Interview with Zara Houshmand

Credits

• Rhonda Holberton, Lead Researcher
• Rhonda Holberton, Interviewer
• Luka Coza, Post Production
• Nathaniel Kwan, Editor
• Soodie Sarooie, Web Editor
• Web Design: Sarai Mateo, Cristy Aguilar, Anna Huynh, Rosa Salangsang, Richer Fang, Vanessa Rivera, EJ Gandia, Cameron Chung

Abstract

This article is an interview with Zara Houshmand.

Bio

Zara Houshmand is an Iranian American writer, editor, and literary translator whose work crosses boundaries and cultural divides. She lives in the mountains of California. Zara worked with artist Tamiko Thiel in the early development of 3D multi-user virtual environments, including what later became Second Life.

Article Body

Rhonda Holberton 0:00
Zara, thank you so much for being with us today! Would you just introduce yourself for our readers and talk a little bit about your practice and where you're based.

Zara Houshmand 0:08
My name is Zara Houshmand and I am a writer first and foremost. Where I'm based I'm totally in transition right now, as I'm in a hotel in Turkey. I thought I was moving to New York, but it looks like I'm going back to San Francisco, but we'll see. I'm learning to just stay loose. My background was in theater. It's interesting, I was working in tech just as a way of paying the bills as a brittle tech writer working in theater when the tech work would allow me stretches of time. Then at one point, I began working with Tamiko at Worlds, and it was a unique opportunity to combine the tech experience and the theater experience because we were beginning to conceive of these worlds, virtual worlds, as essentially a set design where things happen inside of it. We were conceiving of this as how do you develop a new medium? Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But just in terms of the background, it for me, came from this very fortunate overlap of theater experience and just tech grunt work.

Rhonda Holberton 1:41
So there's a couple of different questions that I could segway from there, but what is your earliest experience working creatively with technology? The earliest memory you have of that.

Zara Houshmand 1:57
Earliest memories are working in early creation of help systems, online help systems, as a way of documenting. What I think the first ones we worked on were HyperCard and some of the early drawing programs that Apple produced, or was Claris then. Boy this is really, you know, digging deep in memory. Going against the jetlag currents here, too. The notion of just how you structure the interaction and how you deal with the infinite number of pathways. Worked on a very early interactive video program that was installed in a bar in San Francisco as a way of not teaching, but introducing and sort of softening the resistance to conversations about HIV education in the black community in San Francisco. In a way of just sort of easing it you'd then go to the screen, and you'd try and hook up with the sky and the different pathways that a conversation could take, given their willingness to raise hard questions early. So that kind of thing, you know, just dealing with the very initial basics of interactivity. Those were the first creative challenges.

Rhonda Holberton 3:45
I love that, and we'll talk a little bit more about your background in theater, and thinking about approaching technology as a performative question rather than a technological or platform based question, or a UI even. All of those things are obviously informed. What was your first experience working with web 3d specifically, or what's kind of being commonly called the metaverse today?

Zara Houshmand 4:13
That was at Worlds, Worlds Incorporated back in 90, or I think we started in 94. It didn't last more than two years, and that was it. This was at a time when I think there were maybe 400 websites in total on the World Wide Web. It was very, very early. The notion that we're finally coming back to this at this late stage of maturity of the web, and still not really ready to deal with it is intriguing to me.

Rhonda Holberton 4:46
So can you talk a little bit about what Worlds Inc is as somebody who visited the site. How would I experience Worlds Inc?

Zara Houshmand 4:57
The site was a very late piece of it. It was the notion of social media, specifically multi user social media in a visual environment. That meant the first developments of avatars; what is your visual representation in this world? You would find yourself in what was similar to then, very primitive game worlds such as 3d visualization of a game world. You would have this little halo above your head with words in it, which was your text that you were typing in. Your 3d avatar would move in a very robotic way, sliding across the space, and you would approach other robotic little avatars, and they would have text messages. It was really a way of visualizing text interactions between more or less an unlimited number of users who could drop into a space.

Rhonda Holberton 6:01
At that point, were you bringing your theater practice and your practice of writing and interpersonal communication into this kind of virtual social space?

