Ali Momeni
Pittsburgh, PA
Ali Momeni was born in Isfahan, Iran, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Momeni is a builder, composer, and performer interested in the poetics of gesture, affect, and timing. His work utilizes many technologies to explore the social lives of objects and their embedded performative qualities. He studied physics and music at Swarthmore College and completed his doctoral degree at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he directed the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art and founded the urban projection collective MAW. He now teaches in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs CMU ArtFab, teaches and researches instrument building, urban intervention and contextual practice.
From the Journal
- Ali Momeni Releases a DIY Manual for Urban Projection August 10, 2015
Center for Urban Intervention Research (CUIR)
Ali Momeni is a builder, composer, and performer interested in the poetics of gesture, affect, and timing.
Artist BioAli Momeni’s Center for Urban Intervention Research (CUIR) is an online community dedicated to exploring performative and political urban interventions that leverage mobile technologies. CUIR provides a discussion platform and a knowledge database of mobile, networked and interactive video projection instruments that enable theater, storytelling, telepresence, citizen journalism and political activism within the urban landscape. Through collaboration with other artists and collectives, CUIR iteratively develops critical hardware and software tools for urban intervention, and distributes instruments and documentation to future practitioners.
CUIR‘s first publication, “A Manual for Urban Projection” (MUP) is a resource guide for urban projection concepts, strategies, and technologies. It combines observations by Urban Projection thinkers and practitioners with lessons gleaned from the authors’ collective experiences with Urban Projection, public curation, and other art adventures. MUP provides conceptual and practical approaches for experimentation with and deployment of projection technologies toward public communal experiences.