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I Wish For An Animal (حیوانم آرزوست)

Multiplayer mixed-reality game installation

2015

Dastān Gallery, Tehran, Iran / Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA

Honorable Mention
AIGA (re)design awards 2015

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Published in
Arcade magazine, Issue 33.1

Strangers collaborate over three days via text message to save wildlife in a model city. They make daily choices — go to the park, go to work, take a rest — without knowing that each decision quietly accelerates or slows the extinction of five protected species in the valleys surrounding the city. On the third day, they return to face what they built together: habitats demolished, animals dead, a city that looks fine from the outside.

The installation centers on a detailed architectural model of "Haamand" — an imaginary Iranian city ringed by five wilderness valleys. Players register by text message and receive location-based missions via SMS, playable from anywhere. A fairy-guide voice leads them through scenarios that feel ordinary: a wealthy patient offers money for medicine from the black market, a pharmacy in a poor neighborhood has what you need but visiting increases pollution nearby. The game never announces its stakes. The cost only becomes visible at the end.

The title takes Rumi's word for "human" — Ensān — and replaces it with "animal" — hayvān — in Persian. The two words rhyme. The substitution suggests that our wish for connection, for solidarity, for belonging, does not stop at the boundary of our own species. Collective responsibility extends further than we usually let ourselves imagine.

Watch the game unfold

Exhibition at Dastān Gallery, Tehran

Exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA

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Shaghayegh* *Ghassemian

A Multidisciplinary Art Portfolio

Shaghayegh*
*Ghassemian