Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is a duo exhibition created by Nathan Harper and Babak Ahteshamipour for Babak’s album of the same title. The exhibition features five installations set on a garden ship in space exploring themes regarding climate crisis and technocracy by appropriating pop culture and video game references. The installations are built around each track of the album which play respectively at each installation. Babak’s presence in the installations is highlighted with paintings of nonhuman beings, World of Warcraft spell icons and a black hole on which Skeletor is banishing a ghoul from the Warcraft franchise. In conversation with these are Nathan’s dirt sheet prints and paintings, printed with dirt pigment which are presented as preserved organic artifacts. Additionally Nathan’s Tesla Trucks have been sucked in the alien terrain and he presents the logo from the death metal band Death as a fossilized piece of organic artifact.
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.
