I spoke with Rashin Fahandej about A Father’s Lullaby at Tribeca Immersive 2023 when it was still a work-in-progress. See more context in the rough transcript below. (Photo by Mikhail Mishin courtesy of Onassis ONX)
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my coverage from Tropica Immersive 2025, this is actually an interview that I did with one of the directors of the piece called Father's Lullaby, Rasheen Farrandej. So I actually did an interview with her two years prior to seeing her project, and I because I had a chance to meet her at Tropic Immersive 2023. And we just talked a bit about her project because she's a part of the MIT Open Doc Lab, as well as the MIT co-creation studio, which I had just done an interview about a book that had come out talking around this co-creation strategies, which is really trying to look at the way that art and media can facilitate community building and build up the relationality of the community. So so much of Rasheen's project is about the process of bringing the community together and so in this conversation you're hearing a lot of the back end process before I actually got a chance to see the project this year at Tribeca Immersive 2025 which will be the next interview where I sit down with Rasheen after see the many different iteration and permutations of her project so What I thought was interesting in talking to Kat Cizek and William Uricchio at IFA DocLab the previous year about their book on co-creation, just the point that a lot of times the media, like the point is that you're watching the media and the media ends up being the end artifact in and of itself. But some of these projects, they end up being like a catalyst for creating and cultivating community experiences that go above and beyond what people from outside of that community may be able to experience. And so there's a part of this community building aspect, but also like social change in the way that we're looking at immersive media as this catalyst for these different types of deeper deliberative processes within the context of the community. So you get a little bit of that feel within this conversation. And then in the next conversation, we'll dig into how that actually turned out and within the immersive project and all the other parts of this oral history project. It's got augmented reality. It's got spatial video components. It's like a really vast project that we'll be breaking in much more detail after I had a chance to actually experience it this year at Tribeca Immersive. But hopefully this gives you a sense of the process under which that this project was created and made. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Rasheen happened on Saturday, June 10th, 2023 at Tribeca Immersive in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:43.228] Rashin Fahandej: My name is Roshin Fahandesh. I am an immersive storyteller and multimedia artist. I teach at Emerson College. I teach emerging and interactive media, and I'm also a senior researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, looking at the intersection of art, technology, expanded documentary, public side, and the visual world.
[00:03:07.809] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:03:12.242] Rashin Fahandej: Sure. So my background is, I had quite a journey moving into the space of, so my background is in fine arts and I carry, I definitely carry the elements of poetry and aesthetic and visuals as well as the sonic as a sculpture in a way into my practice now. So previously, like decades ago, I came from fine art and painting and sculpture and then moved into moving image and looking into the immersive storytelling, breaking the singularity of the image or of the screen and really looking at the relationship of the body and embodiment and the relationship of the bodies in the space as they experience the projects. But my projects are generally multi-year and research-based and they engage the community in the process. So for me, the process is 80% of the work. It's really important to think about how the production process becomes this sort of generative, generous space and connecting with the community and sharing the tools and democratizing access to the tools and technology. So definitely a big effort in terms of my practice is that how do we engage the community and another reason for that is that my projects are generally around a social justice issue and social challenges and systemic issues that exist and persist and how we can use the artistic process creative process emerging technology and tools as new modes of engaging and thinking and expanding ourselves and connecting and creating communities around those challenges but also think about how the tools then become these sort of space of transcending us to move beyond trauma and be able to think about future and future imagination and in what other ways we can coexist.
[00:05:14.994] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know at the IFA Doc Lab this past year, Cassie Zak and William Uricchio launched a whole book about co-creation and collaboration and looking at how, as these new media are emerging, how it's really too complicated for just one person to do everything. And so it ends up... facilitating this type of interdisciplinary collaboration amongst all these different disciplines, but also engendering this co-creative process. And I know that you had mentioned that co-creation was a part of your practice as well, but also as you're speaking about the community dimension. So I'd love to hear how you situate the work that you're doing relative to this co-creation lab out of MIT.
