Max kazemzadeh, mfa, phd (Work & Research)

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“Beirithms” (“Bei”: Beijing “rithms”: Algorithms) is an interactive digital, kinetic, geo-location performance project, that uses algorithmic functions calculated in a custom GPS Tracking Android Phone App to direct the user’s or “passengers,” to move around the city of Beijing, China. Influenced by the French Situationists who experimented with numerous rules for navigating Paris with the intention of breaking from routine to re-experience Paris from new perspectives, “Beirithms” will use a custom phone app that, when shaken, will guide the “passengers” through the city of Beijing, on skateboards, with directions and distances as well as required activities, such as dropping a 10 kg bag of rice in a specified GPS location, and then shaking the phone again for the next directive. Directives are intended to guide the user/passenger through the city exposing elements of that city outside of their control and with navigational chance. The movements of the user/passenger in the “field” are tracked via GPS and remapped to the museum space, triggering the movement of an automated kinetic interactive funnel that drops grains of rice onto the museum floor into piles, creating a topological record of how long passengers have been in certain areas of the city, like a three dimensional hourglass. When passengers spend more time in a particular part of the city, the piles of rice in the installation space are higher or taller in that remapped room in the museum, and when passengers spend less time in a particular area of the city, the piles of rice are lower or shorter. In addition to the topological rice printer in the Beirithms installation, there is also a projection of a map of Beijing. On this map, visitors will see the path of the passengers in the “field,” moving around Beijing as directed by their phone app. Visitors will also notice the locations where passengers have been directed to drop a 10kg bag of rice.

Beirithms was developed as a collaboration between artists Max Kazemzadeh and Reza Safavi, which employed different algorithms, materials, activities, and gestures to reflect significant elements inherent within the cultures of the communities where these projects exhibited. Egyrithms’14, the first of these kinds of projects, which exhibited at Di-Egy Festival in 2013, explored the characteristics latent within navigating Cairo. Dabarithms’14, which exhibited at the ISEA 2014 Festival, explored Dubai by mapping the passengers GPS movements digitally and triggering nine fairy drones to launch from their perch and fly away when the “find a wish” directive appeared within the user/participant’s phone app.

The algorithms/navigational rules, content, and activities generated from the directives and actions of Beirithms ’16, and the other Situationist inspired projects, are all influenced by the location, culture, current events and time it is made.

READ BELOW FOR A DEEPER EVALUATION OF THE PROJECT:

er than navigating a city exclusively through practical objectives, established routes, or familiar routines, the dérive encourages participants to wander in ways that reveal how urban environments shape perception, behavior, and emotion.

Conventional navigation treats a city as a network of destinations connected by the most efficient routes. The Situationist approach, by contrast, treats the city as an experiential field: a place whose meanings emerge through encounters, detours, interruptions, and unexpected relationships between people and their surroundings.

Beirithms adapts this approach through a custom GPS-tracking application. Participants shake their phones to receive new directions, distances, and activities. These instructions determine where they travel and what they must do along the way, including depositing a ten-kilogram bag of rice at a designated GPS location.

The phone becomes an instrument for generating an alternative experience of Beijing. Instead of simply choosing where to go, participants temporarily surrender some navigational control to an algorithm. They must respond to places, distances, and circumstances that may have little connection to their ordinary intentions.

This introduces a productive contradiction. The Situationist dérive seeks to interrupt predetermined behavior, yet Beirithms uses a designed system of rules to produce that interruption. The participant experiences chance, but the chance is algorithmically structured.

This tension is central to the work. Freedom does not emerge from the complete absence of rules; it emerges here through the encounter between a person’s agency and a system that redirects it. Participants remain active agents, but their choices unfold within a framework established by the artists, the application, and the city itself.

The work therefore raises an important question: Can an algorithm help us escape habitual patterns, or does it merely replace one set of instructions with another?

