Amirali Ghasemi
Interactive video installation
installation
Dimension/Time variable,
Four letter words (or more) is an attempt to experiment with possibilities of combining randomness & interactivity with typography. Coming from an early literature background, letters - & here in Farsi clusters of types - have been fascinating me to work with. The city as a huge container of random types is a great Inspiration, using and recycling those by creating new works based on "found" typographic elements, in the city, the program is designed to let visitors interact with four screens, to write their own words with the possibility of saving their results. In Persian alphabets, letters are introduced in connected forms beside their singular appearances.
The videos - shot from streets of Tehran - were cropped into letters in their various forms (at the beginning, in the middle & at the end of the word), as well as some clusters of words with 2-3 letters as a whole, letting the users making words with more than 4 letters.
During my residency in Berlin, I’ve become fascinated by vibrant street art scene I found lots of similarities between Persian letters & ornaments used in graffiti writings all around the town, in response I continued shooting videos to complete the work with fragments from its new context, Berlin.
People who are not familiar with Persian/Arabic letters, are asked to use the guidebook introducing the Persian letters & the clusters, which are used in this program beside the examples and their meanings in German or English.
This program has made by using the Open source programming language "Processing” and with efforts and the support of a good friend Shervin Afshar.