[00:05:52.205] Rashin Fahandej: Yeah, definitely. I've been a long-term fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab. I started this research around community co-creation and use of emerging technology and looking into the issue of mass incarceration while I was an artist in residence with Mayer's office in Boston and also simultaneously doing the fellowship at MIT Open Documentary Lab around 2016, 17. So definitely the work that we do at MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Lab has been informing my work, but also my pedagogy particularly. Like the book is fundamental for my pedagogy because it's a very good, it's a wonderful resource to be able to encapsulate different form of co-creation that could exist. But in term of my own practice, I would say my practice is situated at the triangle of breaking down the ways that we do things in general. So when we are speaking about social justice issues or when we think about future, it's not enough to just imagine. what that future would look like, or if we talk about equity or equality is not just enough to think about what it looked like, but it's also super important to think about how our processes, how our processes are embodying that changes that we would like to manifest. And I think a lot of time we use the same processes that we know and in a way we perpetuate the same systemic injustices that exist in our society because we are the product of the system that we critique. So I feel the co-creation as a very especially in my practice is community co-creation is bringing people who are not artists who are not part of the artistic practice and not professional in this field but they have the expertise of their lived experiences in that area that we are investigating and we are looking together so for example Maybe to give a concrete example, my project, one of the main projects that I've been working on is called the Father's Lullaby. So I've been collecting lullabies and memories, particularly from fathers who have been incarcerated in federal system. And it's a way of looking at the impact of absence of fathers and the systemic challenge of mass incarceration in United States and how it manifests in the life of children and women and the community at large. And the way that I do that, there are many nuances. The way that I engage the community, I create different programs depending on where we are in the project to share the tools. But one of the ways that I've been able to sort of create a sustained relationship And this sharing of the tools is through my pedagogy at Emerson College that I teach a course that is XR co-creation. So fathers and formerly incarcerated fathers and probation officers, they come to the classroom with the students from three different departments and they work with 360 camera, they work with VR, They work with their children along the way with Tilt Brush and they get the chance and opportunity to tell their own stories from their point of view and their lens while they also learn to work with this tool with the students. And the way that that community, even temporal, allows for a new form of a community of care to develop. If you think about the power dynamic between probation officers who are supervising and the fathers who are under supervision, they come all together in this space and they talk from this sort of tender, intimate space of their role as a father. and the same with the students and teachers. So I think it's very interesting to think about how we create a new form of social memory using the emerging media, using the technology and using this sort of connective points or shared experiences to be able to then speak to this social challenge that we might all have a different point of view about it or different perspective about it. So I think definitely kind of thinking about how, in what ways we can disrupt the power dynamics to allow new form of engagement and new form of connection to happen. I think that's the way that I'm sort of looking at the co-creation. But also again, like access. Like, I work at the intersection of art, technology, and social justice. And the technology I'm constantly thinking about is an extension of our bodies and our minds. But there are, as new ones are coming in, there are certain groups that they have access to it. How can we actually share this space and be able to together think about what the future of this space would look like? So for me, it's definitely about who's a story, is being erased and who can now have access to this tool to reimagine the future of our coexistence in a way.
[00:11:24.528] Kent Bye: Yeah, I get this sense of, you know, in talking to both Kat and William, that this practice of co-creation is a lot of focusing in on that process and the relational dynamics and that it's not always about the end product, but it's also about the community that's cultivated, but also the process of creating it. And so it sounds like what you're saying is that there's the inmates, but there's also the prisoners and their family connections and that maybe you could help ground a little bit in terms of what the 360 Video Medium is doing and how it's facilitating this type of interchange, because it sounds like you're finding common ground around this archetypal experience of fatherhood. So I'm trying to get a sense of how the experiences that you're creating are helping to elaborate these different connections amongst these different power dynamics as well.
[00:12:12.344] Rashin Fahandej: So what I do, I think another pillar in my practice is to create a form of community and relationship that allows multiplicity of perspective to coexist or interact. And for example, in the case of a father's lullaby, There is no opportunity in the actual institutional space for any form of intimacy or humanizing our relationship or our being within the system. One of the main things that the guards say is that we never talk about our personal family or personal relationship with anybody that we are working with. That's actually one of their guidelines. but I think it's so important again like I acknowledge that what we are doing is temporal but I hope that it breaks a form of biases that when you're in the system you see people from a certain angle and certain point of view and through this sort of a four-month engagement and relationship you start to form a really different memory and history and relationship based on that actually sharing the intimate moments of the life, that I've seen the power of that relationship building. And again, that's not speaking to the system at large, but I think there are many different layers of impact. that we can have and one of it is actually to put people together from these different sides and different point of views. The other aspect of the work for us like this question actually comes up in our class because it's a much more challenging dynamic for everybody when there are these heightened pre-existing power dynamics when you come together and you try to build a community and that question comes up that what if we would have worked with a non-profit organization right rather than the federal probation office being the partner and the probation officers coming to the classroom but i think a big portion of my work is actually to make that a space happen that is non-existent. And I think the tools gives me that possibility, not just the topic, but also the tools and this discovery space and engagement allows people to come together and see each other in a different point of view, but also engage with the issue in a different point of view. It would be very different if it would be all together as converters and speak about this social justice challenge versus we have officers from their point of view and we are trying to really, in a realistic way, look at the system and the challenges. Them, from their point of view of being within the system, fathers who are on federal probation from the point of view of their challenges living the challenge of that and also students that they are many of them are quite disconnected from this space i work in a private school so a lot of people coming to the classroom not even actually having any relationship direct relationship to this issue of mass incarceration and One of the main aspects of the class is that how we all transform through this working together for these few months. I hope I answered.
