The project reimagines the boundaries between performer, audience, and environment through a hybrid format that combines live performance, AI, XR, and real-time audience interaction.
As a gamified human interaction performance, Hyper Game explores themes of agency, surveillance, and freedom. Presenting at Signals Creative Tech Expo in 2026, Hyper Game invites audiences to co-create a story that reflects on digital existence, civic agency, and the ethics of co-authorship. Previous versions of this performance have been presented at IDFA DocLab 2024 and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin.
Credits
Concept and Performance by Pegah Tabassinejad
Producers: Loc Dao, Pegah Tabassinejad
Developed at Signals XR Lab 2025 (CMF, Government of Canada)
Signals Curator / Producers: Loc Dao, Debi Wong
Production Coordinator: Rachelle Jones
Technical Director: Neelish Nair
Production Manager: Nico Dicecco
Touch Designer & AI Programmer: Kyle Qi Liu
Camera Operator: Taha Saraei
Sound Designer: Stefan Smulovitz
UI Designer: Parmis Tabassinejad
AI Advisor: Mots
Entropic Fields of Displacement
Entropic Fields of Displacement is an 8-channel audio video installation that brings together the lived experiences of women and marginalized gender individuals from West Asia, including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Lebanon, whether living in their own cities or cities to which they have been displaced. Capturing the nuances of displacement, migration, and collective resistance, the project transforms walking into a radical act—a form of resistance that embodies survival, joy, healing, and solidarity. In navigating the cityscapes of Tehran, Istanbul, the suburbs of Herat, Beirut, Berlin, Vancouver, and Paris, the performers engage with their environments, claiming spaces of freedom, respite, and self-preservation.
Entropic Fields of Displacement is rooted in the remembered prompts that Pegah Tabassinejad received from audiences during her Game performances. Recalling and reimagining those directives, she wanders through memory and imagination alongside these women, transforming collective traces into acts of embodied presence.
Credits
Video Installation by Pegah Tabassinejad
Curated by Olumoroti Soji-George
Performers: Zhino Arjomandi, Ilkay Bilgic, Lisette Chehade, Zainab Entezar, Sholeh Jalili Khiabani, Zeynep Neslihan Arol, Shahrbanou Rezaei, Ghinwa Yassine
Videographers: Sayed Mubarak Shah Alavi, Sara Fereshteh Saniee, Amirali Ghasemi, Chada Halawani, Mehmet Payaslıoğlu, Baset Rezaei, Pegah Tabassinejad
Colourist: Hootan Haghshenas
Post Production Company: AZ Studio
Sound Design: Kaveh Abdein
Solo Exhibition at VIVO Media Arts, November 2024
Exhibition at IDFA DocLab, November 2024
The Winner of IDFA DocLab Award in Digital Storytelling
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.
Artist Biography
Pegah Tabassinejad is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Iran who is living and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and Sel̓ íl̓ witulh peoples.
Tabassinejad’s new media practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, film, video installations and city projects. Her practice acts as an interrogation on themes that include the intersection of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of marginalized and female bodies in private and public space.