2. Algorithmic agency: Who determines the route?

The custom application functions as a kind of distributed author. It generates directions and activities, but it does not independently determine the entire experience. The participant must interpret the instructions, move through the environment, respond to obstacles, and carry out the required actions. Beijing, in turn, contributes its own unpredictable conditions: traffic, architecture, crowds, weather, distances, and the practical realities of moving through a large city.

The resulting performance is authored across several interacting systems:

• The artists establish the conceptual framework, rules, and relationships between movement and material.
• The algorithm produces navigational instructions and sequences of activity.
• The participants embody those instructions through movement and action.
• The city introduces environmental conditions that cannot be completely anticipated or controlled.
• The installation converts the resulting GPS data into a physical representation of the performance.

This distribution of authorship complicates the idea of the artwork as an object created entirely by an individual artist. The work instead becomes a process that unfolds through relations among people, software, infrastructure, and place.

The application is not merely a neutral tool for recording activity. It actively shapes what participants do by deciding which direction they encounter next and which tasks become part of their experience. The artwork therefore reveals a feature of algorithmic systems that extends far beyond art: systems of recommendation, navigation, logistics, and scheduling do not simply describe the world. They influence how people move through it.

Yet Beirithms does not necessarily present this influence as entirely oppressive. Its rules can create unfamiliar encounters and make otherwise overlooked dimensions of a city perceptible. The same system that limits certain choices can produce experiences that would not otherwise occur.

The philosophical issue is not simply whether algorithms control us. It is how control, agency, and discovery are negotiated when human intentions become entangled with computational systems.

3. Rice as material, metaphor, and measure

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The choice of rice is fundamental to Beirithms. Rather than representing participants’ movements exclusively through numbers, lines, or digital graphics, the work translates GPS data into the accumulation of a tangible substance. Rice becomes the material through which the city is remembered.

Rice carries multiple associations. It is food, agricultural product, commodity, and a staple of everyday life in many societies, including China. Its presence evokes relationships among land, cultivation, distribution, consumption, and survival. At the same time, rice is composed of countless individual grains, each materially similar to the next. This makes it particularly effective for a system that converts a continuous stream of movement data into accumulated physical quantities.

The conceptual power of the material emerges from the relationship between its ordinariness and its new function. A grain of rice is familiar and seemingly insignificant. Yet thousands of grains can create a visible landscape, and their distribution can record patterns of human activity across a distant urban environment.

Rice thus operates simultaneously as a cultural material and a unit of artistic measurement. It connects the abstract information produced by GPS tracking to a substance that can be seen, touched, accumulated, transported, and eventually scattered.

This conversion invites several interpretations.

First, rice introduces a material dimension into an otherwise invisible technological process. GPS data ordinarily remains intangible, accessible through coordinates, maps, and numerical records. In Beirithms, information becomes matter. The audience encounters not just a representation of movement but a physical consequence of its measurement.

Second, rice makes the accumulation of experience visible. Each grain contributes to a pile whose height corresponds to the amount of time participants have spent in a particular area. The material therefore embodies duration: the longer the recorded presence, the greater the accumulation.

Third, rice establishes a connection between urban navigation and systems of material distribution. The participants carry rice through the city, deposit bags at designated locations, and contribute to a museum installation that redistributes the material into a spatial record. The artwork links bodily movement to the circulation of a resource.

It would be too reductive, however, to assume that rice necessarily represents a single, definitive Chinese cultural identity. Its significance is more productive when understood as open-ended: it is a familiar material whose agricultural, economic, domestic, and cultural associations enrich the work without exhausting its meaning.

The material’s transformation is also conceptually important. Rice that could ordinarily be measured by weight or used as food becomes a sculptural medium for representing time and space. The work invites us to reconsider how everyday materials acquire new meanings when placed within technological and artistic systems.

4. The rice printer: Turning movement into a topography of time

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The automated funnel mechanism is the work’s central translation device. GPS data from participants moving through Beijing is remapped into the museum, where a kinetic system releases grains of rice into piles. Areas in which participants spend more time produce taller accumulations; areas associated with shorter visits produce lower ones.

