The Visual Vocabulary of Ardeshir Mohassess

...borrowed, colorized and repurposed:

Note: Ardeshir's signature is also included

... Inspired the main features of the main characters

The Floating Hat of Churchill and the General Prime Minister Zahedi as an anthropomorphized Pig

Deconstruction of "World Police" 

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For more on Decoding: Modern Miniaturism: An Interview with Kurosh ValaNejad, the Tuqay, Feb 2013

10+ years later, I see why a floating hat means "authority" to Ardeshir.

Inherited Treasures & Debts

During production, my older brother Cyrus found some rare artifacts. Framed and hanging above TIME magazine is a 16 mm print of Castle Films' 1953 News Parade.  It's one of the treasures he found. And the blue vase on the mantle - that is a haunting reminder of the enormous debt still left to be paid.

TREASURES 

1953 News Reel includes a story
about Mossadegh and the Korean War

Lt. Colonel Gerald Hamilton               Hamilton, Korea,1950's

a.) 1931, Cadet Ahmad Valanejad with his older Sister Shamsol-Zoha 

b.) 1937, 2nd Lieutenant ValaNejad

c.) 1943, Captain ValaNejad, Head of the Personal Guard of Reza Shah 

(Reza Shah pictured on cover of TIME magazine, 1941) 

Diagram by Farhad Diba, Dr. Mossadegh's nephew

Inheritance includes Karma

Inheritance includes karma

DEBT 

For more: The Chain Murders: Killing Dissidents and Intellectuals 1988-1998,

by Muhammad Sahimi for FRONTLINE, Tehran Bureau

Replace the angels with people who died while fighting for democracy in Iran.

Chancellor of Persia
May 1848 – Nov 1851

Amir Kabir who is widely considered to be "Iran's first reformer", a modernizer who was "unjustly struck down" as he attempted to bring "gradual reform" to Iran. In the last years of his life he was exiled to Fin Garden in Kashan and was murdered with the command of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, the monarch he served as Prime Minister.

Howard's image woven into a carpet

Howard Conklin Baskerville (10 April 1885 – 19 April 1909) was an American teacher in the American Memorial School in Tabriz who was killed fighting for Iranian democracy during the Persian Constitutional Revolution.

He has been called the "American Lafayette of Iran."

Gender ID; the performance

Sociological Gender Glyphs

From crib to coffin, we are put in boxes. At birth, our gender is recorded by checking one of two boxes; male or female. Just out of the womb, we are assigned a lifetime of expectations and limitations. While growing up we see variations in others and in ourselves. This personal sense of gender, our gender identity, forms at the age of 3 and raises the number of options from 2 to 32+.

This larger set of gender glyphs is all-inclusive.  It is well-meaning yet myopic, as the box that describes you, may ultimately define you.*

For some, it is not enough to think outside the box; They must live there.

Staged at the animation building of USC's Cinematic Arts complex.

From the 2nd floor balcony, the performer can trigger clips from a library of pre-rendered animation and generate real-time animation through gesture and dance.  These story elements are projected from inside the building onto a scrim stretching across the arched entry on its ground floor.

protagonist character sheet; from fetus to adulthood

* This is a picture of a real watermelon. It was grown in a box. Its shape could only be achieved at the expense of its contents. Square melons must be harvested before they are ripe, rendering them inedible.







 PRE-RENDERED MEDIA LIBRARY 

The media library consists of keyframed animation and procedurally-generated animation created with the Body Scrub device.

Video: Quicktime, H.264, 24 fps, 1920 x 1080 pixels
Audio: 2 Channel, 44 kHz


 CREDITS with BIOS 

Director & Animator:

Kurosh ValaNejad has worked with Scientist & Designers in many fields, including Land Planning & Architecture, Feature Film & Experimental Animation, Artificial Intelligence & Virtual Reality, and most recently in Video Games & Interactive Media.    From 2001-2016, as a lead artist and/or art director he helped researchers at the University of Southern California advance remote learning and develop innovative Impact games on topics ranging from national & international politics to spiritual enlightenment.   He was a key team member on projects funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts & the Humanities.
Excited by the emergence of a new convergence of the Cinematic & Performing arts, ValaNejad shifted his focus in 2013 to live performance.   He returned to school and developed the Body Scrub device.   The software and sensor correlate Space & Time to spatialize animation. When used in site-specific installations, these virtual funhouse mirrors encourage spectators to become the spectacle. And on stage in multimedia performances, the device returns control of the audience experience to the performer who is present, rather than the media maker who is not. The first application of Body Scrub was acquired by The Strong National Museum of Play.  Gender ID is the 30th and most ambitious project.  The live performance proposed in this application is an extension of his MFA thesis project of the same name.  

