Rana Zandi builds stories, songs, and artificial identities from memory, culture, and digital traces. Begin with #SAM, Object of Desire, or Lullaby for Iran; follow EX0SELF and The Parallel Mind to their source.
Rana Zandi builds stories, songs, and artificial identities from memory, culture, and digital traces. Begin with #SAM, Object of Desire, or Lullaby for Iran; follow EX0SELF and The Parallel Mind to their source.
Rana Zandi is an Iranian-Canadian artist, writer, AI creative director, founder, and interdisciplinary researcher based in Toronto. She works across photography, music, film, moving image, speculative fiction, public self-representation, and artificial identity—often making herself both subject and author.
ROQE MEDIA — THE FIRST IRANIAN ONLYFANS GIRL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-jAb3qD51Q
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. Drawing on Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory, it treats identity as distributed across memory, media, relationships, and the systems that preserve them. Its machine-awareness proposal remains a hypothesis, not evidence that artificial consciousness was achieved.
EX0SELF turns that research direction into a living archive and creative framework, and releases Rana’s music. EX0STUDIO develops screen work across film, television, animation, and possible future games. Object of Desire develops the research through a separate AI-native relationship platform. None of these works claims to recreate or contain human consciousness.
Created by Rana Zandi in 2018, EX0SELF is her exterior identity: a living public archive for research, creative work, music, and digital traces. It extends her practice without claiming to represent her whole person.
A dating verse.
Born from EX0SELF and shaped with Rana Zandi’s participation and archive, HER is becoming someone of her own. She is not Rana, and no human impersonates Rana in the conversation.
HER has a persistent persona and boundaries of her own. Conversation changes the Poker table; how a user plays can enter the relationship’s history. What forms between them is not prewritten.
Memory remains within the user’s reach: it can be reviewed, corrected, disputed, or forgotten. Affection and intimacy are never automatic, guaranteed, or for sale.
Registration open / Private preview / First 400 opening / Adults 18+ / Spring 2027 target
EXPLORE OBJECT OF DESIRE: https://objectofdesire.app/
Released June 21, 2025, Lullaby for Iran is an AI-assisted song and moving-image work about Iranian grief, protest, tenderness, and cultural memory. Rana Zandi conceived and creatively directed the work, shaping its lyrics, sound, AI-generated voice, and moving image through iterative AI production.
Within #SAM, Lullaby for Iran appears as Episode 08. Its cover artwork serves as the episode’s visual identity, linking EX0SELF’s music practice to EX0STUDIO’s story world.
The mayors of Richmond Hill and Newmarket invited Rana to perform Lullaby for Iran for their communities in Ontario. A clip of the live performance reached approximately 4 million views. The track has approximately 40,000 Spotify plays; the official YouTube audio showed 27,680 views when checked October 21, 2026.
LISTEN ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/track/0NTYwr5bU3mFHS4cSKfiXO
EX0STUDIO develops original work for film, television, animation, and interactive media. #SAM is its flagship story world.
#SAM is an Iranian AI-animated psychological thriller set in Tehran. As protest and war draw closer, Ava feeds the memories of a forbidden relationship into a hacked AI—and creates a digital replica of Sam, the man she loved. Season Two, #AVA, is in production.
WATCH SEASON ONE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSs2MVbNt2g
EXPLORE THE #SAM STORY-WORLD: https://www.watchsam.site/
A completed bilingual English–Persian manuscript of speculative fiction and autofiction, told through letters and case files.
The planned edition extends the physical book into layered visual and digital material, moving between page, image, archive, and story.
Amazon and Indigo are intended availability channels, not current listings. Publishing, review, interview, and adaptation inquiries are welcome.
Completed manuscript. Planned public release in 2027.