Interview with Hirad Sab
When asked what possibilities the digital world can give you, Hirad Sab said that no response could do this justice. For Sab, digitalisation and digitisation are the enlightenments of 21st century.
The affinity for digital is clear. That’s because Sab is a digital artist interested in how computers can generate, manipulate and alter perception and interaction. At the moment he is experimenting with alternative forms of storytelling through static and animated imagery. Sab recently created the video for musician and artist Ash Koosha’s track Biutiful combining 2D and 3D images, a chrome figure emerging from layers of distorted images, in fact it’s almost what the sound actually looks like.
His other video creations possess the same ambiguity yet clarity – there are elements that are understood visually, and other elements that are so entwined with others, creating visual neologisms.
“I’m very fortunate to have the liberty of creating and expressing myself,” says Sab. “To be expressive is to have certain freedom. My pieces do include symbols representing captivity, escape, redemption and distance, but I wouldn’t say they are necessarily reflective of my living conditions or state of mind.”
Iranian-born, Sab has spent a large portion of his life out of Iran, so the influence of his birthplace plays somewhat of a subconscious role on his work. “I’ve spent the last one third of my life outside of Iran so there’s no immediate connection apparent,” he says. “I certainly identify with respect to my heritage, however its influence in my works is less intentional and much more subconscious. I’ve always been fascinated with Iranian literature and cinema and maybe I actualise this curiosity in my pieces, but I could never be certain,” he adds.
His ideas about his culture have evolved over time. In close contact with the culture, he explains, he would have developed a critical attitude towards it. But at this point it’s more of a fantasy than its true form since he has been dissociated from it for such a long time. “It’s much easier to forget the negative aspects and romanticise the rest especially considering how identity and ego play a role in perceiving cultures,” he says. “Surely residents of Iran will have varying opinions on the culture, especially considering how it’s intermingled with the political dynamic which is probably the most psychologically demanding factor of living in Iran, and something that I haven’t experienced in a while.”
He has spent a great deal of his life, in the United States, and finds that the culture in the US is as isolated as it is globalised. He suggests that, roughly speaking, for every two “Trump” search queries from the US, one query is also generated in Kenya – keeping in mind that Kenya has a population seven times smaller than of the US. People in Slovakia, Philippines, and Denmark Google “Nike” more than Americans. Katy Perry has more appeal in Mexico and Guatemala. Young Thugs’s regional interest is at its highest in Mozambique. And while no concrete statements can be made, such statistics deliver vivid examples of how the US has dominated the world at cultural exportation. “Relatively speaking, US is not even its own best customer,” he says. “The Iranian regime referred to this as “west’s cultural invasion”. I assume now it’s unfolding more than ever before. So no matter how much I would like to deny the influence, inevitably it’s there. Moldable and ever-changing.”
It is through this globalisation, however, that Sab has generated his unique story-telling abilities, along with, of course, the digital world. If story is synonymous with history, then his works are more participatory than subjugated and he explains, the presence is the dominant form. Sab says that the abundance of stimuli received through our interactions with our devices, screens and gadgets is quite overwhelming in and of itself. In the midst of fifteen second documentaries and aggregated content, scrolling the wheel and flicking the thumb, my opinion, yours and theirs all in 16 to 9 ratios, one could argue if the past is even relevant.
“I doubt if this consolidation of tradition and modernity is as vigilant and attentive as one would like to think,” says Sab of how it’s possible to merge tradition and modernity. “More than anything it’s the manifestation of the medium in the context of the piece. If I was to create with analog tools or even paint or draw exactly what I create using the computer, it could be considered fine art in the traditional sense. The medium is evidently more impermanent than the subject, and it’s in this temporariness that modernity is so fleetingly formed.”
The rest of 2016 sees Sab taking some time off from commissions and focusing on more personal projects. “I want to exhaust different mediums especially those involving visual and interactive computing and programming,” he says. Technology faces the brunt of much criticism these days, but there’s an inherent problem with that, as for it not to progress, for it not to exist, would mean that the possibilities that it lends art, and Hirad Sab would cease to exist. After all, as Sab said, digitalisation and digitisation are the enlightenments of 21st century.
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