Choreographer & Performer

Stephen Hues is a Los Angeles based director, choreographer, performer and costume designer with a diverse background in the arts. Throughout his career he has worn many hats as an interpreter and creator, he has been lucky to work with renowned directors and choreographers as well as create original shows and characters.  In social media, his selfies are as bountiful and his harvests. #stephenhues

Kurosh met Stephen in the Fall of 1988 in a Video Dance course at Ohio State University, where they were students studying computer animation and dance, respectively.  Their mutual interest in Art & Technology and propensity to experiment fueled brainstorming sessions. The clip below, of a flipbook, was their first collaboration.  It was the program for Stephen's final project, Ladies of the Avenue, at Ohio State University.

Music

Nine Inch Nails  34 Ghosts IV is a track on the studio album Ghosts, a.k.a Halo. The album was released in 2008 under a creative commons license (BY-NC-SA)  Sections of the track, sometimes played at 1/4 speed, and sounds made by the performer during rehearsal, combine to form the soundtrack of Gender ID.


 FOR MORE INFO 
          Meaning and Sources of Symbols
          Art & Technology Inspiration
          Technical Challenge
          Subject-Matter Expertise


_______________________
 PREVIOUS PROJECTS 
Other applications of the Body Scrub device in Dance

Coda in Firebird Rising (2013)
El Portal Theatre, North Hollywood, CA
Total Runnig Time: 2 min.

Choreography: Stephen Hues
Performance: Jennifer Curry Wingrove, AJ Abrams
Music: Kate & Martin St. Pierre

Animation: Kurosh ValaNejad

Wise Words for the Modern Girl in Wonderland Unbound (2014)
USC Doheny Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA
Total Running Time: 2 min. 40 sec.

Direction/Animation:  Kurosh ValaNejad
Brainstorming: Roxana Eslamieh
Performamce: Nesli Erten
Music: Jacob Pernell
Architecture Mapping: 7StarSun

Gender ID; the animation

From crib to coffin, we are put in boxes.  At birth, our gender is recorded by checking one of two boxes; male or female. Just out of the womb, we are assigned a lifetime of expectations and limitations.  While growing up we see variations in others and in ourselves.  This personal sense of gender, our gender identity, forms at the age of 3 and raises the number of options from 2 to 32+.  However inclusive and well-meaning, these labels are still confining as they are just more boxes.  Look in the box to see the person.  Remove the box and they will grow in surprising ways.  Sometime the box may feel like a shelter from public scrutiny. Stay there too long, and it will shape you.* 

For some, it is not enough to think outside the box; They must live there.

* This is a picture of a real watermelon. It was grown in a box. Its shape could only be achieved at the expense of its contents. Square melons must be harvested before they are ripe, rendering them inedible.

Protagonist, Character Sheet:  The 7 Stages of Human Development

CREDITS 
Director/Animator: Kurosh ValaNejad

Choreographer/Performer: Stephen Hues
Music: 34 Ghost IV at 1/4 speed by NIN
           (Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA)

 MEDIA DESCRIPTION
Total Running Time  4:30 sec
Video: Quicktime, H.264, 24 fps, 1920 x 1080 pixels

Audio: 2 Channel, 44 kHz

The animation was procedurally generated with the Body Scrub device.


Gender ID, the Resolution is a scene of a live performance in development.  You can see some of the other clips here:



My interest in gender identity grew from the experience I had at Moogfest 2016 in North Carolina, where I was invited to exhibit  Gender - my response to  North Carolina's House Bill 2 (a.k.a. the Bathroom Law)

Like Gender, Gender ID can be shown as an interactive installation.

 FOR MORE INFO 
     Meaning and Sources of Symbols

     Art & Technology Inspiration
     Technical Challenge
     Subject-Matter Expertise

 BRIEF BIO 
Kurosh ValaNejad is an Iranian-American who was born an American-Iranian in 1966 in Tehran to an Iranian father and an American mother. In 1977 at the age of 11, he moved to Midwest City, Oklahoma and now lives in West Mid City neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA.  From 2001-2016 he served as a staff artist and art director at research labs at the University of Southern California where he helped develop virtual reality applications to advance remote learning and cultural sensitivity (Sensory Environments Evaluation) and innovative Impact games (The Cat and the Coup, The Night Journey - both video games were released on Sony's PlayStation 4 console in Fall, 2018)   ValaNejad invented 2 new animation techniques  (Procedurally generated, gesture-controlled Spatialized Animation, Scratch Animation on Film with Robotic Arm.) while earning an MFA (2018) in Animation and Digital Art from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

_\

Islamic Censorship & the Cultural Underground of Iranians

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, artistic expression is not denied. Iranians can sing and dance however and do whatever they want, which they do. They are free to write about the sacred and profane, about politics and religion, and even paint nudes while nude. Why not? They can dress chic or trashy, and bake on their makeup, no matter their gender. They can pluck or tease their unibrows. Iranians explore their artistic freedom more than Americans realize, because they can…as long as they keep it out of public view.

