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Drowning in My Sleep
Nathan Harper
PYLON-Lab is excited to present "Drowning in My Sleep" by Nathan Harper as an online-screening starting at 19 February, 2022.
In his work, Harper explores the materiality of images through regular experimentations with the relationship between physical and digital realities. After appropriating and reappropriating digital files, Harper reconstitutes them either in physical reality with dirt or virtual reality with 3D modeled objects and simulated environments. Harper attempts to uncover how reality shifts alter both our perception and inherent quality of these images, and how they might contribute to an egregore, or “collective group mind.”
"Drowning in My Sleep" will be on view until 19 March, 2022.
The online exhibition is kindly supported by Kulturstiftung des Freistaat Sachsen and Landeshauptstadt Dresden – Amt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz.
Named for a line from the 2004 screamo band Underoath’s song, It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door, "Drowning in My Sleep" is an augmented reality film created at the beginning of the pandemic. It weaves digital entities into the rural landscape of Alabama, where Harper quarantined, separated from his usual studio practice.
With only his cellphone, laptop, and a bad internet connection, he utilized makeshift facial motion capture to perform both songs and spoken word as copy-pasted digital characters that come together as a kind of esoteric ritual.
Featuring an internet cult goddess, nightcore cowboy karaoke, megachurch Zoom evocations, and bedroom death metal noise, "Drowning in My Sleep" is a slow apocalyptic meditation on the egregore of the covid era internet.