Angels Don’t Die In Multiplayer (2025) is a short video essay by Parham Ghalamdar, made from AI-generated imagery and screen recordings of social media posts. It examines the feed as a parallel theatre of conflict during the 2025 Twelve-Day Iran–Israel war, where memes and synthetic visions helped shape fear, belief and permission for violence.
The film follows circulating claims about djinn and occult “talismans” as they move between belief and mockery. Rather than treating AI-generated and game-engine imagery as spectacle, the work considers images as infrastructure: signals that gain force through repetition and influence how events are perceived and acted upon. The angel at the film’s centre hovers between myth, algorithm and first-person-shooter logic.
The video essay develops alongside Ghalamdar’s writing on the same subject, including “Derealized Deterrence: Belief as Payload in the Theater of the Feed,” co-authored with Parsa Esmaeilzadeh and published by Diffractions Collective, and a related text in SUM Journal, issue 24.
FILM DETAILS
Experimental / video essay
Runtime: 3 minutes 46 seconds
Completed: 16 July 2025
Language: English
Format: Digital, colour, 16:9
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Side Quest For The Real, Le Commun, Geneva — 2 December 2025
Adrift: despliegue de máquinas operativas, Mexico City — 12 December 2025
YOTTA.INTERFACE [SCREENING], Living Gallery, Brooklyn — 18 December 2025
Šum Journal #24 & #25 Launch, Weibel Institute, Vienna — 14 January 2026
adrift: post-internet & experimental media, Art Week CDMX — Official Selection, 4 February 2026
Radical Futurism — WaveForms 2026, Boston — Official Selection, 12 February 2026
Navigating Unreality Mode, ŠUM Journal, Ljubljana / online — 10 March 2026
FilmFreeway listing: https://filmfreeway.com/12daywar