Zara Houshmand 6:13
I was bringing it in to begin with primarily in the notion of set design. What are these physical spaces that were creating an imaginary world, and how does the design of the physical space open imaginative possibilities for these interactions to create story seeds and set a mood? Writing wasn't involved much. A lot of what we were doing was deciding what was important in this new medium. We'd have regular weekly meetings of just sort of blue sky brainstorming of what might be possible, and why it would be valuable. So I remember, for example, a discussion about should it be a priority to have facial expressions or articulated limbs. Which of these should we send the engineers off to develop? And this was before emojis even existed. So is it more realistic to have people who can move in a full bodied way, or is the priority the emotional expression? So those kinds of questions we were dealing with. What matters if you're creating an entirely new medium? For that, for example, I was drawing on puppetry. I'd studied Balinese puppetry, and we were looking at things like projection of emotion on neutral facial expressions. How the more minimalist a face is presented, the more you can relate to it empathically. I remember an example from the Balinese puppetry that the very high characters had less articulation and less fluid movements. It was the clowns and the characters that you wanted the audience to relate to. that were more articulated. So we were just pulling in things from all over the world, and all kinds of experience. One of the things that Tamiko and I especially were facing was that the engineers weren't coming from an art world, or from a performance world. The sort of assumption was that what we were building; everything had to be sci-fi. We were building space stations because that was their notion of how they imagined their imaginative, artistic gathering of ideas into the space. This put them off in that direction because that was what they were coming from. We were like no, we can do so much more with this than space stations and shopping malls.

Rhonda Holberton 9:10
Yeah, I was reading an interview with you where you're kind of talking about growing up as a self described Third Culture kid. I'm wondering, you know, you bring in Balinese puppetry. I'm wondering if in addition to having the kind of artistic and theatrical background, if you're also bringing a kind of multicultural experience into these discussions as well, and if those were informing some of the decisions you were making?

Zara Houshmand 9:35
Absolutely. I think the business of having lived between cultures, and especially entering a new culture and that period of figuring out what are the rules here? You may have very weak language skills at the beginning, but you're spending a lot of time just observing how people interact and what are the unspoken languages that are happening. I had a lot of experience with that. I already understood that in terms of corporate culture, so as a freelancer working in tech, I go into one company or another company. I very quickly saw this is what's the culture here, these are what the rules here are. So those skills were just part of who I was, and I think that led to an awareness of possibilities. The business of immersion in a single culture is where you have assumptions that you don't question. So the fact that the engineers were thinking, of course, this space must be sci-fi, those are their unquestioned assumptions. I was always in a position to be able to question a bit more.

Rhonda Holberton 10:55
That's beautiful. That might be an interesting segway to Manzanar. Do want to just kind of briefly describe what the project is, and then talk a little bit about how the collaboration came about with Tamiko.

Zara Houshmand 11:15
The project was an exploration of first the space of Manzanar as a setting for an examination, of how the experience of the internees during World War II, and how the Japanese Americans in the camps had parallels in imagination with the experience of Middle Eastern Americans today. Projecting that into what it would be if we were in camps today, it came out of my experience. First in this space at Manzanar, I was doing a meditation retreat nearby at the same time as the Oklahoma bombing had happened. The first assumptions were that it was a Middle Eastern terrorist. I was out of touch with the news for a week. Imagine living with these first flashes of information that were coming in before the news kind of resolved into what actually happened. I was in this space, which was very much reminding me of the landscape of Iran. High desert and shattered mountains, it to me seemed very beautiful and nostalgic. I was homesick in this landscape. I'd also very recently read "Snow Falling on Cedars", which is about the Japanese American experience there, and descriptions of the land as this desert hell. Just awareness of the different emotional reactions to the same landscape, and imagining what it would be like to be imprisoned there was the sense of homesickness and nostalgia layered on top of the initial negative reaction to the space. It became emotionally very layered and rich. All of this was just my first impressions. Tamiko and I had been talking for a long time about how to use this medium for an art piece, and what is the potential. Then we started talking from that point of view, and of course, she was really interested because of her family's experience in the camps. They weren't at Manzanar, but there's so much parallel. We just started brainstorming from that point. We went down and made visits and photographed, did a lot of research in history, and talked endlessly. And it just gradually evolved over a few years.

Rhonda Holberton 13:56
And you had worked together at Worlds even before that?

Zara Houshmand 14:00
We were working at Worlds Inc at the time. This is what we started doing on the side and then worlds Inc died, and we continued.

Rhonda Holberton 14:09
As a writer and somebody who moves between lots of different types of forms of practice, how was working in this VR format? Because you'd been doing the professional type writing and consulting, did that feel like a natural place to be creating?

Zara Houshmand 14:32
Yeah, I think for the longest time we had a sense that this was a really interesting new medium. It was a half baked medium, which was to say we were deciding what is the medium? Of course that's an invitation to creativity. Then how do you find a way to actually use it to express something that is meaningful to you as opposed to the space stations and shopping malls?

Rhonda Holberton 14:59
Well was there a particular moment in the piece or something that surprised you?