This mechanism transforms a record of human movement into a physical landscape. It can be understood as a kind of topological printer: rather than printing lines and images onto a flat surface, it produces a three-dimensional arrangement of material that represents the distribution of recorded activity.

The metaphor of printing is especially revealing. A conventional printer translates digital information into marks on a surface. The rice printer similarly translates information into material form, but its output is spatial and accumulative. It does not simply reproduce a preexisting image; it builds a landscape through the successive deposition of grains.

The installation consequently occupies a space between data visualization, kinetic sculpture, and performance documentation.

Its topography differs from a conventional map. A standard map typically represents roads, boundaries, buildings, and geographic relationships. Beirithms instead emphasizes the temporal intensity of human presence. The resulting piles indicate not simply where participants went, but where they spent time.

In this sense, the installation offers an alternative geography of Beijing. It is not a representation of the city as a fixed physical structure, but of the city as encountered and inhabited by particular bodies following particular instructions.

The distinction matters because a city is experienced differently depending on where people stop, how long they remain, which routes they take, and what circumstances bring them to a particular location. Two people can travel through the same streets and produce very different experiential geographies.

The rice piles make this difference visible, but they also introduce a critical question: What aspects of a lived experience survive when movement is translated into data?

The installation records duration and location, but it cannot, by itself, establish why someone remained in a place. A long stop might result from curiosity, fatigue, confusion, a social encounter, an obstacle, or the requirements of a task. The physical height of a pile cannot distinguish among these possibilities.

This gap between measurable activity and lived meaning is one of the work’s most productive tensions. The installation gives movement a material form, while simultaneously revealing the limits of any system that attempts to represent experience through a restricted set of variables.

The rice landscape is therefore not Beijing itself. It is a partial, mediated interpretation of Beijing—one produced through the artists’ rules, the application’s instructions, participants’ actions, and the installation’s methods of translating data.

5. The hourglass: Duration, accumulation, and the passage of time

The description of the installation as a three-dimensional hourglass offers a particularly rich philosophical framework.

An hourglass makes time visible by allowing one quantity of material to move gradually into another. Its operation depends on a simple relationship between material flow and duration. Although the grains do not contain time in themselves, their movement provides a visible measure of its passage.

In Beirithms, this relationship becomes more complex. Rice is not simply transferred from one chamber to another at a constant rate. Instead, it accumulates according to the spatial and temporal patterns of participants’ movements. The result is a kind of distributed hourglass in which time is represented across a geographic field.

The installation does not merely indicate that time has passed. It gives duration a location and a shape.

A participant’s time in a particular area becomes material accumulation in a corresponding part of the museum. Duration, ordinarily experienced as an intangible and continuous process, is externalized into visible differences in height and volume.

This invites a distinction between clock time and lived time.

Clock time divides experience into standardized units. GPS records can establish coordinates and timestamps, while software can calculate duration and transform it into quantities. Lived time, however, is subjective and qualitative. A few minutes spent waiting for someone may feel very different from a few minutes spent discovering an unfamiliar place.

The rice printer can register a measurable interval, but it cannot directly reproduce the quality of that interval. Its piles are physical records of duration, not complete representations of what that duration meant to the person experiencing it.

This distinction recalls philosophical accounts of time that differentiate measurable succession from the continuous, qualitative character of lived experience. It also connects the work to a broader contemporary condition in which human activities increasingly become quantifiable through digital devices.

Fitness trackers, navigation systems, location services, and productivity applications routinely transform movement and time into data. Such systems can make patterns visible and support useful decisions, but they can also encourage the assumption that what can be measured is the most important part of an experience.

Beirithms both participates in and complicates this logic. It uses measurement to produce a compelling physical artwork, but its material output also reminds viewers that a record of duration is not equivalent to the experience of time itself.

The hourglass is thus not merely a visual analogy. It becomes a philosophical model for the transformation of lived experience into measurable, accumulated, and displayed information.

