Personal website of Babak Fakhamzadeh.
Babak Fakhamzadeh is a creative technologist, digital artist, and researcher whose work focuses on location-based storytelling, walking art, and participatory media. With a background in mathematics and decades of experience in web and mobile development, he has worked internationally with NGOs, media organisations, and cultural institutions to build digital tools that connect people with place, history, and public space. His projects often combine technology, urban exploration, and narrative, using mobile media and interactive platforms to encourage people to engage with their surroundings in new ways.
He is a co-founder of the global walking-arts platform walk · listen · create. Fakhamzadeh is also the creator and maintainer of the Dérive app, a mobile tool that encourages exploratory urban walking inspired by psychogeography. Across his artistic and technical work, he explores how digital tools can reshape how people experience cities, uncover hidden histories, and reclaim agency in navigating the urban environment.
Most recent articles
A pleasant exploration of Jogja
Indonesia is the second country this year which I had not visited before. We flew in to Yogyakarta, from Kuala Lumpur. YIA, the new airport of ‘Jogja’, was opened in early 2020, was then open for three months, to close again because of COVID. In 2022 it was opened permanently. A whole 50k from town, …
• Drifting Through Empire: From the Situationists to Big Tech and the Dérive
Next week, Saturday November 29, I’m hosting a Dérive app workshop in Yogyakarta, together with Kunci and Jalan Gembira. You can still sign up, check the announcement for the signup link. In preparation, we kicked off with an online presentation, to ease participants into concepts surrounding the dérive, specifically its origin with the Situationists, and …
• In an attempt to cross borders
An important reason for this trip halfway around the world was for me to stop in the tiny village of Camallera, in northern Catalunya, for a three day meeting connected to a European collaborative project which the NGO I co-founded is involved in. Here, the bakery only opens at 9am, everyone greets each other on …
• From Streets to Screens: Resisting the Commercialisation of Movement
I had the pleasure of presenting at WALKING – Thinking in Motion, “A transdisciplinary symposium on walking as an artistic practice, spatial experience, and epistemic method in the spirit of Lucius Burckhardt”, by the Swiss Institute for Land and Environmental Art. Being based in Brazil, I couldn’t justify the time or cost to hop across …
• Fragments of the Urban Absurd
A bunch of years ago, I threw together Sauntering verse. Based on an individual going on a walk, it uses what3words as a source for collecting words, related to the locations the person moves through, to construct poetry connected to the person’s journey. Then, the often clunky result can be cleaned up by using ChatGPT, …
• Where Portugal was born
Though the NGO I’m (partially) responsible for, WLC, I’m participating in a four-year European project, partially funded by the EU. The project is called WALC, and it brings together seven European organisations, all involved in walking art. The project’s aim is to create a physical center for walking art in Prespes, northern Greece, with hubs …
• in loving memory
Memory is a profound aspect of human existence. It shapes our identity, influences our decisions, and anchors us to our past. The interplay between remembering and forgetting is crucial in navigating our lives, as each serves a distinct and essential purpose. Remembering is fundamental to our sense of self and continuity. Memories allow us to …
• Of snow and ice
After a good month moving around Europe to collect raw material for the walking piece I was going to produce in Moskosel, in northern Sweden, I made it to my destination. I had managed to squeeze in a week in The Netherlands, during which Natalia also was able to come over, after a conference in …
• In which I go for a walk… on paper
This is part of the work I’m putting together for my residency in Moskosel, in northern Sweden. I wanted to use the opportunity of my residency, which was to consider themes of AR and VR, to explore the possibilities of the rapid rise of AI. Already, I had ChatGPT create two dozen, or so, short texts, …
• In which I go for a walk… on YouTube
This is part of the work I’m putting together for my residency in Moskosel, in northern Sweden. For my main piece, I am creating a work that is to be consumed in a shipping container that will travel Sweden. This work will be based around a number of videos which I shot during two trips, where …
• In which I go for a walk… on Placecloud
Part of the work I’m putting together as part of my residency in Moskosel, in northern Sweden, I wanted to augment reality in a context that made sense as part of my trip towards Moskosel, which took 5 weeks, as I recorded video along the way as raw material for my main piece, and augment …
