In Conversation: Parham Ghalamdar on Decoloniality, Myth and AI as a Hyper-Infrastructure
- Amy Jiang
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artist
Parham Ghalamdar is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist whose painting, film, and writing fuse forgotten mythologies with cybernetics and generative AI, questioning how machine vision rewrites history and possibility. Solo shows include Painting, An Unending at HOME Manchester and Deep Desert Objekt at Pipeline Contemporary, London; his work has also appeared at the Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery, Caustic Coastal, Castlefield Gallery, the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, and The Lowry. Honors include the 2023 UK New Artists bursary, ACE Project and DYCP grants, and inclusion in the Government Art Collection.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
My practice spans painting, animation, and moving-image work. I was academically trained in oil painting. As a teenager in Tehran, I painted graffiti on brutalist walls, trying to add colour to a grey landscape. These early acts sharpened my sensitivity to hidden narratives and marginal voices. In recent years, my work has come to explicitly explore my historical and philosophical heritage through a decolonial lens, merging Middle Eastern mythology and futures studies. I see all my films as haunted by what is unspoken or erased, which never left us.
For example, Burial Without Body is set “in the scorched desert town of 1950s Iran, where no rain had fallen for years.” It is based on a "true story" I heard through rumours. This barren, forgotten terrain resonates deeply with me. Growing up between that dry desert and the damp uncertainty of Manchester, I felt that entire rituals and memories could vanish through neglect. My film literally conjures a funeral for what is absent—an empty coffin for the “rain that never came.” During the pandemic, I began working in digital animation and AI, and as I explained elsewhere, the “ghost of painting was present in the modification” of my digital works. Even when I generate images with AI, I carry the spirit of older traditions and stories into them. Painting has become a philosophical enterprise rather than rubbing pigment on a cotton canvas; the best painting today is the one not painted at all. That is exactly what Ghosts in the Feedback Loop means to me: certain bodies, stories, and ways of knowing are marginalized in algorithmic systems, yet we can make them haunt the machine. By introducing glitches, poetic fragments, or silences into the loop, I aim to give voice to those ghosts, letting excluded narratives slip through the cracks of code and reshape the outcome in unexpected ways.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
In practice, I see AI primarily as a hyper-infrastructure: a lattice of invisible systems that determines what can be seen, said, and imagined. For Burial Without Body, I made the entire 12-minute film within this infrastructural logic. The machine did not "write" the film for me; it produced raw materials, images, and textures, which I then reassembled. This is also why Soviet montage theories are more relevant than ever, or why the current Gen Z movement of Internet Cinema is heavily invested in the role of the artist as editor. In this sense, AI is not a brush or a camera but the entire ground of possibility—the unseen architecture on which images collapse and recombine. Even the voice in The Sight is a Wound is AI-generated: a disembodied whisper, spectral and machinic, reciting the text. That decision underscored the ghostly presence of the infrastructure itself, as though the system were speaking through me rather than serving me.
Using AI profoundly shapes my process. It allows me to create worlds (like a drought desert) without physically traveling there. The Burial Without Body material statement notes that I chose this low-tech, AI-based method for sustainability: the AI production consumed only 108–216 kWh of energy, roughly a few hundred dollars’ worth of CO₂, versus tonnes if we had flown a crew to Iran. Conceptually, too, AI introduces randomness and “glitch” into the image. I deliberately shot Burial Without Body at a low resolution (854×480) to let compression artifacts and unstable light become part of the ritual. I treat the digital decay itself as a kind of sacred noise. In short, AI is not an external author but part of my palette: I use it to unearth and shape hidden layers of meaning. It’s a collaborator I can have a dialogue with, but I remain the conductor of the process.
Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
For Burial Without Body, I gesture toward a future of ecological and spiritual loss. The film unfolds “not as history but as prophecy folded backward,” as if we are already living inside a myth of a drought with no end. In that imagined future, people perform funeral rites for an absence (rain, hope, or meaning) that has vanished. My warning is twofold: if we ignore environmental collapse and the emptiness it brings, we risk becoming incapable of mourning or digesting the unbearable amount of the upcoming tragedy; and if we forget our collective stories, we hollow ourselves out. I imagine the audience partly as communities that have known such losses—drought-stricken regions, communities of exiles, or anyone who has felt grief with “no shape.” I also address viewers who may never have faced these tragedies. I hope the film unsettles them, forcing a confrontation with what has been buried by convenience or indifference. Ideally, viewers will carry that “ghost of rain” with them, feeling a quiet weight of empathy or urgency.
