite feels like home, don’t you agree? For this "whole" to become home it takes time. It must hold our past, carry our scent, resonate with our familiar sounds, and reflect who we are. To feel at home in a new apartment, we need to listen to its walls for a while and let them change us first, then reclaim our identity and project it back onto its walls; and we need to do this gradually, and not loudly, and from the heart–like it’s a form of art. And only then walls begin to speak to us.

Now let’s apply the same framing to a bigger move. Like from one city full of connections to another full of individual freedom. To feel at home in a new city as immigrants, we learn to carefully listen to its streets, and to those who lived there before us. To get adopted, we adapt to our new environment and let it change us. Then, slowly, we start to talk; we reclaim our identity and project it back onto the public space; and we know by, for things to work, we need to do this gradually, and not loudly, and from the heart–like it’s a form of art. And only then streets begin to speak to us; and only then we start contributing to our new home.

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On Banality of Science & Tech after Bud

A biased opinion essay on

bbb-based narratives
accumulation of bullshit as a path to mortality
a naive wish for a version of science that reads like poetry
the role of scientific poets helping "time"

On March 12th 2024, at around 12pm, I lost my Ph.D. advisor, “Bud”. I was officially his student for three years (2014-2017) but I was lucky to meet him frequently till his last day. Being his student is my greatest academic achievement, but his influence on me extends far beyond academia. He was my mentor in history, art, culture, gardening, and politics. He was my guiding light on cloudy days of research and my stable anchor in the unknown seas that surround the life of an immigrant student. But more than anything, he was the manifestation of an honest version of science that is liberated from result-oriented narratives and branding. On multiple occasions, I witnessed him sticking to his values, when scientific or educational systems (e.g., a fluid mechanics journal or a mechanical engineering department) were starting to move towards bullshit and needed correction. I witnessed him holding his position and artistically showing the right path, so other small fish could swim against the flow–even when it was against his self interest.

After I lost Bud, I was aggressively sensitive for a while, mainly towards those who benefit from the version of science that relies heavily on branding, including myself. These biased lines are written with that anger and frustration.

Scientists are not immune to bullshit. In fact, we are systematically rewarded to improve along this axis.
Bullshit/ˈbʊlʃɪt/–Indifference to truth

Our evaluation metrics today—perhaps more than ever—are vulnerable to manipulation by those who can ride the surface waves of popularity, and science is no exception. Today, success in scientific environments (e.g., through the index number game of academic publication or the political game of performance review in applied research funded by private sectors) can be achieved through what I’d like to call bbb-based narratives, i.e., pop narratives optimized for short-term gains and generated based on bullshit, branding, and boondoggle.

Boondoggle/ˈboonˌdäɡ(ə)l/–Work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.

These narratives are strong tools. Once successful, they give birth to the next dominant variant, which consumes resources at a rapid rate to multiply and dominate. They are not inherently bad; depending on who is leading them, they can lead to positive action, shake up a passive system, or wake up a lazy organization from its comfortable, inefficient sleep. But since they often serve as shortcuts to influential positions that enable rapid, large-scale change, they often attract opportunists with good branding skills.

Snails strongly believe that only blurred visions lead to rapid changes.

The crisis begins when, these bbb-based narratives become the path of least resistance to ppp, i.e., promotion to powerful positions. Once bbb-masters control the promotion process, the system will start to decay and soon lose its aaa, i.e., the ability to actually act. With a decent amount of cynicism, one could say that's why we never landed on the moon again.

In a self-correcting environment, the mortality process begins when the system loses its ability to act. The accumulation of bullshit over time slowly fills the mortality dam, and at a certain point, when the dam breaks, the bullshit shatters, and the flood transforms all loud pop spikes into a forgotten noise on a 2D plot—with time as x-axis and importance as y-axis.

Mortality/môrˈtalədē/–the inability to keep your legacy against the passage of time.

Time is our oldest filter for bullshit and I like to believe that it still works, that it seems to be failing only because I’m too distracted to have a bird-eye view, that when a system gets infested with bullshit it dies over time; it naturally should, no? Well, unless it is constantly fed by an external energy source (e.g., fossil fuels, slaves, or cheap immigrant labor) which always comes at the cost of other’s effort and resources. Because bbb-masters are great at unfair capitalization bbb-based systems do not get filtered out by time soon enough. As a result, they are everywhere around us, only apparently functioning, leading us to believe that, as humans, we are incapable of acting on real problems.

