The Distance Within

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the piece roots experience in the body, demonstrating how perception is shaped not just mentally but somatically. Here, the paradoxical sensations of water and desert ask viewers to reflect on how these embodied experiences reveal the layered reality of memory and displacement. For me, these sensations echo the longing for the natural landscapes of Iran and the subtle but persistent nostalgia for the familiar textures and forms of that geography, now reshaped by memory.

This immersive duality also calls on Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, representing a "hybrid space" where the imagined and the real coexist. Within the installation, reality and memory intermingle, embodying the immigrant’s experience of "home" as both a present and a fading past, a space reshaped by memory and longing. As I adapt to my new surroundings in the U.S., the installation reflects a merging of these disparate worlds—the tangible presence of Lake Michigan and the mental landscapes of Iranian deserts—which together create a liminal space filled with longing and familiarity.

In a Lacanian sense, the project is a manifestation of desire and the mirror stage. The desert represents an unattainable ideal, an ever-familiar landscape that echoes one’s origin yet remains elusive, mirroring the immigrant’s search for connection and belonging that is always partially out of reach. This desert within the VR experience embodies my own nostalgia fantasies for Iran’s natural environment, a place that has shaped me yet remains distant and transformed by memory.

From a postcolonial perspective, the installation embodies Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of “unhomeliness”, capturing the sensation of being "caught between worlds" with the uncanny familiarity of “home” that is also irrevocably changed. My adaptation to this new environment highlights the fractures and shifts that come with migration. The VR medium, displacing viewers into a reality neither fully here nor there, mirrors the immigrant’s fractured geography and the haunting resonance of the "unhomely," where I stand between two places with memories of one while physically adjusting to the other.

Conceptually, the sublime is central to this VR experience, creating a visceral confrontation with the vastness of virtual and physical worlds, a sense of awe and estrangement intensified by technological mediation. The dual immersion evokes the digital sublime, presenting a boundless virtual expanse felt within the tactile confinement of water, provoking existential reflection. This boundlessness captures the enormity of migration and the scope of adaptation, underscoring the awe and estrangement I feel in the tension between my physical presence in the U.S. and my rootedness in Iran.

Finally, as a form of daydream and lucid dreaming, the VR headset becomes a portal to hyperreality in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, where digital landscapes complicate and even transcend the real. The viewer’s sensory displacement becomes a meditation on migration, nostalgia, and identity in flux, crafting a space that is both an escape from and an engagement with the existential longing for a homeland that has transformed. As a lucid dream, the VR experience reflects my deep connection to Iran, where memories of landscapes serve as both refuge and reminder.

Inspired by the paradoxical wish to be "elsewhere," the installation embodies the immigrant experience—familiar in form, yet alien in nature—blending tactile reality with virtual dreamscapes. Through this fusion, The Distance Within invites viewers to explore the fluid boundaries of presence and absence, reality and memory, and here and elsewhere, and to contemplate the duality of nostalgia and adaptation in the search for belonging.