The following four texts are selected from an on-going archive we have been developing since 2016. The texts are written description of scenes of opium smoking in early modern to contemporary Iranian fictions. Each text is a third-person account abstracted from the original smoking scene. Reading them together one follows...
The following four audio files are extracted from breath sounds which were generated by a computer model simulating inhalation of opium smoke. Each file depicts one breath cycle. We developed the model for a sound installation titled Labour Lung (2021). The simulation model adopts algorithmic methods of calculation used in...
If we were to wonder how opium inserted itself in history, the most straightforward answer would probably be: as smoke and through inhalation. In 1878 the late Qing writer Zhang Changjia writes the following paragraphs about opium in his text “Yanhua, ‘Opium Talk’,” published in a Qing ‘collectanea’ in Shanghai:...