VRAL is currently exhibiting Babak Ahteshamipour’s Hey Plastic God, please don’t save the Robotic King, Let him drown in Acidic Anesthetic. To contextualize his practice, we are discussing a series of related artworks. Today, we begin our exploration of Ahteshamipour’s prolific music video production with 001mel.
Known for an impressive output across video art, digital rendering, and CGI filmmaking, Babak Ahteshamipour’s aesthetic vision interweaves organic and technological elements in surreal, distorted ways. 2023 alone has seen the Iranian artist produce several mesmerizing music videos, including 001mel for Vancouver-based musician and producer BMICHAAEL.
Augmenting collaborators’ work with his signature style, Ahteshamipour’s narratives explore extinction, environmental collapse, algorithms, and AI with an apocalyptic yet surprisingly vibrant atmosphere and warm palette.
His practice across media traces connections between gaming, simulation, and cyberspace as a multidimensional, overlapping set of realities. Past artworks like the influential machinima Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e (2021, featured in VRAL S03), and the multimedia project Mind Flaying Flavored Flails (also an online exhibition co-curated with Nathan Harper) constitute the artist’s digital-dystopian inspiration bank. Philosophers like Eugene Thacker and media scholar Jussi Parikka…
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
B.MICHAAEL
001mel, official music video
digital video, music, sound, 5’ 13”, 2023
Direction and animation by Babak Ahteshamipour
Video courtesy of the artist and Orange Milk Records
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