How Technology Helps to Engage Audiences With Art

Ulrich Schrauth: Mohsen, your artistic background is rooted in your experiences growing up in Shiraz, Iran. How has your upbringing influenced your approach to art, especially when it comes to combining traditional motifs with contemporary digital and immersive techniques?

Mohsen Hazrati: I studied graphic design in Iran and was very interested in multimedia design – this was before the time of VR. In Iran, it was a bit more difficult to access new technology. But thanks to the internet and all these tutorials, I learnt about it. Artistically, most of my work is really rooted in the culture or poetry of my city. In addition to the development of technology, I thought about how cultural values or personal experiences could contribute to the uniqueness of digital artworks. I always try to have both sides, the technical side but at the same time a personal or more cultural side to add a unique and personal experience.

Schrauth: That’s actually a very interesting point that you just mentioned. As part of your artistic practice, you often delve into Persian or Iranian mythology and cultural history and reinterpret it through a digital lens. I would be interested to know how you manage to maintain the historical narratives while giving them a modern twist with digital art.

Hazrati: It’s a very good question about how to bridge these new technologies with, in some cases, even ancient knowledge. I like to try different ways. At the moment I’m very interested in AI because it’s text-based. My practice is very much about how to feed the AI system with all this poetry. Or when I do something more visual, I try to take inspiration from poetry. It’s all about different periods of existence – technology changes over time. There was a time when paper was also considered a new technology; painting was a new medium some day. What I also find very interesting is using AI or the Internet to interpret this ancient knowledge. Everything is based on language. Today we have emojis and so on, but in the end everything comes from these ancient scripts, all our systems today.

Schrauth: You just mentioned AI, but you have also been working with virtual reality, augmented reality, new media installations. You seem to be quite interested in the technological side. For you, how does technology enhance the visitor experience? How do people interact with it?

Hazrati: I remember five or ten years ago there were these conversations about bringing new media art into galleries. I think at that time the bridge between technology and art was quite blurred. There were a lot of artists with a lot of media in every museum, maybe not crazy AR or VR installations, but new media was getting into a lot of different art spaces. It’s definitely my interest to work with new technology, but at the end of the day, it’s an art medium. So it’s really important as an artist to know what kind of experience I want to share with the audience or with my work. I also wanted to ask you something. You have the VRHAM! Festival, and I saw that since COVID you have experience in bringing a festival that consists of installations into a totally virtual world. I saw your amazing exhibition that you curated for Jakob Kudsk Steensen at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and for me it was really fascinating to see these 3D scans of this new media artist between traditional art pieces and paintings. So I would like to know what you think about it?

Schrauth: I totally agree that new media art has been part of the cultural canon for a long time, but it is getting more into the mainstream, into galleries, into art fairs, into larger museums. And I see a push there. For example, the exhibition that I curated with digital artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, called The Ephemeral Lake, is an example of a public cultural institution looking at this space and really using its collective heritage, which in this case was the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the Romantic painter, of whom the Hamburger Kunsthalle has the largest collection in the world. And for the 250^th anniversary of his birth, they were looking for new ways to convey romantic landscape painting. So I commissioned Steensen as someone who uses digital technology, game engines, game mechanics, and new media to construct romantic landscapes in a completely new way. He also uses physical objects, in this case glass lamps, and light and sound to create an installation that spans two levels and is completely interconnected and interactive. This is an exploration that is very interesting in terms of using collective heritage, new media, but also the physical space. This is something that I find more and more in my curatorial practice. You just mentioned the completely virtual landscape that we built for the festival here in Hamburg, but also for my London Film Festival, which was kind of one of the first metaverses. You could visit the exhibitions, you could talk to other people, and it worked really well. But we can see now, after COVID, that people are really into haptic experiences, into shared experiences. They want to share art. So for me, it’s really about bridging those gaps and not seeing them as separate things. How does that work in your practice? I feel that in a lot of your work the viewer or participant is very engaged, people really have to respond to text or interact with the work. How do you see the role of the participant in your artistic practice?

Hazrati: It’s always been one of the most important parts for me to create different ways for the audience to interact. That’s one of the most unique tools of new media or game engine technologies. For me, it’s the key point to use new methods of interaction, like my VR piece Fãl, for example. I remember it was a bit stressful to build all the levels of connections between all these devices. I created a connection between the tablet and the pond through Bluetooth and also created a connection between the tablet and the pond with the VR piece through the Internet. When the user looked at the pond with the tablet, there was a physical reaction that started the water pond. I used an AR interaction for this piece, but at the same time there was no AR structure on this piece. I didn’t add any extra 3D elements to the tablet because the tablet was just acting as something to detect the pond and send a message to it. This is my approach to using AR technology by creating my own way of interacting in this piece. In AR itself, there are many ways to create new interactions, but I am always trying to find a new definition of the medium. For me, the most exciting playground for that is all the data we have from users. Where is the device, and at what angle is it moving? There is a lot of information in the devices and tools. That is the most exciting part of the project, to create new definitions of interactions through these devices or technologies.