[00:15:45.766] Kent Bye: So I get the sense that it's like a four month process where you're maybe setting a context in a situation where the prison guards and the inmates can share a context or maybe have a change dynamic where there's certain things that are by their guidelines, not be able to talk about, I guess, because I haven't seen the end product of what the 360 videos, I'm trying to get a sense of there's a broader process. That's a four month process that you're bringing people together and you're setting a ritual context for them to engage in a new way but then at some point where does the 360 video come in and then creating artifacts for people to then watch later so maybe you could separate out what does it look like for them to come to a series of these different gatherings over four months and then when does the 360 video come in and then how's that 360 video used to be able to facilitate this broader process i see i see
[00:16:34.053] Rashin Fahandej: yeah so a big portion of our work is happening around community building and getting to know each other and really forming a community the students do a big research at the beginning of the semester around the challenge of mass incarceration from data from research and looking in different organizations that they've been working for decades around this issue and then the students and fathers come we go through a series you know like i break the really the dynamic of documentary filmmaking so it's not about interviewing people it's about actually deep listening so they go through this process of what does it mean to be deep listening and what is amazing is also fathers sort of taking some of these lessons and practicing them with their children because one of the major challenge that they have as people who have been within the system for 20 years 30 years not in the life of their own children is reconnecting and being able to meet them despite having that absence history. So I get a lot of narratives and the stories and feedbacks from the fathers that like how going through this or seeing the dynamic or talking through these with the students that they are maybe the same age of their children, but not their children. There are a lot of like just human understanding that happens through their process of working through their life stories.
[00:17:59.003] Kent Bye: Just a quick clarification question because you're talking about inmates and students. Are they still imprisoned in a prison system or these are ex-prisoners?
[00:18:07.867] Rashin Fahandej: So these are formerly incarcerated fathers or men who are now under federal supervision. So I work with federal probation office in Boston, which people who have been incarcerated under federal law They have long sentencing, generally. So it's like 10 years, 20 years. And now they are out of the prison system, but they are under supervision. So they have to report weekly. It's very rigorous and hard, actually. A lot of them are under supervision. house arrest after they come out so even for coming to the classroom they have to like fill out the form weekly before and report on when they come when they go back we actually hold the classroom during the pandemic hybrid in terms of accessibility that was actually quite helpful once we transported to the hybridity And using the online platform for fathers to connect to us at home and also students work together in the classroom. So I hope that clarifies it. The fathers are not necessarily are under the supervision of the officer who's in the classroom, but they are from within the same office in Boston.
[00:19:25.069] Kent Bye: Just another quick clarifying question, because you were talking about officers before. Were you talking about the parole officers or the people that were working within the prison when you're talking about other people? So are you talking about the parole officers?