Zara Houshmand 15:08
In the development of the piece and in how our conversations were working out, how the collaboration was working, I remember a moment when that third culture experience came in because there was so much to be decided. Tomiko was coming from the place where for her family, there was real history. For my family, it was imagined history, and how do you respect that distinction without one totally overpowering the other? Obviously, the real experience is heavy. You can't minimize that by making it equal to imagine what if. Obviously, since then, so much more has happened in terms of what's come down on American Middle Eastern communities, but at the time, it was very much a what if, and that respectful engagement with each other as like, who makes this decision? Who makes that decision and where do we back off? I realized that Tomiko is Japanese and German, culturally, her father's is German. She spent a lot of time in Germany, and I grew up in the Philippines. Also, I have a big piece of Iranian culture. I realized we were doing this dance where on some moments, on some days, we would be Japanese and Filipino and very delicately dancing around things. On other days, it's like we're going to be German and Iranian, and we're going to be invited down on that level. It was just really interesting to watch how we shift between these things. I mean, that doesn't have much to do with technology, but in a lot of ways, it had to do with this business of the piece itself, bridging cultures.

Rhonda Holberton 17:05
Well also, the medium itself being one that is bringing in set design, but also has both the temporal component, but also spatialized component. So in the PCM Manzanar, you're constantly moving between scenes, almost like scenes in a play but also very much kind of alone. So you're really the kind of only character other than, you know, remnants, or kind of ephemera of other interactions.

Zara Houshmand 17:41
Tamiko had a lot of experience, not as set design, but from her father's practice in architecture, the influence of his ideas about the emotional qualities of space and moving through space. So that was a big piece of it as well. I'm not representing Tamiko's side as well, because I think she's probably spoken much better than I can.

Rhonda Holberton 18:05
What I'm also interested in then is those layers of reality that we're kind of playing with. When you walk through a barracks, and then you're kind of introduced into these garden spaces, there's these layers that kind of like an onion, start getting peeled away. One of the things that I'm so impressed by in the piece is that you walk a very fine line of that kind of really deep, really heavy, really dark history. But then also this kind of beauty within it. Do you want to talk about it, you kind of spoke around that kind of dissonance that you felt being in the site. Was that something that you intentionally designed into the piece as well?

Zara Houshmand 18:51
Yes, absolutely. I think I spoke of it in terms of the double reaction of whether this is a desert hell, or whether this is a nostalgic space. But my first experience coming to that landscape was a week-long meditation retreat in silence, totally alone. The healing and grounding aspect of being in that space, which it's not pretty, but it's beautiful. Imagining how, in what way that might have been a condolence constellation to the people living in that, and how you find sources of healing and strength when you're in a situation. It goes beyond the acute circumstances because you're there for a year or two years. You have a whole life in that space. There's wonderful stories about the Manzanar fishing club, and the people there having their own relationship to the land, and to what it offered as nature. These vast big silences? So yes, that was very much a part of the intentional, original design.

Rhonda Holberton 20:12
And did you find, you know, you talked about kind of the nature of collaboration, the nature of both of you being kind of multiculturally identified. Trying to then represent these, kind of layers and facets in the same virtual space. Do you feel like VR in particular, like web 3d and this kind of digital virtual space, do you think it was conducive to those types of layerings and representations? Or were there specific opportunities or challenges that you faced while you were creating?

Zara Houshmand 20:47
I think it was definitely conducive to the layering, because it was, like I said, wide open. We were trying to figure out what this medium can do, and there weren't a lot of conventions established. If you look at how a story happens in film, when you study that as a film student for example, you're learning a whole language of what this kind of cut suggests and what that kind of transition means. None of that existed, and so of course we all have sort of the experience of film, even if we haven't made film. So that is part of our language. But we aren't stuck with that at all when you have the freedom to move through a space. It was wide open, so yes, it was very conducive. We aren't bound by reality here, we can make things appear in the sky, we can suddenly throw you inside of a video game and you're behind the cockpit of a fighter plane. So that freedom was very rich.

Rhonda Holberton 21:53
And were there things that you were able to bring out of those conversations from worlds Inc? Should our avatars have articulated limbs or facial expressions? Were there conventions or discoveries that you were able to kind of push back against or play with beyond Manzanar?

