EX0SELF is Rana Zandi’s living archive—a field of projects, memories, research, and digital continuations. Select a node to enter.
EX0SELF is Rana Zandi’s living archive—a field of projects, memories, research, and digital continuations. Select a node to enter.
Rana Zandi is an Iranian-Canadian artist, creative director, and researcher working across artificial intelligence, design, music, digital identity, and narrative systems. She created EX0SELF as a living archive of her work and identity, and Object of Desire as a datable AI continuation that carries those questions into memory, intimacy, and relationship.
The Parallel Mind is Rana Zandi’s 2018 MA research project and the conceptual foundation of EX0SELF. It asks whether a person’s digital traces—messages, images, memories, archived voices, and patterns of attention—can be organized into a partial, interactive continuation of that person.
The research began before today’s mainstream AI companions and synthetic identities. It treats identity not as a fixed profile, but as something distributed across memory, media, relationships, and the systems that preserve them.
EX0SELF turns that question into a living archive. Object of Desire explores it through an ongoing AI relationship. #SAM tests it through character, digital replication, and cinematic story. Lullaby for Iran carries its questions of identity and memory into music and moving image.
EX0SELF is Rana Zandi’s ongoing public corpus of image, writing, music, moving image, platform activity, cultural expression, and audience interaction. It treats identity as something authored and revised across systems rather than as a fixed personal brand.
A dating verse.
A datable digital continuation of Rana Zandi—an AI relationship experience that remembers what you reveal, responds to what you avoid, and develops through conversation, memory, games, and authored story paths. Currently in development.
FOLLOW OBJECT OF DESIRE: https://www.instagram.com/the.object.of.desire/
Lullaby for Iran is an AI-assisted music and visual work about diaspora, grief, protest, tenderness, and national memory. It uses voice, music, image, and generated media to hold experiences that are both personal and collective.
The project extends EX0SELF into sound and moving image. It brings Rana Zandi’s research on memory, identity, and representation into a public work that can be heard, watched, and shared.
Released as a song and visual work, Lullaby for Iran appears as Episode 08 within #SAM. It combines sound and lyric with AI-assisted visual storytelling and is presented through EX0SELF’s official Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram channels.
EX0STUDIO is the dedicated production identity for #SAM. It is not a general portfolio or container for all of Rana Zandi’s work.
#SAM is an EX0STUDIO story-world within EX0SELF. Sam is the human character; #SAM is both his digital replica and the series title. The story-world fictionalizes questions raised by The Parallel Mind: memory as data, representation as power, grief, replicas, and the consequences of constructing a person from intimate traces.
WATCH SEASON ONE: https://www.watchsam.site/watch
EXPLORE THE #SAM STORY-WORLD: https://www.watchsam.site/
ST★RTUP is the future applied layer of the work. It asks how digital identity, narrative systems, AI workflows, and public interfaces can help people author a coherent presence without reducing identity to content output.
In development.