[00:19:35.554] Rashin Fahandej: Yeah, yeah. So these are the parole officers or the probation officers who are on the federal level. And they are supervising different individuals who are returned from prison. prison but they are on their supervision so they have to report and they have their own like very rigorous criteria in terms of how they are actually being supervised some of them are on their house arrest so they have limited actually in and out and access depending on their job or on their work and so these parole officers are also participating in this community building process with the students and with the formerly incarcerated inmates Yes, so that's for me, that's where it allows for that different dynamic and different point of views to come to the space, because I feel we all as individual and based on our life experiences bring a different point of view. And that's another important element of co-creation that if you are talking about the challenge of mass incarceration, the fathers and the probation officers have a totally different point of view. from this space or different feeling in relationship to it? And then how is it possible to actually come together and talk critically about these issues together in the classroom? What I do also, again, like it's much more about the community building aspect of it. So the way that the rest of the class goes is that people get trained onto working with the tools and the technology, but the stories is around their life story, whatever they want to share. So the end result of the projects are like some of the community engaged projects that They won't emphasize as much as at the end result. I think there is a possibility to be really engaged in the process, but also create tangible, beautiful experiences at the end that other people could experience and share this space and bring the impact. So we have many different projects created the first semester. We shifted from VR to AR because in the mid of the semester we had to transport to online and fully online, so it was reliant on what tools fathers had at home, which was their phone. So we launched a series of postcards around each father's stories that you can activate using your phone. And all of those recordings were done through fathers, their own phone audio recording, or they shared archival material with the student to create those narratives. The following semesters, we were able to basically create xr lab in the federal probation office that the fathers could check out equipment from there and they were able to get 360 cameras vr headsets and for me what is exciting is actually the discovery process that they go through with their children along the way so a lot of them work with their kids different ages at home with the tools and it becomes like a relationship building and a discovery space for them. So we have a series of 360 videos and sometimes it's combined with Tilt Brush or drawings of the students and then in the past couple semesters that we were able to bring back the fathers to campus we've been focusing on volumetric filmmaking. They learn and they get trained with 360 to do a lot of exploration. But then at the end, the project is coming together now as a VR piece and volumetric filmmaking.
[00:23:14.724] Kent Bye: Okay, so just to clarify this process, because it sounds like you've been doing this community building process, and then it sounds like that there's almost like these homework assignments or prompts for the formerly incarcerated inmates to tell their story, and so maybe they record something, but then they're collaborating with other students to be able to help translate all these artifacts into a fully immersive either augmented reality or virtual reality, like 360 video, and so... At the end of it, they have a media artifact that was a collaboration amongst both the formerly incarcerated inmates and the students who are helping to generate this. And then they, during some class time or at some other time, be able to watch each of these to get a full perspective of all the stories. Is that kind of a sense of what you're working on?
[00:23:57.335] Rashin Fahandej: Yeah, so each project that the fathers do with a team of students are independent. But at the same time, we are now in that phase of after five semester of doing this work, trying to figure out in what way all of these stories could come together to create a world that you can actually move around and experience and what that world would look like. And that would be a big engagement. We have a group of students and fathers that they are staying on from different so they are alumni of the program and they are staying on to sort of think tank about okay what would that word look like what the impact is who's the audience and where we want to take this and how we can build actually that virtual space that you can go through and experience all these different life experiences and collectively exactly that's the goal like how this collective storytelling would create a different form of realization and acknowledgement through this very intimate personal and a lot of time like loving stories to allow us as a wider community to see the impact that we are creating by taking members, community members, away from their community. And through this, it's so amazing to see the impact of every individual that is not just on the next generation and their children, it's actually an entire community. Every person is connected to at least 50, 60 more human beings in the community. And the way that actually I came to this project was through looking at the space of violence. And realizing like a direct connection between the space of absence and the space of generated, like sort of systemic generated violence in a way. And I want to acknowledge this aspect that, you know, this is a philosophical issue in our society. Like breaking the space of love and intimacy and support of children has been a systemic issue. methodology in the United States for marginalizing, for criminalizing. When you look at the slavery before that, when you look at the indigenous communities, when you look at immigration now, So all of the stories that you're hearing is actually disrupting that family nuclear and taking away that space of love and connection and intimacy. And what I do with the Father's Lullaby and also with this project is actually amplifying that space of love for us as a community to realize what happens when that love is absent, when that connection is lost, and what is the impact of it. It's just mind-blowing when you, I have interviewed many and many and many, many people over the years. And it's almost like I'm listening to the same story again and again and again. Like all these fathers got into the system as a child, like 8-year-old, 11-year-old, 15-year-old, 17-year-old. And then once you're in the system for petty crimes or like something that you cannot call it even a crime, then it's very hard for them to come out of it. You know, like on all of the stories almost becomes about mothers. So for me, it's a very much also a feminist project in a way, too, because it just amplifies the role that mothers had to take on for two sides. And a lot of it is about survival, is about having food at the table, is about... not knowing what masculinity is in reality and having that absence generationally because fathers have been taken away and then the toxic masculinity become for them they they voice this out again and again that the toxic masculinity something that they didn't know what it is and they saw it from media or from gang streets on the street like the things that they have they were able to witness and then that becomes their guidance or like that becomes actually the point that they get into the system and then once you're in the system there is no support for you to get out of it i like to use data often because it makes us sort of realize or parallel these spaces of intimacy again like personal stories but then with like reality of data you know i ask my students do you know What is the ratio of a student to teacher in a public school? What is the ratio?
