Babak Ahteshamipour

I Sometimes Cover my eyes (since I can’t control them in order to shut them) and dream the Occasions where We drop our Smiles (since I haven’t been getting that lately, it’s as if we’ve accepted believing fate, UFOs, time-travel and stuff) is an anti-materialist and anti-consumerist manifesto video.

Babak Ahteshamipour chose the process of collecting various digital objects over the internet as if he was rummaging for leftover second-hand material objects in trashes IRL (in real life), to create scenes in which retro laser guns make them explode. The objects are based on RL (real life) objects such as ceramic pots, plants, shoes, trash bags, desks, electronics and carton boxes.

The scenes alternate between RL footages which are close up shots of some of these objects. In the digital scenes, digital drawings of various non-human NPCs / characters from video games that are inspired from the animal kingdom are placed as signifiers on how non-human beings have been commodified, becoming products to be consumed in the context of culture.

The title of the video is based on how marketing and branding agents present and promote in a subversive innocent, yet sugary ways these kind of products, subjugating and alienating their actual states of existence into becoming something more than themselves, a product, an icon, a simulacra.

As an extension, living in a fast paced era of spammable acidic online information and face-slapping curated suggestions on what to read, watch and believe, capitalism realism leaves tiny to no room for choice by presenting alternating mesmerising windows of escape, hibernating skepticism and critical thinking.