6. The museum and the city: A distributed geography

The installation establishes a relationship between two distinct spaces: Beijing, where participants move, and the museum, where their movements become visible as a material landscape.

These spaces are connected through GPS, software, projection, and the automated funnel. Yet they are not identical. The museum does not reproduce the streets, buildings, social encounters, or physical conditions of Beijing. Instead, it receives a translation of activity occurring elsewhere.

The projected map and the rice piles provide two complementary representations of the same process.

• The projected map displays routes and designated rice-drop locations, making the geographic pattern of the performance legible.
• The rice printer translates recorded time spent in different areas into differences in physical accumulation, giving the movement a sculptural form.

One representation is primarily cartographic; the other is material and topological. The map allows viewers to follow where participants have gone, while the rice piles emphasize the relative duration of their presence.

Together, they create a layered understanding of urban experience. The map suggests the city’s spatial network; the installation reveals a temporal dimension within that network.

The museum becomes a remote site of participation. Visitors who did not travel through Beijing can nevertheless encounter a physical consequence of that journey. Their experience is indirect, but it is not purely documentary: the rice printer continues to produce material change in response to actions taking place elsewhere.

This is an important feature of networked and locative media. An artwork can operate across multiple locations, with actions in one place generating consequences in another. Its identity resides not in a single object or site, but in the relationships among participants, devices, environments, and audiences.

The result is a form of distributed performance. The participants in Beijing enact the work through movement, while the installation in the museum makes that movement perceptible to a second audience. The two groups occupy different positions within the same system.

This arrangement also raises questions about mediation. Museum visitors see a representation of the participants’ activity, not the activity in its entirety. They encounter a map and a sculptural trace shaped by the artwork’s technical and conceptual choices. The system makes certain relationships visible while leaving others outside its frame.

The installation therefore demonstrates both the possibilities and the limitations of mediated presence. Technology can connect distant experiences, but it always does so through a process of selection and translation.

7. The ten-kilogram rice bags: Labor, obligation, and the weight of participation

The requirement that participants transport and deposit a ten-kilogram bag of rice introduces a striking physical dimension to the project. Unlike an ordinary digital instruction, this task cannot be completed solely by pressing a button or following a line on a screen. It requires participants to engage their bodies with a material object and with the practical conditions of urban movement.

The weight of the rice makes the algorithm’s directions tangible. Navigation becomes labor: the participant must carry something, move it through the city, and leave it at a designated location.

This requirement changes the relationship between the user and the application. The phone may appear to be a lightweight interface, but its instructions can produce substantial physical demands. A digital directive becomes an embodied obligation.

The rice bag also creates an interesting contrast with the rice printer. In the city, rice is a mass that must be transported and deposited. In the museum, rice becomes a dispersed material that accumulates into a sculptural representation of movement. The same substance occupies two different roles: first, an object carried through urban space; then, a medium for recording spatial experience.

The relationship between these roles suggests a transformation from labor into representation. Participants physically undertake the journey, while the museum receives a visual and material record of the resulting movement.

This may prompt questions about the relationship between physical effort and the production of information. In many contemporary technological systems, the effort of users is converted into data that can be stored, interpreted, or displayed. Beirithms makes that conversion unusually visible by connecting bodily labor to an accumulating sculptural output.

The work should not necessarily be read as a direct critique of labor exploitation. The available description does not establish that as its sole intention. Rather, the task opens a broader interpretive question: what happens when an apparently playful system assigns physical obligations to its participants, and those obligations become part of a larger apparatus for producing knowledge?

The weight of the rice makes the algorithm’s authority felt in the body. The participant does not merely receive information; they must act upon it.

8. Cultural specificity and the problem of representing Beijing

Beirithms belongs to a series of projects that adapt algorithmic instructions, materials, gestures, and activities to the locations in which they are presented. Egyrithms explored Cairo; Dabarithms engaged Dubai; and Beirithms developed a distinct relationship to Beijing.