[00:28:36.352] Kent Bye: I don't know. It's probably from 30 to 1 or 40 to 1 by now. I don't know.
[00:28:39.534] Rashin Fahandej: Yeah. So it's in that range. Like between 25 to 30, 40, depending on the state. What do you think is the ratio of a prison to guard?
[00:28:47.879] Kent Bye: I don't know. Maybe 2 to 1 or something. I don't know what it is.
[00:28:50.841] Rashin Fahandej: Yeah. It's like incredible. It's 1 to 5. Or in some states like California, it's 1 to 3. But then who's paying for these? We, as the community, as the people who are living in the United States, we pay for that. But we are spending our money captivating people that three out of five are there for non-violence crimes. And then we are disinvesting from education, from art, from creativity, from music. I grew up in Iran, and I grew up as a Baha'i minority, which is a persecuted, systemically persecuted in Iran. So we don't have a lot of basic human rights, and they've been sort of persistent and resistant, and they've been staying there, many of the Baha'is, as a way of creating systemic change. But I lived in a very vibrant, it was such an amazing, grassroots environment. community engaged childhood and adulthood experience for me growing up there. So I do also, in the face of all these challenges, I do see the power of collective action, of community engagement and grassroots organization. But I think with that comes the knowledge. Like a lot of time, there's a gap that we don't know. And I really hope that these kind of work could allow for us to see, you know, criminality from a different face and from a different point of view. Because for me, it was like shocking to move from a dictatorship government basically in Iran to United States. And then working after school programs and not being able to comprehend why these children come to the class with all these rest in peace pins attached to all of their bags and hats. Like how many loss they experience in Boston, inner city Boston, one of the most wealthiest, most academic places. A culture shock for me was that the arts and music is actually not part of the main curriculum in the university or in the schools when we know the impact of music on the brain like scientifically now. In this country we do have the power to speak up and not get bitten or killed on the streets as people are now in Iran or the women are in Iran. And I think with that comes the responsibility to do anything that we can do in our power with all the tools and the new technologies and different ways that we can to actually do bring some change.
[00:31:43.735] Kent Bye: Yeah, wow, that's really amazing to hear all the stuff that you're doing because it's not only building upon practices like oral history to be able to capture these stories, but in a specialized context, then you have this restorative justice in some ways. And restorative justice, in my understanding at least, is that When you are taking somebody out of a community, you're taking them out of their relational dynamics and you're basically cutting them off. And nonviolent communications, whenever you're cutting off someone and you're no longer connecting to them from a place of empathy, it's a form of violence. in this way that the existing criminal justice system works, is that it's this violent act to take people out of the system. But to have this restorative justice is how do you reintegrate them into the community? And it feels like some of these immersive projects, by allowing them to tell their stories and to have people bear witness to them in the immersive media, you're on the frontiers of trying to find a way to expand out these individual oral histories with maybe some spatial context, but put them in a collective context that then starts to tell a larger story and you start to see the themes of how the larger system of mass incarceration is impacting each of these individual stories. It reminds me of a film called Testimony VR, where a lot of women who have experienced sexual assault are sharing their individual stories, and then by bearing witness to each of these different stories, you start to see these larger patterns. And so I imagine you're finding something similar, where as you bear witness to these oral histories of these formerly incarcerated inmates, You're then starting to see those larger patterns and those patterns revealing the larger structure of the impacts of mass incarceration that is able to, through the collective experiencing and witnessing of these stories, have that reconciliation on an individual level for each of the people who are sharing their stories, but also, you know, trying to tell a larger story of the system.
