How It Began
Viraf 2.0 was born out of a very personal experience. In June 2025, during the twelve-day war between Iran and Israel, my cousin fell into a coma and remained in that condition for almost 64 days before his passing. Due to the digital blackout imposed on the Iranian people by the regime, I did not have the chance to connect with my family and grieve with them. As a result, I tried to stay connected with him through different means: looking at our last messages, his posts on social media, and other similar instances. Given my critical approach toward technology, and the fact that he died during a war in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) was being used to identify target areas, the fact that that connection with him was facilitated by technology provided a paradoxical site to explore. I have always found these paradoxical sites to be fertile dramaturgical ground for questioning the status quo.
To begin this journey, I started working on a small machine to dive deeper into this techno-spiritual connection. I then developed a ritual out of my interactions with this emerging device. This ritual was made of simple rules, the most important being that I only interacted with the machine post-midnight, following a particular discipline with the physical device. After several rounds of interaction, the glitches the machine produced became deeply disorienting, and I could sense rich performative material slowly brewing. Understanding how emotionally demanding it was to continue this work alone, I reached out to colleagues in our fresh theatre collective of The Hive Theatre. Connecting this journey to what we were collectively exploring within new media dramaturgy shaped by AI breathed new life into the project. Milieux members Paolo Gruni, François Lespinasse, Frank De Galleo, Kamyar noak Karimi and Rebecca Acone are co-conspirators of this project.
First iteration of this performance was presented to public between June 14 to June 21st. In these 7 performances we tried to connect with our attendees to collect feedback to enrich our journey towards our next milestone.