Schrauth: I was also wondering about something else. When you look at the mythology and ancient traditions that you explore in your artistic practice, are there certain elements or textures that you’re particularly interested in working with?

Hazrati: For the last few years, I’ve been using fish as the main metaphor in my projects. What I have done in this project is to turn each user into a fish within the VR installation. It opens a new window into the installation and adds new elements to it. At the same time, a pond is an important architectural part of old houses in Iran, even for office complexes. There is always a pond and a small waterfall. For me, it was a good opportunity to play with the meaning of these virtual fish in a physical installation, because in the VR piece, the user was also seeing water, seeing a virtual pond where all these fish are moving around. It is like a bridge between the physical world and the meanings of fish and water in the virtual parts of the project.

Schrauth: I curated an exhibition about three years ago that was about water and underwater. It was called Ultramarine. And we showed it in Venice, during the Venice Biennale, but also in Hamburg and Miami. It dealt with all sorts of immersive media, from projection mapping to virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive media, and a wide variety of explorations and manifestations of water. And that’s probably why your work resonated with me so much. And I think it’s a very interesting subject to deal with digital technology because there’s so much overlap and so much poetry and beauty. And that’s something that’s inherent in your work. You use a lot of language and poetry. Combining that with such a fluid medium makes perfect sense and gives a beautiful texture to the work you’re creating. I have another question for you. It’s a little deeper and probably touches on some of the themes we’ve been talking about at the eCommemoration Convention. As someone who is deeply involved in both Eastern and Western artistic traditions, how do you try to navigate the tensions or find synergies between these cultural influences?

Hazrati: This is a question that has been on my mind ever since I moved to Germany or even before. I am still developing the answer for myself. It’s really challenging, especially for me, because most of the roots of my work go back to Shiraz and all those old poetries. But thanks to new media tools, like the Internet or AI language, it is possible because it brings us all together. We are working with the same medium, we have the same language to talk about or to talk to. One of the most important examples would be the project we’ve just been talking about. Because of the language limitations of the AI and the APIs, the tool that allows communication between the work and the websites, I had to choose a book of poetry translated into English. Since the beginning of the development of this project, I started to develop an English version of Hafis’ book. What I’m trying to do is find common languages to communicate with my audience. I play with symbols like fish and water, but I try to find a more general language. Every definition that this project generates is specific to that person and generated by AI, even though it is all based on this complicated Farsi poetry. I have a residency in Abu Dhabi at the moment, and I’m working on translating these definitions into generated images, which is an even more common language for everyone. The conclusion I have to your question is that I am trying to make the piece not so much informative but rather interactive and bring the audience into this world.

Schrauth: You’ve mentioned the use of AI, and in the current art world there’s a lot of talk about the use of AI and especially about the biases of algorithms. Obviously, AI is only as good as it’s trained to be. And a lot of the talk is about using Western-centric beliefs to train AI, or very Western-centric stereotypes. Is that something that informs your practical thinking about how to overcome these biases in algorithms? Or would you say that because you’re so deeply rooted in poetry or the use of language, it doesn’t inform your practice as much?

Hazrati: I’m always trying to use AI as part of the puzzle. I would never rely entirely on AI. It’s not something I criticise, but it’s my method of using it. With most of my projects, in terms of medium, I try to have an AR version, I try to make a film out of it, and I try to make a VR piece. I like to make it a little bit more hybrid. I’m wary of relying on AI because, as you mentioned, the system has biases and limitations. Going back to my Fãl project: At the beginning of this process, I started to perform an operation on the poetry myself, based on the algorithms I wrote. For example, I take some words or sentences from the project and send them randomly to some internet dictionaries and get the result back. I play with it a lot. And then I give the project a chance to adapt the poetry based on the randomness. And then at the end I send it to ChatGPT, for example. I keep it as a part of the puzzle, but not as something that makes core decisions about the project. For me, it’s a way of controlling the AI.

Schrauth: You see it as your lifelong practice to bring together these Eastern and Western traditions, it is an ongoing exploration. I think that is a very nice way to end our conversation, because there is a similarity in both of our practices. We are both trying to find ways to engage with audiences in a different way, using new media and digital technologies, but never for the sake of the technology itself. It’s really all about the artwork and what visitors can experience and how that can change perceptions, whether that’s in a political sense, a social sense, or a personal sense. I find it deeply moving to hear you talk about your artistic practice and how much it is connected to your personal life and your search or your quest for the perfect exploration.