Mahdohkt

During the year long Commission program, Neshat worked on special effects for her first feature film, Women Without Men. The film's screenplay is an adaptation of a surreal novel written by Shahrnoush Parsipour, a celebrated Iranian woman writer living in exile. The book chronicles the lives of five women running away from some sort of social, cultural or sexual oppression; whose lives mysteriously converge in an orchard, where they attempt to create their own society. The story follows the construction and eventual breakdown of this 'utopian' society.

Through the use of a mystical, metaphorical and feminine terminology rooted in Iranian culture, the film addresses the universal subject of human suffering that is caused by oppressive cultural and religious environments where 'madness' and eventually 'suicide' become true options for salvation. The film's main location will be an Iranian garden that is reminiscent of the traditional concept of 'paradise' in both Persian and Islamic traditions. The film will attempt to explore the 'internal' world of each woman, a mad pattern of obscure dreams, anxieties, fears, obsessions, and ultimately spirituality. Similar to the novel, the film will be created in a series of short stories which eventually connect in the final chapter.

Director: Alex Rivera

Screenwriter: Alex Rivera, David Riker
Executive Producers: Guy Naggar, Peter Klimt
Producer: Anthony Bregman
Cinematographer: Lisa Rinzler
Editor: Alex Rivera
Composer: Tomandandy
Visual Effects Supervisor: Mark Russell

Gorgeous, intelligent, and intensely imaginative, Alex Rivera’s stunning first feature, Sleep Dealer, is set in a near future marked by airtight international borders, militarized corporate warriors, and an underground class of node workers who plug their nervous systems into a global computer network that commodifies memory.

Memo Cruz is a young campesino who lives with his family in a town fighting for its life, the small, dusty farm village of Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca. A private company has hijacked control of the area’s water supply and is selling it back to the village at outrageous prices, provoking the mobilization of aqua-terrorist cells. But Memo couldn’t care less about Santa Ana. He loves technology and dreams of leaving his small pueblo to find work in the hi-tech factories of the big cities in the north. He dreams of becoming a node worker and learns how to build his own transmitter, which he uses to hack into the lives of others and live vicariously. One night, he stumbles across a transmission destined to pave the way to the city of the future, but in a way Memo could never have expected.

Burning with visual energy and originality, Sleep Dealer is a fascinating and prescient work of science fiction that is as politically engaged as enjoyable to watch.

Eyebeam Production Lab worked with Mark Russell on elements of the visual effects.

Scissorfriends, is both DVD zine and installation. Expanding the metaphor of the paper zine into a 3-dimensional experience, Scissorfriends highlights a series of DVDs crafted with original and found video and audio content, exploring questions about the impact of format and technology on deeply personal expression.

Tentacle, from Swedish arts collaborative Beeoff (Olle Huge, Tomas Linell and Mikael Scherdin), is a receptor-sculpture on a network that feeds streamed content (“streaming media”) over the Internet to several stations. During Works in Process ,Tentacle will gathers and transmits sound and images from nodes at Eyebeam and in Stockholm, transmitting them to a central editing computer, creating new content which is rebroadcast simultaneously back to the translucent, sculptural nodes at each location. Tentacle has been exhibted abroad in Paris (Villette Numérique), Stockholm (Splintermind – the artists’ studios) and Helsinki (Kiasma Museum), and for the first time in the United States at Eyebeam.