Should they want to share their creative output with an audience, no matter how small or marginal, they must fill out a form, and adhere to a set of guidelines, Islamic and impossible.   Its a prescription of public appearance and behavior, mandated by the Ministry of Culture.

 FILM & TV 

Movies, television programs and the commercials that air with them reach the largest number of Iranians and are therefore the most regulated. In the documentary, A Cinema of Discontent: Film Censorship in Iran by Jamsheed Akrami, the popular actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya explains that the restrictions and religious imposition are so heavy-handed that many of the top filmmakers stopped making movies.

A Cinema of Discontent; Film Censorship in Iran, trailer (2013)

Nourideen ZarrinKelk, widely regarded as the father of Animation in Iran for starting the first school of Animation, lost his faculty position because he touched the hair of a female student during a lesson. The Islamic guidelines originally implemented to protect woman are now used to silence the voices of Iran's most accomplished storytellers.

Mad Mad Mad World (1975) 

When an infraction of the rules can end a career and film projects are approved or denied arbitrarily, a frustration festers in young filmmakers who find ways to defy the system. Using a coded language and often with humor they point out the absurdity of applying 7th-century Islamic code to film making, the art form of the 20th century.

Many who viewed this parody of athletes competing at the Olympics thought it was real footage from Iran's state-run sports network.

Anonymous 

(Meanwhile, in America, Stephen Colbert reports on the nonsensical rules applied by television censors who draw the line distinguishing the point at which Art is considered pornographic.  Using humor, Colbert points out the arbitrary application of rules.) 

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS (2015)

And I am reminded of a quote by Marjane Satrapi

"If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same..."

 Sexual Revolutionarie by Michelle Goldberg,  Salon (2005)

 POETRY & MUSIC 

Of all Art forms Iranians love poetry the most.  Saadi (Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī (1210-1292), revered as the master of speech wrote Bani Adam,  an aphorism about our common humanity. 

Bani Adam بنی آدم

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکرند                        The children of Adam are the limbs of one body

 که در آفرينش ز یک گوهرند                       That share an origin in their creation

 چو عضوى به درد آورد روزگار                       When one limb passes its days in pain

دگر عضو ها را نماند قرار                       The other limbs cannot remain easy

تو کز محنت دیگران بی غمی                     You who feel no pain at the suffering of others

نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی                     It is not fitting for you to be called human

by Saadi from Gulistan,1258                        Translation by Marizeh Ghiasi

Obama recites two lines in his Nowruz Greeting (Persian New Year) on the First Day of Spring (March 20, 2009) to the people of Iran.

Bani Adam Rug, Mohammad Seirafian, 5 x 5 meters ,Wool, Silk, Gold, 2005 United Nations Bldg, New York City, NY, USA  (Gift of Islamic Republic of Iran)

source UN Photo Library

There are only three genres of music sanctioned by the government,: folk, classical, a.k.a. traditional. and pop (as long as it's made in Iran by Muslims. - so no GooGoosh or Gaga.)

Iran's contemporary musicians are masters of a special language.  They hide the meaning of their songs between the lyrics. 

Described in The New York Times as" a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran," and "the most controversial, and certainly the most daring, figure in Persian music today" (2007)  Mohsen Namjoo  is not allowed to perform in Iran.   He is no longer welcome to perform in Islamic countries because he sang on television a phrase from the Quran, the central religious text of Islam.  Here he is singing the words of Hafez, a 14th Persian poet who work was entirely inspired by holy books.  The ironic tone of Hafez revealed the hypocrisy of the ruling and religious class on his time.  Seems absurd that it is OK to sing words inspired by the Quran, but not the actual words in the Quran.