Perhaps naively, I think that science is that one safe place that should stay clean of these result-oriented pop narratives. Perhaps naively, I still believe that an accessible version of science–away from the pretentious Ivy League tone, indifferent to short-lived waves of popularity, and liberated from addiction to success—should exist: an honest version that reads like poetry.

“The ability to understand something before it is observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.” Rovelli, Carlo. The order of time. Penguin, 2019.

But even if “Time” is still doing its job, what else do we have to help us with this battle?

Even though the growth of bbb-based narrative in scientific environments is a systematic problem, the primary defenders against this crisis are individuals whom I like to refer to as scientific poets or Hakims.

Hakim/haˈkēm,ˈhäkəm/: one who transcends the science kingdom and enters the playground of wisdom.

Scientific poets embody a synthesis of seemingly opposite qualities: they reach the top but somehow do more than just capitalizing on others below them, and this helps them stay sharp. They are extremely successful but not addicted to success, and this helps them stay loyal to their values. They are open to novelty but can also see the hollowness of new popular waves. They understand the power of narratives but are able to tell the difference between short-lived branding and timeless results. And finally, they are extremely productive in generating science and yet see value in teaching and mentorship. Bud was the greatest scientific poet I’ll ever know.

Scientific grandparents like Bud are our main chance for correcting scientific and educational systems when bullshit-based narratives empty their core of the weight of truth. The truth they carry is our savior against the fast expansion of distraction we are facing today, and many other modern-day diseases. I was lucky to witness how the pure form of scientific curiosity (stronger than spirituality or religion) can bring meaning to life, breathe life into a garden, impart wisdom to a lost PhD student, create new working educational/scientific systems or correct failing ones. These guardians of truth and heavy sources of stability stay loyal to scientific curiosity until the day they die, because it helps them maintain control over death—the ultimate form of distraction—in their final moments. I've seen it firsthand, and I've felt it firsthand: when they leave, bullshit smiles—as if gravity has weakened. And once they’re gone, things no longer fall into the right space, distraction spreads over time, and the system falls apart.

"Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed down by the earth. A moving object experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a plant grows less and a man dreams less." Rovelli, Carlo. The order of time. Penguin, 2019.

Thank you Bud, for teaching me everything I know correctly. Now that you're gone, it's as if gravity has weakened. I feel adrift without your “if I were you”s and I am terribly scared of losing our shared memories. I am certain that it would take another lifetime for me to encounter a tree as tall and fruitful as you, but I calm myself by spending time with Bryn in your garden and in the honor of being labeled a friend by you.

I lost a man who used to sit above the stream of time
A man so honest
A man full of life

And now that the winds that used to carry me are all gone
Time is a great friend of mine

It’ll speak to me
I know
I just have to flee
To somewhere where I don’t miss hummingbirds
To where the snails see me

And when it speaks
It’ll flow
Like the creek of my tears
Like a river full of justice
It’ll cut right through the grass
It’ll fill all the gaps:

The shoulders I deserve to cry on
The lips I deserve to kiss
The cities I deserve to miss

And when it flows
It’ll shut all those little mouths
It’ll sink all those little ants
All those poor fucking cockroaches who choose to be little acts

And it’ll flow
I know
I just need to learn how to write a poem that doesn’t bother the birds first
Plant the larch exactly how the maple says
And the moss
Exactly how the crow wants

I just need to hear beyond the wish
On rocks of emotions
I need to sit and learn how to fish:
Daphnes
Cigarettes
And loads of lost memories.

And when I have a tiny little catch
He’ll speak to me again
I know
I just need to learn to guess the season first
From the way the leafs move
And the night air scents.

Disclaimer note: Fast changes led by non-scientific bbb-based narratives that aim to correct a failing scientific system can be far more dangerous than scientific bbb-based narratives themselves.

"Shinto takes a far-sighted view that low-level or wrong ideas will eventually be naturally eliminated in the long run." Motohisa Yamakage, The Essence of Shinto.

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On My Love for Poetry:
Originally written for an art exhibition called "Frikto-Kinesis"

I'm not a good poet–there's so much for me to learn to become one, and more to unlearn probably. But when you're not good at something, you better be good at talking about it, right? Just like how when we are not good at science, we move to philosophy, if not branding. And when we are insecure, we overemphasize, no? Just like when we are in a nonfunctional relationship, we use the word "love" too many times. Anyway, this is me making sure everyone knows I’m good at loving poetry and I’m planning to do so by saying things like:

Arising from the rawness of our emotions, fueled by radical honesty, poems are capable of generating and recording strong motions, almost like movies.
Movie–words’ desire to become motion.
Poem–words’ desire to become emotion.
Liberated from the necessity of having a narrative, an agenda in advance, poems paint potent images with aimlessness, and because of this quality, they get to transcend the world of ego and sit next to other forms of shared language, alongside music perhaps.

