The project deploys the concept of “Hyperstition” – an idea that could condense into reality – and fabricate a story to invite the audience to think about the present socio-political situation of Iran and speculate about the future of the country. For this project, I create pseudo-documentary images and documents of a fictional story using AI as a medium to speculate. Hypothetically, the photographs are taken by different Iranian archeology teams led by a fictional archeologist Dr. Faramarz Keyhani. The name translates into Farsi as “Dr. Beyond the Boundaries of Cosmos”.Dr. Keyhani is a combination of me and AI technology. This cyborg-like figure has come to life from the future to narrate a story and encourage spectators to envisage the image of the future and accordingly shape the social formation of the future society in Iran.
In an article written for an imaginary magazine about the event created by chatGPT, you read as follows:

In a revolutionary archaeological discovery during the last months of 2022, a team of Iranian archaeologists led by Dr. Faramarz Keyhani came across an unknown teleportal gate in the ancient city of Susa. This unexpected finding has captivated the scientific community and the world, suggesting a connection to a future Iranian civilization yet to be formed.

The teleportal gate, which seems to defy the cosmological bounds of time and space, was initially discovered during an exploration journey in Susa at night. Through the application of the carbon-14 dating process, the archaeologists were able to ascertain that the gate indeed belonged to a civilization that would emerge in the future. Following the groundbreaking discovery in Susa, archaeological teams expanded their research to different regions of Iran, where more teleportal gates appeared. Qom, The Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and many other areas have now revealed these perplexing gateways. Each gate holds the promise of a future yet to unfold, raising countless questions about the nature of time, space, and the formation of future societies.

These gates propel us into uncharted territory, where the boundaries between the past, present, and future become blurred. Dr. Keyhani expressed his excitement, stating, “We have stumbled upon portals that offer us a glimpse into a different time and space. They open the door for us to encounter the unknown future. We have come across relics from the future that ask us to think about what kind of world we want to embrace.”