[00:33:37.668] Rashin Fahandej: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And also, my hope is that that work becomes a mirror that we actually do feel our shared responsibility and our contribution to the system and how we actually need to sort of rethink that and reverse that cycle that we have been creating. Because again, like in a democratic society, we have the power of vote and we have the power of practicing our responsibility, this shared responsibility. together to do bring the change because I feel like unless we change the policies and unless we philosophically really think about where we are putting our energy and how are we caring for each other in a community especially as we are looking at the issue of mass incarceration, the people who are most impacted by it are the most vulnerable populations, right? So you put it really nicely and well, and I think definitely, and maybe I should mention that as part of our process, All the fathers that they take the class, they also participate in a nurturing fathers program. So they build a community outside of this classroom also together thinking about their role as a fatherhood and is a form of self-reflection and skill building for them in the community because many of them, they actually didn't have their fathers around and they have to work through their own emotions. of childhood while they are trying to rebuild a relationship with their children and loved ones back now that they are out. And I cannot emphasize how that challenge is like a core seed emotional challenge for all of them of that lost history that they weren't able to share. And now they're trying to sort of rebuild it while at the same time they're dealing with all these sort of challenges that, you know, We have not built the system to allow for them to reintegrate into the society. The system is created in a way to put them back. Like the recidivism in the United States is, I think it's 83%. That's a massive number. And the reason is that we took away the education from the prisons. We took away all these sort of trainings that allowed people to rehabilitate, like come back to the society and be able to live a different life. And I'm really hoping that we are now in the space of reversing that. But again, what is our role in the media industry, in this war that we have the power of creating the narrative around it, right? Like, I think where we are, like, All the political institutions are using the power of storytelling and whose story is being told in what angle and what way. Yeah, you know, like I come to this challenge in the United States from the point of view of fathers, male, and trying to amplify their tender voices. From my experience as a female growing up in a community in Iran that is marginalized and as a woman who's a second class citizen, But I think it's so important. We have been disempowered to speak to each other's experiences. And I also hope this work from these different perspectives would allow to empower us to speak to the, not the challenges that is only my experience, but the injustice is injustice. And we should feel empowered as citizens of the world to speak to all the injustices that exist in this world. Otherwise we cannot change, right? So, and the reason I'm saying that, like I mentioned the power of narrative, how we are in the industry, that we have that power, like all the political systems are using the power of storytelling to create segregation and to create polarization and to keep the power going. And I've been reflecting in the past few months, it's been so hard to go through witnessing what is happening in Iran and witnessing like all that like violence and brutality that now has existed for 40 years but now it's like in the face of the world and people through citizen journalism are trying to capture and voice that out but then at the same time witness how we are so in a way disconnected from each other you know like We are at the moment that I feel as world citizens, we should feel more interconnected to all the challenges that is happening in the world and be able to speak to them. And I think how the technology is moving so fast and so rapidly, we have this opportunity to be at the forefront of it and use it in ways that is actually empowering the communities.
[00:38:54.292] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are in terms of the strength and affordances of augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality, all of the aspects of spatial computing altogether, because you're collecting these audio recordings and oral histories, but as they all come together, what do you think it is about this spatial computing medium that's allowing you to maybe address some of these issues in a way that wouldn't necessarily come through as well if you were to only use, say, a 2D film or something that's a little bit more linear. It feels like with the spatial dimension, you're able to maybe cover some of the multiplicities of this experience. But I'm just curious to hear from your perspective, what does the XR provide to you as an affordance to address this issue of mass incarceration and all these other issues? dimensions that you are doing with community building and building these communities and these relationships? And how do you see that XR is helping to augment or provide new opportunities for you to explore these relational dynamics in a way that you couldn't necessarily do in previous media?
[00:39:58.368] Rashin Fahandej: There is a power of intimacy with the medium that it puts you in the presence of the story or it puts you in a deep encounter or a deep witnessing situation that is very different than sitting back and watching on a screen. You're there with the story and I feel like this sort of body relationship is powerful and that's the power of the medium for me I work with physical installation and spatial storytelling and audio and relationships so when you think about all of these elements and the elements of touch that is in the sound or the element, the haptic elements of when you're surrounded by them, like especially again, like in the immersive space. I think the color, the piece colored here at the Tribeca is an incredible example of that, like thinking about augmented reality and your relationship to this lost history or erased history in a way and thinking about all the Rosa Parkers that they allowed for the Rosa Parker to emerge or for all the women in Iran, you know, from Tahrirah to all the women that they are getting beaten and killed on the street to what we kind of emerge as a movement. I think There is a different relationship again, like I think for me it's much more about the intimacy and the presence and witnessing it in a much deeper way than a gaze that is separate and far away. And in my work I'm really mindful of that because I think historically with the media, with photography and film, there is a colonial gaze. that exist and there is a sense of ownership over the image, right? There is a sense like in the Western world, there is a sense of you want to know it all and it should be clear to you and it should be there and then you own it, right? Like you own the image once you know it all and you can have a narrative right there. And in The Father's Lullaby, I really tried to break that away. Like, that's why I love volumetric filmmaking, because it allows this sort of a space of presence and absence that fathers are in. But at the same time, it also breaks that sort of clarity of the visual that you can like own a person's image and you understand them and you just like could comfortably put them away and say, this is not my story, this is somebody else's story. versus that when you are in the story in a way that it's becoming hard for your body and your mind and your emotions to separate yourself from the body or the touch. So I really think about all different devices and affordances that it breaks that separation between my story and somebody else's story, my body and somebody else's body. and how that intricate moment of complexity and questioning, even like