In The Sight is a Wound, the future it gestures toward is one of blindness and silence in the face of atrocity. The film asks: when the images from our time become unbearable, where do we turn? It delivers the answer in the form of a ritualistic destruction: burning my own paintings. As one synopsis notes, this act becomes a “visceral response to the impossibility of creating images with greater urgency or ethical weight” than the live-streamed horrors. In effect, the film is a funeral for the image. It warns that if we continue numbly consuming atrocity as spectacle, the future will be emptier, and art will lose its power and meaning. The audience here is fellow artists, thinkers, and anyone doubting that art can still matter. I imagine people who feel complicit or overwhelmed by media, especially the global images of violence. I hope that seeing my canvases turn to ash, accompanied by the hushed narration, provokes a moment of reckoning. My goal is to instill quietness and reflection, to carry that “ethical failure of seeing in the age of over saturation” into the minds of viewers. If it leaves them reconsidering how we view and document the world, then it has done its job.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
My work is in dialogue with Middle Eastern and diasporic histories, Shia and Persian philosophies, and postcolonial critique. I grew up Shia Muslim, where the idea that fighting for justice still matters even if we fail shaped my orientation. This ties me to narratives of martyrdom, ecological stewardship, and ethical struggle that run through Iranian culture and broader decolonial thought. Burial Without Body draws on folk rituals such as Ta’ziyeh (Passion Play) around drought and water, reimagining them as speculative mythologies. The Sight is a Wound speaks directly to the flood of live-streamed genocide of Palestinians under siege. More broadly, my work addresses colonialism and the way Western art traditions erase non-Western voices. I apply a decolonial lens to reconfigure futurism and science fiction within my heritage.
These relationships shift with unfolding crises—the Gaza genocide, climate collapse, pandemic isolation, and freedom of movement. After October 2023, when I began The Sight is a Wound, I felt traditional painting had become irrelevant. To frame is already to impose violence; in the face of genocide, such framing risks aestheticizing pain as spectacle. For me, this is less about medium than philosophical stance: do we move toward the crisis and let its negativity transform creation, or retreat into escapology, careerism, and the ambient? I choose the confession of failure, admitting that the image cannot contain the enormity of what unfolds. Creation is not over, but its task has changed—to subtract, to mourn, and to let absence speak as truth.
That is why I burned paintings rather than made new ones. The pandemic also pushed me into digital media. I began with oil painting and physics, but Covid forced me to rethink how to leave the studio and venture into chaos without traveling. The conversation therefore shifts from oil on canvas to AI-generated video, yet the underlying dialogues remain—with landscapes that carry memory, with silenced languages, and with communities of artists, protesters, and faith groups. My hope is that these evolving practices, whether painting or AI film, remain faithful to those communities and histories, keeping them present “through cracks in the loop,” as the curators suggest.
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
A major threat I see as an artist is an ethical and epistemic crisis stemming from AI. As The Sight is a Wound points out, we already face an “ethical failure of seeing in the age of digital oversaturation.” If AI accelerates that oversaturation, the stakes rise: imagine deepfakes or automated content being peddled faster than we can process truth. In practice, this could mean mass desensitization, where even more horror is presented as just another feed. Another concern is algorithmic erasure: most AI systems are trained on data from Western, male-dominated sources. This means the very people I come from—Middle Eastern cultures, Indigenous knowledge systems, non-Western philosophies—risk becoming completely invisible to those machines. The “ghosts” of these communities might never appear unless artists intervene.
There are also concrete dangers like surveillance and control. Authoritarian regimes could use AI to monitor dissent or rewrite history. Economic inequality could widen if technology replaces livelihoods without equitable redistribution. In short, AI could intensify existing crises. The threat is that without critical resistance, our societies could become even more inhumane—more surveilled, more environmentally destructive, and more culturally homogenized. These are the uncertainties that keep me up at night. I see art and theory as tools to prepare for, or push back against, that future.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
After the 7th of October, in the wake of what I call the ethical collapse of Western civilization and philosophy, I turned to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia and his other writings as a philosophical mainframe and compass. His work resurrected Iranian Shia intellectualism in a form capable of confronting contemporary crises. Cyclonopedia became the mainframe through which I could think again—a philosophical engine that rewired my orientation toward art and theory. I strongly recommend him not only as an author but as a reanimator of the forgotten. Alongside Reza, the writings of Dr. Jason Mohaghegh, the desert epics of Ibrahim Al-Kone, the mytho-poetic cinema and theatre of Bahram Bayzaie, and the elliptical films of Shahram Mokri have all been influential in shaping my imagination. These figures show me how myth, void, and philosophy can be rearticulated in contemporary forms. I am also reading cybernetic and critical-tech texts: Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgs and Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology speak directly to the issues I grapple with around AI and power. Artists like Forensic Architecture, who interrogate the politics of images, are similarly crucial reference points. And of course, my own faith and cultural background inspire me—poets like Forough Farrokhzad and thinkers of the Persian mystical tradition, such as Suhrawardy, continue to inform the affective and philosophical mood of my work.
Credits:
The cinematographer of THE SIGHT IS A WOUND is Dean Brierly / Caustic Coastal
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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