We welcome emerging artist Illya Mousavijad as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art and Technology at The Ohio State University. He recently completed his MFA from the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Working across varied media, including installation, painting, video, and computer animation, his art practice investigates the limits and extents of exile, border and identity politics, Middle Eastern history, exile literature, US and Iran relations.
Currently, I am following the incredible and indescribable currents unfolding in the Middle East following the fall of Afghanistan. What has already and will continue to produce great numbers of exiles. Displacement, instability, and inaccessibility are increasing. I am in the process of expanding on my investigation of virtual production, including but not limited to computer animation and virtual reality, as the means to understand and articulate the profoundly liminal experience of exile.
In my classes too, I am seriously encouraging critical thinking about what it means to move through and to occupy a space, as well as the experience of time in sophisticated ways beyond its often linearly rendered convictions. My students are experiencing the process of creating computer animation with an internal collision with the realities and unrealities of the software used. They are learning to generate movement, time, and space on both individual and collective levels. Many incredible learning moments are unfolding for all of us, myself included. –Illya Mousavijad