questioning all of these, or abstraction and not clarity and poetry, be those moments that it really sort of gets through you or get to you through an emotional level rather than like a rational level that you can like totally separate like and this is a methodology that i used like very earlier on when i came to united states one of my challenges was this sort of expectation that i have to have a certain form of image a certain form of representation as an iranian and the things that it was questioned was actually not getting comfortable or not seeing those and being confused at who's a story that is. And actually that confusion and that confrontation and that sort of experiencing something that you don't know where you're located is a beautiful space for criticality. And I think the medium has a lot of affordances for that because first of all, it's exploratory. We are trying all different ways of how we can tell the stories and how we can connect and how we can break some of the already conceptions or biases that we have. So I'm really interested in this medium in a way that it could allow to sort of maybe move beyond some of these sort of preconceptions and biases that we are so used to through the mediums the way in the traditional way that we have been experiencing. And I think each one of them, they have different affordances, right? Like when we think about AR versus when we think about, you know, virtual reality that it takes you fully there or 360 video. And each one of them, they have their own affordances in a way to connect us to the story. But I think overall, it's much more about this sort of like a bodily relationship and connection and disruption of preconceptions.
[00:45:07.714] Kent Bye: Yeah, very well said and totally on board and I agree with all that. And yeah, excited to see where you take this in the future. But yeah, just as we start to wrap up, I'm curious what you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:45:29.494] Rashin Fahandej: I think it's quite exciting to think about the ways that, again, like I see the spatial computing and these new emergence of ways of telling stories or connecting to the world or processing the world is an extension of our body, an extension of our mind. I think what is important is that there is a lot of potential, but what is super important is that the criticality should be at the center of it. What I'm mindful is that how are we avoiding the mistakes that we made in the past? And we are repeating them. And the problem with the new immersion technology at the fastest speed is that the challenges and also the mistakes could be amplified in a very magnified way that we would be falling behind in terms of thinking about what to do with them in the future. That's why these are spaces that we are coming to these use of technologies in a much more imaginative and creative and critical way. And another aspect of it for me is that who are we leaving behind? Who are we leaving behind? And in my practice, I have these core ideas, like who is being erased, how I can bring that community, how we can hold hands in all possible ways to bring their perspective into this space, allow that exchange to happen. And on the other hand is the criticality. And I think that's why I'm also in multi-institutional way. I think at MIT Open Documentary Lab, we look at the field building from the space of criticality, right? Like what is accessibility and disability justice in this space of XR and emerging media? How do we address that? How do we not put it as a afterthought but how it could come actually to our design process because we could actually create a much more beautiful imaginative ways if you're considering a wide variety of access right or like the way that i think about community is also like other form of expansion so when i'm thinking about this emerging media space i'm thinking about how it can be equitable and accessible and equitable means that we expand ourself So that's one. Maybe another element that we are also looking at at the Open Documentary Lab is looking at the future space. What does it mean to build communities or to have communities or engage with communities in the public side? But now that our public is expanding to a different realm, what that community building would look like or what is the relationship between these two and what we have been doing so far and how can we look at it critically in the future so i am very hopeful with this tools because i think it gives us some new facility and some new ways of thinking that it might allow us to accelerate some of the changes that we needed. But again, it needs to have that criticality and critical point of views and a wider access to the tools. What I'm trying to do in my practice is also to really look at that possibilities or examples or prototypes that these things could happen in the space of emerging media and technology by breaking the walls that exist already, right? So for example, in this course and its pedagogy is really about expanding or breaking the walls of the institution and how we can actually engage with the real life issues by bringing the people that we don't consider professionals in the field but they have the life experiences into this practice and and really think about what does it mean to create a generous and giving a space like when we are making the work really reconsidering what does it mean to tell somebody else's story, like how can we expand this space and invite the wider community to engage in the making, not only the experience of them in terms of public media or the ways of access. I really think they were powerful tools that have been used. in the traditional media but i think in this space we have the capacity to really rethink that because the critique that i have for that is that there is a sense of high art and low art this is the community this is like the professionals and when you go to the festival circuits you don't really see the public access media content and i think i i really believe that we should break that space and that's where we can actually merge the lived experiences with a professional skill, toolset, right? And the concept and actually the live experiences being in the same level of importance as the skillset that you bring to this space. And I think that's essential for building this field. To reconsider it, like I really think about, okay, these projects that they are made in the class in the span of, sure, the span of time is magical. To get people that they can't even work with their phone or they can't record their audio on their phone and take them through this process of now working with MetalQuest and working with, like teach their children or their children teach them how to work with Toothbrush and create these environments. So I think there is a power in exploration and in the tools and in the technology, but there is an important aspect for us in the field of the high-end media to really reconsider the community work in a different way. I think we cannot have these sort of divisions. We really need to be able to think about point of views. And point of views are different ways. There are lived experiences, there are the access and justice, there are different range of human experiences that we are bringing into this table. And we have to make room in our production, not in the work that we are actually producing, but actually how our processes could allow for some of these opening and engagement to happen. but then create projects that we could value them in the festivals that they come to the festival and they viewed in the festivals but brings professionals and non-professionals or artists and non-artists together and I think it's possible and there is a power in that the power of point of view and witnessing each other's experiences that I think it could be a very good opening a space in the space of emerging media
[00:52:34.386] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, beautiful, yeah. Just to give you an opportunity, if there's anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community.