Zolf Bar Baad (Tresses in Wind), Lyrics by Hafez, lyrics and translation 

Musician Shahin Najafi points out the irony of his exile

  "My songs didn’t make me famous, The fatwa did.” 

source When God Sleep by Till Schauder

                          

 The 94-year-old religious leader who wanted to silence Najafi must be dumbfounded or ignorant of the fact that his actions are the reason Najafi’s message is now amplified to the world. Shahin is unflinching and continues to sing, bringing attention to those marginalized by self-titled leaders who have forgotten the words of their Prophet who inspired Saadi:

The believers in their mutual kindness,
        compassion and sympathy are just like one body.
When one of the limbs suffers,
       the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.

The Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Hadith Collection, Sunan Abu Dawood in English

Mammad Nobari (2015)

 EPILOGUE 

In Iran, all form of artistic expression must adhere to an Islamic code. These government guidelines are sacrosanct because they said so.   But contrary to popular belief the most effective method of adherence is not state-mandated regulation, but the hegemony of self-censorship from 40 years of fear, not faith.

And  to make my bitter posting palatable an Iranian joke

An inmate at Evin prison goes to the library to look for a book.  When he can't find it, he asks the Librarian who says, ‘We don’t have that book, we have its author."

 CURRENT CASES 

In 2013, Mehdi and Hossein Rajabian and their friend Yousef Emadi are jailed in Iran for distributing underground music. 2 years later they are found guilty of ‘spreading propaganda against the system’  Hossein Rajabian’s conviction has also stemmed from his feature film The Upside-Down Triangle, which dealt with the issue of women’s right to divorce in the country.

______________________________________

About the Author:  Kurosh ValaNejad is an Iranian-American, who was born an American-Iranian in Tehran in 1966 to an Iranian father and American Mother. He currently lives in Los Angeles and Laguna Niguel, California.  Kurosh's collection of Art books censored in Iran are featured in The Artist, the Censor and the Nude; A Tale of Morality and Appropriation.  Bani Adam, mentioned in this essay, has also been a source of inspiration for a series of his works. 

An earlier version of this essay was posted on March 30th, 2018 on the blog of Independent Lens, a PBS primetime series of independent documentaries.  It was commissioned and edited by Craig Phillips to complement When God Speaks.

Special Thanks to the Three Amirs.  

Left to Right  Amir Arzanian, Amir Blue, and Honorary Amir, Craig Phillips.

GENDER ID; Registering Live Action and Interactive Animation

With every exhibit opportunity,  I attempt a new technical challenge.  These baby steps trigger new and more complex ideas and give me a sense of the technologies potential.  This was good training for the ultimate challenge of integrating the live performance with the interactive animation it generates. 

Project         Challenge                                
Lego            Playful
Try Me        Vertical capture for vertical projection
Sideshow     Interactive animation interacts with cast shadow
Gender         Activism
Monster       Inticing Entrance
Firebird       Amplify Dancers on stage


As usual, I test new ideas by myself.   At this stage, I am simply seeing if an idea is viable.  When I get promising results I schedule some time with choreographer Stephen Hues, who then communicates the story through body language.   He has used the Body Scrub device as a dancer and a choreographer and can compensate for the limits of the technology.   As a founding member of House of Pride in Montreal in the 90's he understands the complexity of gender identity and delivered a nuanced performance in 2 takes.

iPad mini camera is lined up as close as possible with Kinect depth sensor

Body Scrub's Interactive Animation  + [(Live Action shot with High-speed camera) - white background)] = Money shot!
Setting the fps to 6 for the gender icons while the live action inside them moving more smoothly at 24 fps punctuates the thesis of my film!

As I come out of the R&D bubble I learn that while we used spit and tape in our indy effort, Intel was developing similar tech. and in January released 2 RealSense Depth Cameras the D415 at $149 and D435 at $179

Intel RealSense™ Depth Camera D435  Model #: 961448

Use environment: Indoor/Outdoor
Depth technology:Active IR Stereo (Global Shutter)
Depth FOV (HxVxD/degrees): 91.2 x 65.5 x 100.6
Depth output resolution: 1280 x 720
RGB resolution: 1080p @ 30 fps
Maximum range: 10m+
Physical dimensions (LxDxH): 90mm x 25mm x 25mm

Although it shares a lot of specifications with its slightly cheaper sibling, the Intel Realsense D435 has a couple of interesting features that help justify its inflated price tag. Along with the standard support for 1280 x 720 depth stream output resolution at up to 90 frames per second and an RGB sensor resolution of 1080p at 30 fps, it widens the field of view considerably on the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal planes.

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The Body Scrub device is my naive effort in Volumetric Filmmaking. Learn about the history of the practice in this article by James George.

The New Almighty

de·nom·i·na·tion /dəˌnäməˈnāSH(ə)n/   noun

1. a subgroup within a religion that operates under a common name, tradition, and identity.

