SADAF SADRI Selected Work

I makes work that explores worldbuilding that prompts re

flection on gender, ideology, power, and relationality using digital technologies.
I am currently a Ph.D. student at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington. In 2022, I founded the SPAM New Media Festival, a platform for experimental practices in art and technology in Seattle, where I currently live..

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Work

1. De/Angular
2. A Prayer Unfolds Itself Into
3. Zine of Spells
4. Threads
5. Listening Patterns
6. It Happened On A Sunday
7. Heavens by ML
8. Cow
9. Molly
10. Noctural Baseline
11. Gaze

Threads

Index

Threads, 2024
Electronic Textile

Threads is an electronic textile installation developed in the visual language of Shia devotional banners, drawing on materials, ornamental styles, and compositional conventions traditionally used to honor kings and the Imams within Shia Islam. These textiles historically function as carriers of declared belief, loyalty, and collective identification. Instead of devotional or triumphal text, the tapestry incorporates the words of a widely known love poem that has gained political force through its circulation in Iran’s on-going revolution. 

At the center of the work, embroidered map-like forms connect multiple embedded electronic systems. These systems communicate wirelessly through decentralized, peer-to-peer protocols. Rather than transmitting readable language, the tapestries exchange encrypted signals that are translated into physical responses. A second tapestry responds indirectly to touch on the first. When contact is sustained, heat generated behind the surface slowly reveals light beneath a blackened layer.

Through encryption, touch, and material transformation, Threads approaches communication as embodied and resistant to legibility, circulating through sensation rather than text, operating outside regimes of visibility and surveillance.
This work was developed as part of the first cohort of DWeb for Creators at Gray Area in 2024. Technical documentation and code for the project are available in the linked GitHub repository.