• In which I go for a walk
In the second half of 2022, I responded to a call for an artist residency in the far north of Sweden. My proposal, a kind of sound walk, or audio-play, with individual components of the story triggered by the listener walking through geofenced areas in an outside space, perhaps a small forest, was to be …
• New York on the Mediterranean
In Tel Aviv I was staying in a pod hotel. The third pod hotel on this trip. This one is very slick and hip, and also not cheap. Though I discovered that Tel Aviv is insanely expensive, perhaps even more so than Jerusalem, making the cost of a night in this pod hotel relatively affordable. …
• Religious tourism in Haifa
Much of Israel is an open air museum. The major Christian sites are the obvious locations to visit, but there is much more. I wanted to visit Haifa, in northern Israel, for the Baháʼí World Centre, the spiritual and administrative heart of the Bahá’í community. Then, close to Haifa, in the nearby town of Acre, …
• The cost of Jerusalem
European budget airlines wouldn’t be European budget airlines, if they didn’t try to squeeze their targets in every possible way. So, Wizzair still charges you extra if you prefer to check in at the counter, instead of online.But, after doing so, I was told I had to present myself at the counter, anyway. Supposedly for …
• Going back a few thousand years
Just before walking into Valletta from the airport, I had done my due diligence and confirmed that that essential chain of providers of sustenance to wary travellers had also made its services available to pilgrims in Malta.But, this being Easter Sunday, all Lidls were closed. Instead, walking through the center of a small settlement between …
• Vedi Napoli
I am not quite sure how calming it is, knowing that I can die now that I have seen Naples. Surely, it would have been more prudent to hold off on seeing Naples for a while. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the referenced phrase in a letter in 1787, when Naples was the capital of …
• Of planes, trains, and metromobiles
I arrived in Nice, close to midnight, only to have to fly out again by 10am. Not that this was planned, though. My host in Nice, a lovely lady with a curious old cat that went by Pistache, apologized multiple times for my misfortune in travel. She had prepared a list of things to sea, …
• In which I go for a walk
A significant number of significant events in my life have been the result of chance occurrences. One such occurrence, though the resulting event is still waiting to be significant, is a call for proposals which my WLC colleague Andrew Stuck sent over late last year, for a 1-month residency in northern Sweden. I responded with …
• Walking times between Sao Paulo metro stations
Like many, I find the typical design of public transport maps rather gorgeous. They speak to my imagination on several levels. There is the challenge of simplifying complex and rich information, simplifying as much as possible, but not more. Then, an extensive public transport network also speaks to the level of service the state provides …
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Dérive app
Dérive is a mobile application designed to encourage exploratory walking through cities using playful prompts and chance-based instructions. Inspired by the Situationist concept of the dérive, a method of drifting through urban environments to experience their psychological and social effects, the app nudges users to move through places in unfamiliar ways rather than following conventional routes. Instead of maps or predefined routes, the app presents users with “task cards” that propose actions, observations, or small interventions in the surrounding environment. These prompts might ask users to follow a particular sound, look for overlooked details, interact with strangers, or reinterpret the built landscape. By introducing randomness and curiosity into walking, the app transforms everyday urban movement into a creative and reflective practice that reveals hidden histories, spatial patterns, and social dynamics. Dérive is used by artists, educators, and curious pedestrians alike to explore cities from new perspectives. It functions both as a personal exploration tool and as a platform for curated “decks” of task cards created by artists, researchers, or communities. Through these decks, the app supports workshops, participatory art projects, and psychogeographic experiments that invite participants to question how cities are structured and how people move through them.
Mythogeography: A guide to walking sideways
2 parts storyThis is the gloriously funny and endlessly fascinating account of the author’s recent journey on foot across the north of England in the footsteps of a man who made the same journey 100 years ago with a dog trouvé called Pontiflunk.Buy it just for his inimitable account of the journey. 1 part handbookThe
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