Zara Houshmand 22:12
The possibility of the space itself just dissolving into other forms of space was something I think was coming from the technology? Things like, you know, crossing the line, and that triggering a transition. A lot of it was like, how do you make things happen. There was a structure to it that we conceived as we're trying to tell a story. And so you want things to happen in a way that you as the creator are controlling the order of experience because there needs to be an emotional arc. At the same time, you want the user of the peace, the audience, to have the sense that they can wander freely and explore and have that sense of agency. There were a lot of fine line decisions and trade offs. When do we give them freedom? When do we force them? Some of that was just the technical things like when you cross that line, you hear that sound. You're not aware that you've crossed a line, you are just now in a different portion of the geography logically, even if it's not visually. What was interesting I think, in this piece was we decided to figure out how to use that sense of constraint. To recreate the psychological effects of being in a prison space of, you know, you can go up to the fence and you can't go beyond. Whereas, elsewhere, you're walking through walls. That was something that became just a very conscious technique of adapting the technical constraints. But just the technology of how you make things happen in a space to make you feel open to imaginative exploration going deeper, going internally in the garden spaces piece are really imaginative internal spaces. They take you far away and lead you into other kinds of transitions, but the physical space of the fence is a hard wall, and you can see the landscape all around you. The landscape beyond the fence is an important part of the experience, but you can't cross that line. So those were the kinds of things that come to mind quickly.

Rhonda Holberton 24:39
You talk about the kind of arc of experience, is that coming from your writing background more so than the World's Inc or was that kind of collapse together at that point?

Zara Houshmand 24:51
It collapsed together at that point. It was a sense that meant the question that led to it was how do you make this art piece as an experience. The temporal blending in the temporal aspect with the spatial aspect. You wanted to have a beginning, and an end didn't have to have a beginning and an end. It could have been just a game thing that you can play infinitely, but then it's much harder to structure an emotional meaning to it.

Rhonda Holberton 25:31
You know, I am thinking, at the time when you're working in Worlds Inc, if this is website 400, right, not only are there not really conventions for a 3d kind of virtualized experience, there really isn't a ton of conventions for how to interact and be in a digital social space. So thinking now about how we've watched Web 1.0 and the evolution into Web 2.0, which is this kind of highly standardized format for social space, are you thinking at all about Web 3.0 and what might go beyond the Facebook's and the Instagrams of the world.

Zara Houshmand 26:22
I think it's worth stepping back and looking at the social interactions about how we set up beyond Manzanar, that it would never be something you experience, solitary, you alone in front of the screen. The piece itself has all the solitude in it, and you are alone in the space. But it has always been conceived as an installation where you are sharing the experience, the joystick, with the other people there present. I think it's been really important that this is something we sort of did tentatively. I think the original motivation had more to do with how do we get this taken seriously as art as opposed to just being a CD we can send out because at that point, the technical social media was just alien to the art world. We did want it to be taken seriously. So we said, here's the rule, it has to be an installation, and then we observed how that happened. When people shared the joystick, we saw this intergenerational thing happening in some of the early exhibitions in Seattle, where there was a lot of presence of the Japanese American community. Grandparents explaining to their kids what they'd seen in experience, and the kids handling the technology that was really moving and very rich. Coming out of that, I think for myself, I'm most interested in how technology can interact with audiences that are together, and not in solitude. What it means to have an interactive piece in a theater setting, and I'm grappling with that now in a very different realm, it's tricky, but also rich. I don't think it needs to be very much, as it's unique to each piece and how you frame that in another realm. I kind of let go of the technology piece for many, many years, because my sense of it was what we could do. With the programming, the computer screen experience was so vastly inferior to the imaginative realms and the worlds I could create just by writing. In this, there's no better VR than a novel. In terms of real world building, it doesn't compare with what you're concerned with in the content and experience, as opposed to what can we do with this new technology? If it's about what you want, what you have to say, it doesn't hold up yet. I see that also as it's used in theater and as techniques get repeated. Then they get locked down and that becomes the language of medium video projections in theater. It very quickly becomes stale because it's more focused on how you use the technology than on what you actually have to say. In my own practice and in my own life, I've distanced myself from it. But I'm interested in dropping back in for specific ideas, specific projects where it might be appropriate.

Rhonda Holberton 29:55
So beautiful. I think that's a wonderful place as we're both at time, but I also just think that that's a wonderful place to leave it. Thank you so much for your time. We so appreciate your perspective, the love that you're bringing to this kind of history of the metaverse as we're kind of calling it. So thank you so much again for your time!

Zara Houshmand 30:18
Thank you, it's been fun to do this.

References:

Interview Transcript, Zara Houshmand, Fall 2022, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IXDVH6JaBzMcjdSvyVUYzzjV-s3fQxaBuXzw3qAefiQ/edit#heading=h.lhyyzb39a9kl

Interview Questions, Zara Houshmand, Fall 2022, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sv6c3OJgLyBmGIHt_0WZ1BxpEVfuFK4DddtEI940URM/edit#

Artist Website, Zara Houshmand, https://zarahoushmand.com/

Beyond Manzanar (video demo), Tamiko Thiel & Zara Houshmand, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHWPw1pEYpU

National Historic Site, Manzanar, https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm

Media

Video Recording of the Interview via zoom, Conducted December 6, 2022

Kewords

Adapting, Interactivity, Puppetry, Immersion, Multicultural