Commissioned by FTW (For The Win)
for “Side Quest for the Real” project
Le Commun, Geneva · December 2025
[Server_connecting]
Nostalgia isn’t a wish to return.
It’s a system error in time…
a signal that the present has lost its coordinates,
and the mind, desperate for a map,
starts rendering one from memory.
[Low-budget Iranian de_dust2 loading]
The gamenet of early-2000s Iran was never about games.
It was a small republic of screens…
built from lag and dust.
Inside those dim blue rooms,
teenagers rehearsed new forms of proximity.
Years later, I log back into *de_dust2.*
Same CS 1.6, same Iranian servers. the same sunlight baked into pixels.
[Glitch]
Time doesn’t exist here.
It feels less like nostalgia,
and more like a reconnection to a lost topology of relation…
one where dying was only a way to stay connected.
Death becomes a rehearsal of return;
it reloads, it waits.
[Respawn]
In Cyclonopedia,
Reza Negarestani wrote of the Middle East
as a sentient terrain…
a desert that breathes through war.
Oil, dust, decomposition…
its syntax of combustion.
de_dust2 is that theory rendered playable:
a synthetic desert scripted to repeat conflict.
The 12-Day War enters this continuum as its sequel.
Territory becomes interface.
Mourning becomes data.
The desert extends into bandwidth.
Even under bombardment, the network keeps selling itself.
A gamenet in Karaj uploads an advert about missile strikes:
half in jest, half in denial.
The war becomes a marketing filter,
another map loading in the background.
[Respawn]
The desert keeps burning.
The server keeps respawning.
But somewhere inside that loop,
I fall asleep and dream of a ceasefire.
The desert learns to dream of winter.
No one dies here.
We throw light instead of lead.
To dream is just another form of rendering,
where what remains isn’t the memory
but its compression artifact.
And somewhere inside that artifact,
someone’s still in there,
moving, looping, waiting to respawn.
[Silence]
I still daydream about snow in the Iranian deserts…
[End]
:: DIFFRACTIONS :: 