[00:52:43.991] Rashin Fahandej: I don't know. I think I want to end that with Iran. Because I feel, you know, being in diaspora and living in the United States for over 20 years now, like, I have devoted all of my practice into the social challenges and evaluating systemic injustices. And I've been focusing on issues in the United States because I, again, for engaging with that sort of the power and intimacy of creation process and engaging the community in that space. But it's been quite challenging for me the past few months to sort of witness all the brutality and the harsh and naked brutality that is happening in Iran from far away. And then the feeling of disempowerment from my community here abroad in terms of being able to speak to it. And I think that this empowerment is the result of the system of power. The fact that we don't feel empowered to speak to those challenges that we don't experience ourselves is a big universal problem at the moment. That's what I see. I would like to make a call to all of us to be able to witness each other's experiences in a different level. that it moves us beyond this sort of borders and boundaries and marginalized spaces because our power is in that collective action beyond the border of nations. And again, in the community of media makers, we do have that power to amplify and we do have that power. And we have been seeing that power in a negative ways, right? Like even in the issue of mass incarceration that I'm working with, one of the major challenges, the way that we think about criminality is media portrayal. of the criminality, historically, in the past decades. The only way my students know about the criminal justice system is through the media and the series that they have seen or the films that they have seen. One of the first exercises that I do in my classroom, I ask my students what is the first image that comes to their mind when they hear the word Iran. And like we do this word bubble and they look at what the words are that it's coming up and it's generally war, you know, Chador or covering and fight and desert. And then I asked them, how do you describe this information? How is it nuanced? Or how is it almost black and white or polarized? How is it expanded? And they define the information. And then I ask them where this information is coming from. And everybody is saying media, news, the things that they have saw. And they consider it as a knowledge, right? That's the knowledge. Unless you know somebody intimately... Unless you know somebody personally, that you sat on their table and they had their food or shared memories together. That's the image that we have of each other. And that's the way that we can be disempowered to speak to those experiences. And I think... We have the possibility to look each other in the eye and use the medium in a way that it sort of breaks that boundaries and brings us in a more intimate level. And that's been sort of my efforts in the media production. How is it possible to do that and how to empower people from different point of view to actually witness and be able to speak to the human right challenges and reduce them actually from the political level to the human rights level of them. And with that, maybe I want to end with actually kind of a call to ask for our community to witness what is happening in Iran, the woman-led revolution and movement that has been happening there. And we do have leverages in the United States. You know, what has been amazing in this past few months is that like the call of people in iran like to witness us and be our voice be our voice be our voice be our voice like that's the constant nobody wants intervention but they want people to witness and be the people to acknowledge and support so maybe i'll end our conversation the thinking of women of Iran that they bravely come on the street and they record themselves dancing and they record themselves kissing on the street. Things that they could get bitten and thrown into jail for doing that. So I want to maybe leave us with the image of women dancing on the street.
[00:57:41.926] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Rasheen, for sitting down and being able to share a little bit more of your story and also, yeah, just frontiers of public media and these new forms of bearing witness and restorative justice in all these dimensions that you have in your project. And yeah, I look forward to seeing how this continues to evolve and develop. And thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about your practice of co-creation and community building and how XR is playing a part of that. So thanks again.
[00:58:08.559] Rashin Fahandej: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ken. It was great talking to you.
[00:58:12.571] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
