RANA ZANDI
Biography / Origin Node
Rana Zandi was born in Tehran on January 2, 1987. In 2001, at fourteen, she moved to Canada and entered high school with the sense that a life already in formation had been interrupted. She was learning English, adjusting to a new social code, and trying to make herself legible in a country where none of her references yet carried weight.
She graduated from Bayview Secondary School in 2005 and entered York University the following year to study Space Engineering and Communication Science. In a family shaped by academic ambition—parents who valued achievement and a brother working in computer science—the rational path was familiar. But it did not feel like hers. In 2008, she made the harder decision to begin again, enrolling in Sheridan College’s Art Fundamentals program.
By 2009, she was designing posters for Toronto clubs, parties, and nightlife events: a fast education in spectacle, seduction, branding, and who gets seen. That year she entered a relationship that lasted roughly a year and became more public than she had expected. Its breakup, the attention surrounding it, and the backlash that followed broke open a period of crisis that ended in an overdose. During recovery, she assembled the portfolio that took her into OCAD University’s Graphic Design program. It was an early encounter with a question she has never stopped returning to: what happens when a woman’s image, story, and desirability become material for other people to narrate?
The relationship has resurfaced in several interviews and remains part of the emotional DNA of #SAM. It is not a factual retelling. Instead, the story takes its tension—control, longing, shame, obsession, memory, and the unequal power of being represented by someone else—and pushes it into fiction. In #SAM, the question becomes stranger and more dangerous: what happens when a woman builds a digital replica from the intimate traces of a man who once shaped her life? Can reconstruction become authorship, revenge, mourning, or another kind of captivity?
A second loss gave this question its research form. While finishing her undergraduate work, Zandi’s online best friend Reza died unexpectedly. They had never met in person, but their connection had been real. After his death, she became absorbed by his Facebook page: messages, photos, comments, statuses, and the peculiar fact that someone could be gone while their social presence remained available to scroll through. She began asking whether those traces could be organized into more than an archive—whether a system built from a person’s data might hold a partial, interactive version of how they attended to the world.
That line of inquiry became The Parallel Mind, her 2018 MA thesis in Digital Futures at OCAD University. Before large language models became a mainstream interface, Zandi was asking whether digital traces, attention, memory, and conversational structure could produce a meaningful but incomplete model of a person. The work was never a promise of resurrection. It was a confrontation with the seduction and danger of replicas: the difference between a person and a system that can convincingly occupy the space they left behind.
When her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Zandi returned to York University for Cognitive Science, determined to investigate the gaps she saw in her own theory: perception, attention, language, memory, consciousness, and the limits of simulation. Her mother’s death later reignited the original itch behind The Parallel Mind. The ideas that had been speculative in 2018 now live inside everyday tools: ChatGPT, generative AI, voice systems, searchable personal archives, and platforms able to synthesize patterns from enormous amounts of data.
For Zandi, the possibility of an AI-based conversational presence built from a loved one’s messages, images, recordings, and accumulated digital traces is neither simple comfort nor science fiction. It is a real ethical problem and a deeply personal one. Such a system would not be her mother. But it could test the boundary between memory and interface: what it means to encounter a response shaped by the data of someone who cannot answer for herself, and what responsibilities come with designing that encounter.
During the Woman, Life, Freedom era, Zandi also made public visibility part of her practice. She became publicly known in Iranian circles as the first Iranian OnlyFans creator, using a platform often reduced to transaction to explore desire, agency, cultural judgment, image control, and the price of being seen. The experience brought financial independence at a difficult time, but it also sharpened her understanding of how platforms can turn intimacy into exchange. Object of Desire emerged from this period: not as a mask, but as a deliberately authored public self, testing the space between persona, labor, performance, and survival.
Today, Zandi maintains a selective client practice while expanding Ex0Self, her long-running digital persona and creative field. Her work moves between AI creative direction, original story worlds, music, visual systems, performance, and cultural memory. It does not treat technology as neutral or magic. It asks who is being reconstructed, who controls the source material, what is lost when a person becomes data, and whether making a replica can ever repair the rupture that produced it.
Rana Zandi’s work begins where biography becomes infrastructure: in the messages left behind, the version of a woman that strangers think they know, the lover remembered too clearly, the mother whose voice still lives in an archive, and the question of whether a machine can carry a trace without pretending to be the life itself.