The Lost Woods is a duo exhibition created by Nathan Harper and Babak Ahteshamipour. The work explores digital identity and artificial intelligence set in a mythical setting placed within an appropriated digital location from a popular video game. The space is a mythical space between worlds with fluid identity. The space features real-life “evil beings” paintings by Babak and digital reconstructions of the beings in 3D. They serve as an enemy NPC while still referencing a life outside of cyberspace as physical artifacts. In conversation with these are Nathan’s A.I.-generated hedgehogs trained on hundreds of images of Sonic theHedgehog fan characters. These aviators serve as self-inserts into the fictional world, but disconnected from human input and fully given to nonhuman vision. The titles of the hedgehogs are A.I.-generated by giving a text generator the titles of Babak’s works nearest to them and generating follow up lines.
BY Nathan Harper Babak Ahteshamipour (GR/IR/US)
Nathan Harper is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in north Texas. He received hisMFA from The University of North Texas with a concentration in New Media. His research examines internet culture through spiritual and ritualistic lenses to reinvestigate outpost-enlightenment assumptions about technology and digital society. His work spans a variety of software and mediums, from animation, avatar performance, GAN, virtual reality, and evendirt. His film Drowning in My Sleep has been featured in noteworthy screenings, including at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pylon Lab, and most uniquely, at the Chapel of SantaMaria dei Carcerati in Bologna, Italy. His virtual reality projects have been featured at the BarcúVirtual Art Fair in Columbia and The Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. More can be read about his work in Coeval Magazine and Anti-Materia.org
Babak Ahteshamipour is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Athens, Greece. His practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating topics from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity, exploring them via MMORPGs, video games, internet and pop culture while focusing on themes of coexistence and simultaneity. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa space (Athens, Greece), UNT (University of North Texas), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois), Milan Machinima Festival (Milan, Italy) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast (Thirsk, North Yorkshire) and on the cassette label Jollies (Brooklyn, NYC). His music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Concertzender Radio (Utrecht, Netherlands) and Radio alHara.
