EVENT: BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR (OCTOBER 10—23 2025, ONLINE)
Tell no Friend or Foe apart: Hell Unleashed
digital video, color, sound, 6’ 45”, 2025, Iran/Greece
created by Babak Ahteshamipour
World premiere
This work is presented in collaboration with Octobre Numérique-Faire Monde festival in Arles, France
Tell no Friend or Foe apart: Hell Unleashed (2025) is a machinima composed from a heavily modified version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and additional footage sourced from World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (2010). Presented as a sequel to Unborn in the Sugar-Coated Caffeine Induced Heat of the Moment, the work centres on a non-human avatar navigating a series of destabilised, fire-scorched environments. Rejecting conventional gameplay goals, the protagonist opens portals rather than closing them, reversing the moral structure of the original narrative. The machinima explores themes of political refusal, systemic collapse, and racial liminality, positioning the machine as a figure suspended between exploitation and obsolescence. Intertwining imperial fantasy aesthetics with procedural destruction, the video critiques the underlying logics of conquest and control embedded in role-playing games, reframing disorder not as failure but as a possible mode of resistance.
Babak Ahteshamipour (b. 1994) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, musician, graphic designer, writer/researcher, creative director, and curator based between Vienna (AT) and Athens (GR), with a background in mining and materials science engineering. His practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs the actual, aimed at correlating topics from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity, exploring them via gaming and internet culture with a focus on affect, chronopolitics and coexistence. His work has been presented at festivals, venues, galleries , museums and institutes such as Centre Pompidou, Onassis ONX, PAF Olomouc, The OverKill Festival, The Wrong TV, Neo Shibuya TV, Experimental Sound Studio and Milan Machinima Festival. He has released music on the independent labels Industrial Coast and Jollies. His compositions have been broadcast on radio platforms like LYL Radio, Stegi Radio and Internet Public Radio. Additionally, he has been a resident on Radio Raheem and Fade Radio. He has performed and shared the stage with artists such as Zoviet France, HELM and MSHR, and has produced video clips for musicians such as Fire-Toolz and Digifae. His work has been featured on publications, magazines and platforms such as CTM Festival’s magazine, FIBER festival’s dossier, Bandcamp daily, COEVAL magazine and KIBLIND. He holds an Msc in Minerals Resources Engineering from the Technical University of Crete.