Growing up in Iran, Ali Eslami was a keen member of the “modding” community—designing and building his own modifications to well-known video games. Now, unsurprisingly, he makes a living as an award-winning virtual reality artist. His work largely draws from contemporary digital culture, with projects like “nerd_funk”—which takes views on an interactive journey through the Instagram stories experience, and “Eclipse”—which explores the traces we leave of ourselves online. Ali describes his project “False Mirror,” which featured on WePresent, as an experiment to see if humans could inhabit a virtual, matrix-esque world. The piece poses some philosophical questions about human identity, and how things like memories could be artificially produced in a digital space.
