About
VAL makes immersive work — in a room or in a browser — where the visitor isn't the audience but one of the materials the piece is made from.
Show reel2016—2025
Profile
VAL is the practice of Hosein Alemi. I came to this work through theatre and performance art, where what held my attention was never the stage but the audience — how a body behaves in a room it can act on. Video mapping and interactive tools were the way in. Between 2019 and 2022 I designed and staged more than twenty multimedia events inside an 1800-year-old caravanserai in Iran's central desert. I now build generative and interactive pieces in which the visitor is treated as part of the work, with AI as a working partner in developing them — in the WebGL and shader work in particular.
On balance
Beauty appears in balance. Each element of a piece brings its own colour of meaning, and together those colours make the experience the piece is — when an element is shaped by the others rather than set alone, the work gains depth and new meanings are born out of it. In interactive work the visitor's presence is one of those elements. That is what I'm after in VAL: the name is short for value, and the practice is about bringing it into sight.
Tools
TouchDesigner · GLSL · WebGL & Web Audio · MediaPipe · Kinect & Lidar · Ableton Live · MIDI hardware · Blender · Unreal Engine
Selected work
- Painting by the Wall — interactive A/V installation · Ostblock-5, St. Gallen & BA’B Art Platform, Qeshm · 2025
- Polex — interactive A/V installation · Optic Exhibition, Shiraz · 2025
- Kamakan — audio-visual performance · Qeshm · 2025
- Music Battle — real-time audio-reactive system · Neoki · 2024
- Deyr-e Gachin Caravanserai — 20+ immersive events · Iran · 2019—2022