Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah is an author, media and performance artist. Responding to the prevalence of algorithms in contemporary art and culture, Arian’s work emphasizes, in lieu of known taxonomies of fine arts and new media, character (ethos) and hermeneutical tools exclusive to man. A recurring tenet in Arian’s artistic practice, ever since the inception of the ethnographic/systems art collective “The Blunder of a Horse” has been the tracing of the rapidly changing ontology of art, in tandem with emerging technologies including yet not limited to AI and blockchain, with existential and economic anthropology as guiding principles. Arian has given speeches at international conferences held at University of Virginia, Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Barcelona, among others, and is published by MIT Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively.

In “Man in the Sound of God” [2019-21], a site-specific artwork at the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Arian asks a simple yet profound question—Where is Man? The artwork itself, in its integral negation of normative approaches to the human mind (as in cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience) and space (i.e. digital/physical), reformulates Kant’s “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (‘Was ist der Mensch?’), looking, among others, at two distant yet deeply interwoven global phenomena, of urban sprawl and the rise of Web3. Outlined as a “Teilkunstwerk” in a series of essays tied to the work, “Mensch” is christened the Gesamtkunstwerk of the Information Age, decidedly split into thirty unique fragments outplacing an array of media including yet not limited to painting, sculpture, poetry, music, land, computer and performance art. A récit more than a riddle, Arian’s purposely consumptive take on the tokenization process inherent to crypto art, has thus far made for select, equally fragmented premieres, including one at the Ars Electronica 2021, all of which have revealed little of a work that will continue to live on, simultaneously across several blockchains and in Schöppingen, next to former resident, Stefan Sous’ equally site-specific yet categorically different piece, Flunki Kiel [Dekonstruktionen 1995-99].