As part of Navigating Unreality Mode, we are screening two video essays by Parham Ghalamdar that extend the journal’s inquiry into image warfare, belief infrastructures, and performed truth.

Both works move from theory-fiction into audiovisual form — asking not whether images are true or false, but what they do: how they circulate, what they authorize, and how they shape collective perception in moments of crisis.

“The work treats AI-generated and game-engine imagery not as spectacle, but as infrastructure. These images operate like hyperstitional objects, repeated until they acquire force, collapsing distinctions between irony, belief, and participation. The angel that appears in the film is not a promise of transcendence, but a networked apparition, hovering between myth, algorithm, and first-person shooter logic. Rather than asking whether images are true or false, the film asks what they do: how they circulate, what they authorize, and how they rewire attention during moments of crisis. It is an attempt to think through war as an interface, and to treat image-making itself as contested terrain. If you want this to be watertight, decide what you are claiming: did the film adapt the essay directly, or did it run alongside it as parallel research. If it is parallel rather than adapted, I can tweak the first paragraph so it does not imply a direct adaptation.”

– Parham Ghalamdar

Angels Don’t Die In Multiplayer is a short video essay built from AI-generated imagery and screen recordings of social media posts. Using angelic, “divine” aesthetics, it examines how, during the 2025 12-day Iran–Israel war, the feed became a parallel theatre of conflict, where memes and synthetic visions shaped fear, belief, and permission for violence. The film follows a loop of claims about djinn and occult “talismans” as they move between belief and mockery, reframing viral images as hyperstitional payloads that do not just represent war, but help compose it.

A film by Parham Ghalamdar
Additional concept and research: Parsa Esmaeilzadeh

TRUTH PERFORMED / TRUTH DISRUPTED is an unfinished poetic video essay by Parham Ghalamdar and Dr Lone Sorensen. It was planned as a 12-minute work, but was intentionally abandoned halfway through at 05:35, so what exists is a partial cut rather than a finished argument.

In the piece, two synthetic voices move through a tight Q and A exchange, using archival footage, AI images, and broadcast-media fragments to track how “truth” gets staged and felt under populism. The film treats political authority as a performed effect: bodies, emotion, spectacle, and platform algorithms producing what audiences accept as real. It sits inside a “Climate Futures” research context by looking at the media conditions that shape climate belief and denial, instead of offering climate solutions or future scenarios. The missing second half would have shifted from disruption toward revelation, care, and future imaginaries, and the absence is framed as part of the work.

A film by Parham Ghalamdar
Writer: Lone Sørensen

The project was developed through Leeds Creative Labs, an interdisciplinary programme run by the Cultural Institute.