What do you think? Wanna keep reading?

As a scientist, systematic thinking is the default mode of my productivity-addicted mind. Dissatisfied with unsolved problems, my mind desperately needs to make sense of everything, imposing result-oriented logical formats on everything around me: identify the gap, define the problem, draw a dashed box around the system, close your eyes to all other things, create the objectives, review the previous work, describe the solution method, present the results in forms of bulletpoints, share, celebrate for a minute, and move on to the next gap. Like a combine harvester machine fueled by its addiction to problem-solving, this approach often collects success at the cost of destroying delicate matters.

I know from personal experience that this efficient and systematic framework fails to capture or communicate the delicacy of the chaotic, eruptive emotions I sometimes go through. And as a writer wannabe, I know that these emotional eruptions are my best material for creating something that has the chance of lasting against the corrosion of time–something people freely choose to connect with. This is where poetry saves me, from the negative side-effects of my organized mind, and sometimes from my depression. My depression is relatively mild, but it’s been with me since I left Tehran. You think it’d get easier, but 14 years in Seattle and I still get depressed with rain. It’s just that now I can pinpoint the exact moment clouds enter my soul. And it is in that exact moment that poetry comes out to save me, to help me see that depression is Death and Life at the same time. In that sense, it functions almost like shrooms.

I love poetry because of its unique power to capture the emotional eruptions I just talked about, and to make sense of them away from the pressure of logic and rules, and, if well-crafted, I get to share my complex emotions with others. What else does one need to generate meaning in this meaningless world?

I love poetry because unlike me, there's no teaching in poetry. The part of me that wants to teach is not invited. For me to enter the poetic realm I need to shut up and become a child, feel, stop thinking about right and wrong; cause poems don’t care about being right. And I love it that because of this freedom there is no push in poetry, it only gently pulls.

I love poetry because unlike guilty whites it has no shame in saying no. A poem kills the unnecessary and gives birth to lightness; a poem carries only what's necessary, and because of its radical honesty, travels effortlessly, protecting our emotions against time–only emotions, stripped of all that is extra.

I love poetry because I don't know how it works, but it somehow always does. All I know is that it's not a product of my demystifying mind. A poem happens randomly, because of a successful and temporary connection between me and my core. A poem happens when it wants to. It has no rush. It feels no urgency to produce results even though it often works on most urgent matters. It takes its time to digest and in that sense it's the opposite of all of us headless chickens running on our productivity treadmills.

I love poetry because, like a reliable friend, it's always there for me. When I'm going through personal holes of overthinking or the disappointments of the sociopolitical world, it accompanies me in bed. And when I'm high, dancing under the sunshine with friends, it waits for me—patiently and with no expectation—in the room next door.

I love poetry because it's a window that opens directly into the personal, and yet there has to be no "me" in it. And because there is no "me," it lives free of all short-lived, transient waves of popularity. Away from distractions, a poem cuts straight to the point, wasting no time, and this gives it an unlimited capacity. You can distill an entire book into a small collection of poems. Believe me, I did the opposite: 15 short poems into 150 pages of short stories and yet, I think the poems have more to say.

I love poetry because it magnifies only one thing. And because it does so without drawing a box—not like Newton, more like a good landscape light in the garden, at night. Without creating isolation, a poem makes it clear what to pay attention to, and this amplifies pleasure. Because all pleasures are reduced when we don’t know what to pay attention to, no?

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A Postcard From Tehran|A group exhibition by ANTiPODE In collaboration with Saina Heshmati

Chimera|An album statement In collaboration with artsaves

On Immigrants and the Art of Transforming an Unfamiliar Space into a HomeFrom an unpublished short story collection formerly called as "Seattle art sucks"

On Banality of Science & Tech after Bud

On My Love for Poetry: Originally written for an art exhibition called "Frikto-Kinesis"

A Postcard From Tehran|A group exhibition by ANTiPODE
In collaboration with Saina Heshmati

Chimera|An album statement
In collaboration with artsaves

On Immigrants and the Art of Transforming an Unfamiliar Space into a Home
From an unpublished short story collection formerly called as "Seattle art sucks"

On My Love for Poetry:
Originally written for an art exhibition called "Frikto-Kinesis"