KEY:  Symbol and its Affiliated Religion
C      Star and Crescent; Islam
 O      Ahimsa; Jainism
 E      Atomic Whirl[ Atheist
 X      Star of David; Judaism
 I      Khanda; Sikhism
 S      Rajitu. Taoism
 T      Cross; Christianity

2. the face value of a banknote, coin, or postage stamp.

KEY:  Currency, Country 
C      cent; United States
 O      safety-deposit; Banks
 E      euro; European Union
 X      x currency; supranationals, precious metals, BitCoin*
 I      afghan; Afghanistan
 S      hryvnia; Ukraine
 T      lira; Turkey

Hijab & High Heels

Are High Heels the Hijab of the West?

image sources: BBC News, Getty Images

What does the Quran really say about a Muslim woman's hijab?

"God doesn't give a bullet point of all parts on a women's body that he wants hidden from view. It is argued by many Muslim scholars that the reason the 3 verses in the Quran about the way a women should dress were left intentionally vague is so that a women could choose for herself how to dress, according to her specific culture and the progression of time."

"The word hijab is no where in the Quran directly meaning a women's vail. Hijab in Arabic means <barrier> <divide>  like between humans and the Divine or between believers and nonbelievers   - like a physical screen that men were asked to stand behind when speaking Prophet Mohammed's wives.  Hijab in Arabic can also mean <seclusion> <separation>  - what Mary sought when giving birth to Jesus."

Samina Ali

TEDx, University of Nevada, 

February, 2017

GENDER ID; Cast

Stephen Hues the Choreographer, Principle Performer and Costume Designer of Gender ID

I met Stephen in the Fall of 1988 in a Video Dance course at Ohio State University, where I was studying computer animation and he was in the dance program.  Our mutual interest in Art & Technology and Experimental Storytelling has fueled many brainstorming sessions.  The clip below shows the first thing we made that served a purpose*.  It is the program for Stephen's final project.  Play the video to see how we thought Dance and Performance could be represented in a printed program.

* This program was not our first creative collaboration.  A few weeks prior we painted our face, took selfies (before the word existed), picked new names (I picked Storm because it looked like it was about to.) and went  to a dance club (or three.)  We were Club Kids while the NYC Club Kids were still in diapers.

MIRRORS, Electronic and Mechanical

ELECTRONIC MIRRORS

Jim Campbell, 1999 - present

Motion and Rest 5 of 6 (2001)  Total Running Time: 42 seconds 

from Low-Resolution Works: Motion and Rest Series

Custom electronics sample every 20th pixel of a pre-recorded 640 x 480 digital video clip.  The sampled pixels are assigned to a 32-column x 24-row grid of LEDs (totaling 768 LEDs) 

This series depicts disabled individuals as they walk. Campbell reduced the information to the point that only the gait remains intelligible—only the movement, no other factor of the individual’s appearance, remains expressively meaningful.

Look to See By Looking by Richard Shiff,

Daniel Rozin, 2001-present

Mirror No. 5 (2001) by Daniel Rozin
Total Running Time: 1 min. 12 seconds

from Software Mirrors Series

Rozin's Software Mirrors redefine the building blocks of his animated digital images. His pixels have a more complex characteristic. In Mirror No. 5 they are pacman-like figures driven to get across the screen. While in motion, and viewed closeup, they spin and chomp. But step back and you can crudely see yourself along with anyting else taht happens to be in front of tFYALEhe camera.  

from the Artist's website

Kurosh ValaNejad, The Body Scrub Device, 2013-2018


_______________________________________________________________

MECHANICAL MIRRORS

PinScreen Animation, Alexandre Alexeïeff , Claire Parker,  Paris, 1932

\

Closeup of Device

Pinscreen Ward Fleming 1987

Daniel Rozin, 1996-present

from Wired on YouTube, June 2019

Stop Motion Animation - Yale Univesity Card Catalog, March 2012

MIT Tangible Media Lab, inFORM, dynamic shape display, Nov 2013

HypoSurface by dECOI/MIT
MIT Architecture Dynamic Walls

GENDER ID; Sources and Meanings of Symbols

Gender ID filter

There is not an official set of gender identity glyphs because there is not a finite set of identity types.  The 2 sets below have 32 and 18 symbols=types. Facebook has fluxuate from 51 to 71The first set below is by an anonymous graphic designer with the user name of caaloba-d81ds6u. It is the most referenced set on the internet, despite its redundancy I also included some symbol from the Transguide website of UC Riverside.And to lighten the tone, I included the roundabout traffic sign. These are the symbols which comprise the filter for my thesis project.