This site-specific approach resists the idea that an interactive artwork should function identically everywhere. Instead, the artists treat the city as an active contributor to the work’s conceptual structure. Location, cultural context, current events, and the circumstances of the project’s production inform the instructions and the resulting experience.

Beijing is therefore not simply a backdrop against which a generic GPS performance takes place. It is the particular urban environment through which the participants move and from which the work derives its geographic and temporal record.

Nevertheless, a distinction is necessary between engaging a cultural context and claiming to represent an entire culture. A city as large and complex as Beijing cannot be reduced to a single material, activity, or set of navigational experiences. Rice may carry associations with agriculture, food, commerce, and everyday life, but it cannot stand as a comprehensive symbol of Chinese identity.

The work is strongest when its cultural specificity is understood as a point of departure for inquiry rather than a definitive statement about Beijing or its inhabitants. Its rules generate encounters with a particular city, but the resulting map and installation remain partial interpretations shaped by the project’s own methods.

This limitation is not necessarily a weakness. It highlights a central issue in all site-specific art: how can an artwork respond meaningfully to a place without suggesting that a limited set of observations captures the place in its entirety?

The GPS application makes this question especially relevant. A location can be precisely identified by coordinates without being fully understood. Geographic precision is not the same as cultural knowledge.

Beirithms thus invites viewers to distinguish between locating a place and understanding it. Its technology can track where participants travel, but the meaning of those movements remains open to interpretation.

9. Data visualization and the politics of visibility

The rice printer can also be understood within the broader context of data visualization. Contemporary life produces enormous quantities of information about where people go, how long they stay, and how they interact with their surroundings. Such data is often rendered through maps, graphs, heat maps, and statistical models.

Beirithms takes a different approach. Rather than presenting the data only as a screen-based visualization, it gives the data a material presence. The viewer encounters accumulated grains rather than merely reading numerical values.

This choice changes the experience of data in several ways.

First, it gives information a physical scale. A difference in duration becomes a difference in height. Abstract quantities acquire visible volume and spatial presence.

Second, it emphasizes accumulation. Instead of treating each GPS record as an isolated event, the installation builds a larger structure through repeated deposition. The sculpture embodies the cumulative effect of many small actions.

Third, it makes the visualization perceptible as an artistic construction. The audience can see that the landscape has been produced by a mechanism, and that the relationship between data and physical output depends on the system’s design.

This last point is especially important. Data visualizations can appear objective because they use numerical information, but the choices governing what is measured, how it is processed, and how it is displayed shape what the audience sees.

In Beirithms, time spent in an area determines the relative height of the rice pile. That decision privileges duration as a meaningful variable. Other dimensions of experience—emotion, social interaction, personal significance, or the reasons behind a particular route—remain largely unrepresented.

The installation consequently offers a useful reflection on the politics of visibility: to make some aspects of experience visible is also to leave other aspects unrepresented.

The work does not need to reject measurement to make this point. Its artistic force depends on measurement. Rather, it invites us to recognize that every system of representation establishes a particular relationship between the world and the information it produces.

The rice piles are compelling precisely because they make data tangible, while also revealing that the material landscape is a constructed interpretation rather than a neutral mirror of reality.

10. From Egyrithms to Dabarithms to Beirithms: Algorithms as culturally situated systems

The broader series provides an important framework for understanding Beirithms. The artists do not simply repeat one interactive format across multiple cities. Instead, they adapt the relationship among location, movement, algorithm, material, and audience.

In Egyrithms, the navigational experience of Cairo served as the basis for a Situationist-inspired exploration. In Dabarithms, participants’ GPS movements in Dubai were mapped digitally, and a directive to “find a wish” triggered the launch of nine fairy drones from their perch. In Beirithms, the tracked movements of participants in Beijing activate a kinetic mechanism that deposits rice into sculptural piles.

These differences are conceptually significant.

