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“The Diaphanous Pause : A Description of Inability” :The "Words in Walls"


"Words in Walls" is an ongoing archival project that documents political slogans painted across the walls of various Iranian cities, most of them photographed during my last visit to Tehran in March, at a time when the streets echoed with the pulse of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

The archive currently contains over 3400 augmented images, compiled in a folder titled "TheWalls", along with still frames extracted from short video recordings, some captured in my absence, sent from those still immersed in the unfolding reality also the internet archive of slogans. Many had been scratched out, painted over, or partially erased. Their disappearance was not complete, but deliberate traces of violence left behind  


In an attempt to bridge the growing void between my diasporic perspective and the revolution I could no longer physically witness, I developed a Convolutional Neural Network script (TheWall.ipynb) to generate images that resemble the original slogans. The idea was to simulate presence—to create new walls where my distance had rendered silence.

Despite several iterations and adjustments across multiple neural network layers, the outcomes remained fractured, blurred, noisy reconstructions. These images do not replicate clarity; they express failure. The algorithm becomes a testament to distance, to the inability to recreate what is gone.

The code, in this sense, becomes both a method and a monument—a description of inability.