Recent Projects
When I look at my projects, I see that I’m always driven by people, landscapes, language, and the intangible. Their ambiguities, contradictions, and inner beauty motivate me to discover the unknown. Whether in my teaching, creative work, scholarship, or leadership roles, I strive to see the hidden, hear the forgotten, and present the unpresentable.
Machine Dreams of A Cosmopolitan Past: An Image Generator Based on Safavid-Era Iranian Miniatures
by: Hamidreza Nassiri & Rowena Chodkowski
Presented at: MUTEK Forum & Festival, Montréal, Canada, August 2024.
We trained a text-to-image Generative AI model natively with a large selection of Iranian miniatures from the Safavid era (16th to 18th century). We hand-scanned or digitally extracted these images from different books and cropped them to make them suitable for training. Then, we processed and tagged them manually. The model was then trained with the Kohya SS native training script on a cloud GPU instance.
We then converted the model and set it up to work with the Hugging Face Diffusers library.
by: Hamidreza Nassiri, Jacob Geuder, Mídia Independente Coletiva
The Urban Video Archive project analyzes how social transformations are chronicled by digital video making and how those videos can be preserved and structured for scholars, activists, and the public. These questions are of urgency in Brazil, ten years after digital video activism blossomed.
Today many videos by citizen journalists and video activist collectives are in danger of being lost. The Urban Video Archive preserves digital videos and ensure their long-term accessibility in an online repository. The prototype of the digital video archive is developed in close collaboration with Mídia Independente Coletiva from Rio de Janeiro. The collection consists of 119 videos that document or bear witness to Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities’ struggles for human rights, and amplifies the voices of marginalized urban citizens.
We are currently working on making it accessible in both Portuguese and English, including the interface, descriptions, and video subtitles.
The project was partially funded by Fordham University’s Center for Community-Engaged Learning and Princeton University.
Co-Created With Students at Fordham University, NYC
My students in Global Cinema (Fordham University) and I co-created this resource for global cinemas in Spring 2024.
Upon clicking on any country’s name, you will see a brief overview of its national cinema, five significant films representing it with brief descriptions of them and their importance, and finally five readings on the national cinema and/or the films.
I hope this resource will help teachers and scholars of global cinemas.
As you see, each country’s entry is written by two students. As such, the quality of the content varies a bit, but my hope is to work with some students later to edit the entries.
Logline: When Rever fell in love with Ruya, he fell into a fever-dream, somewhere between reality and delusion. Drawn by fortune or fear, hope or despair, he stumbles while his life blooms before him, unfolding like poetry, step-by-step, stanza-by-stanza, breath by breath.
Created with Google Veo and DaVinci Resolve, this video spans the history of the universe, tracing echoes of Iranian art and culture. Manifested in the geometric and floral patterns of tiles and muqarnas ceilings, Iranians’ contributions to math, philosophy, physics, and the arts inspire the mesmerizing beauty I tried to recreate here.
Please visit my film productions page for more, including my latest work, Candle & Vessel, which is coming soon, as well as my short experimental videos, my short contemplative pieces shot in New York City, Montréal, California, and Wisconsin.
by: Hamidreza Nassiri, Ralph Vacca, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Gregory Donovan
Over the course of a year, I led a team of faculty members in Fordham University’s Media & Communication Studies department to organize Civic Media Workshops, aiming to incorporate civic media with a focus on racial justice into the curriculum and student learning experiences. Each civic media workshop was facilitated by an artist/activist and focused on a specific project and media-making approach. This project has become possible thanks to the generous grant from Fordham University’s Office of Chief Diversity Officer.
Workshops’ recordings and accompanying resources are accessible to the public via https://civicmedia.ace.fordham.edu.
by: Hamidreza Nassiri
Data Sheet: NYC OpenData
I used the data collected by NYC OpenData for 3,319 Free and Limited Free WiFi Hotspots throughout NYC to create this interactive map. The user can use the map and its markers to locate hotspots and/or filter the hotspots based on the borough, provider, and type (free or limited free). Access it here.
Hamidreza Nassiri 