The same general framework—algorithmically directed movement through an urban environment—can generate very different artistic outcomes depending on the materials, activities, and systems of response selected for each project.

In Dabarithms, the drone launch creates a dramatic event: a directive produces the release and flight of objects into space. In Beirithms, the process is accumulative: movement produces a gradually developing landscape. One emphasizes the moment of release; the other emphasizes the material residue of duration.

The projects therefore explore different ways of translating digital instructions into physical consequences. They demonstrate that an algorithm is not simply a mathematical structure detached from culture. Its significance also depends on what it asks people to do, what materials it activates, and how its results are made perceptible.

This is one of the series’ strongest conceptual propositions: a shared technological framework does not have to generate a uniform experience. Its meaning can change through its relationship to a specific location and the cultural, material, and temporal conditions of that location.

At the same time, the series makes the artists’ role in these translations visible. They decide which relationships are emphasized, which activities become instructions, and which physical mechanisms convert participants’ movements into an artwork.

The algorithm may generate the next directive, but the artistic framework determines the kinds of experiences that the algorithm can produce.

11. Philosophical impact: The city as an accumulated record of human experience

The significance of Beirithms ultimately extends beyond GPS tracking or interactive sculpture. It proposes a way of thinking about cities as places continually shaped by movement, duration, and material activity.

A city is commonly represented through its infrastructure: roads, buildings, transportation networks, boundaries, and property divisions. These systems are essential, but they do not fully explain how a city is experienced. Human movement creates additional, temporary geographies: routes of curiosity, patterns of waiting, unexpected encounters, repeated habits, and moments of prolonged presence.

Beirithms makes a portion of this experiential geography visible. It converts the participants’ journeys into a landscape that is neither a conventional map nor an independent sculpture. It is a physical record of movement, filtered through a designed system of instructions and measurement.

This process brings together three interconnected dimensions:

• Space: Participants move through Beijing, following directions and carrying out tasks.
• Time: Their duration in particular locations becomes a measurable variable.
• Matter: The resulting information is translated into accumulations of rice within the museum.

The work’s conceptual structure depends on the interaction of all three. Space generates movement; movement unfolds through time; time is translated into material accumulation.

The installation thus gives physical form to an otherwise abstract relationship between human activity and urban geography. It asks viewers to consider what a city might look like if it were represented not only through its buildings and roads, but also through the durations of people’s presence.

Yet this transformation remains deliberately incomplete. The rice piles can register the spatial distribution of time, but they cannot fully communicate the experiences that produced them. The installation presents a record of activity without claiming to exhaust the meaning of that activity.

That distinction allows the work to operate both as an experiment in data translation and as a reflection on the limits of representation.

Its philosophical impact lies in this dual movement: it makes experience visible through technology while prompting us to question what the resulting representation leaves behind.

Beirithms does not simply map a city; it materializes a particular way of encountering one. The resulting sculpture is a record of algorithmically directed movement, but it is also an invitation to think differently about the relationship between people, urban environments, time, and the systems through which experience becomes legible.

12. Integrated conceptual framework

Element of the artwork	Conceptual significance
GPS-guided wandering	Disrupts habitual navigation and opens the city to chance encounters.
Custom algorithm	Establishes a tension between programmed direction and participant agency.
Skateboards and physical movement	Make urban navigation an embodied, situated experience.
Ten-kilogram rice bags	Turn digital instructions into physical effort, obligation, and material transport.
Rice grains	Connect ordinary material, accumulation, cultural association, and data representation.
Automated funnel	Translates digital records into physical form, linking computation to kinetic sculpture.
Height of rice piles	Represents the relative duration of participants’ presence in different locations.
Projected map of Beijing	Makes the geographic routes and designated drop-off locations visible.
Museum installation	Establishes a relationship between distant urban activity and a local sculptural environment.
The hourglass analogy	Makes duration visible through material accumulation.
The Egyrithms–Dabarithms–Beirithms series	Demonstrates how a shared algorithmic framework changes through its cultural and material context.