A Telegram Bestiary
A Telegram Bestiary, is somewhere between studying medieval bestiaries and a practice of writing myself into a world that I recognize in Telegram animal media. They are videos that I receive from my family's Telegram group-posted animal video gossip in Tehran. They inspire a form of amateur ethnographic hunting, or speculation-gathering of impressions. And I try in sifting and cultivating them as expressions, if not idealizations, to prepare myself into a speculative concept of worlding in Tehran that I think is urgently needed. How do you describe an enigmatic scene, banal and repetitive event, or a constitutive differing? What does it mean to think descriptively about how Tehran worlds?
Telegram, is the most used cloud-based instant messaging in Iran (until 2018). From bestiaric point of view, it is an energetic interfacing device for tele and trafficking human-user-animal encounters that happen through the fantastical medium of visual media. Bestiary, is the name of a pre-modern technique of crafting connections and discontinuities that links and defines bodies, things, types, animals, humans by the affects they are capable of. They are composed in the inseparability of what is taken as perceived and what is imagined. Together they are imagined as impure ecologies of potentials.
