Director: Nathan Harper

Bio: Nathan Harper is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in north Texas. He received his MFA from The University of North Texas with a concentration in New Media. His research examines internet culture through spiritual and ritualistic lenses to reinvestigate our post-enlightenment assumptions about technology and digital society. His work spans a variety of software and mediums, from animation, avatar performance, GAN, virtual reality, and even dirt. His film Drowning in My Sleep has been featured in noteworthy screenings, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pylon Lab, and most uniquely, at the Chapel of Santa Maria dei Carcerati in Bologna, Italy. His virtual reality projects have been featured at the Barcú Virtual 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.

Film: I Just Wanna Be A Teen Werewolf is a short film that revisits concepts from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto through the lenses of teenage internet culture. Haraway theorized that new technology would produce prosthetics added to our bodies leading to experiences beyond human scope into this new identity she called the cyborg. Though we do not live in that world (yet), the virtual avatar can be observed as a fulfillment of this. The niche internet communities that operate these cyborgian identities tend to blur the lines between human, animal, and machine in the same way Harraway did in her theory. This film specifically focuses on those of wolf/human hybrid identity arguably spurred on by the popularity of the Twilight Saga on the early 2,000s internet scene. Is Haraway’s vision of a cyborgian utopia being fulfilled by non-human digital avatars, or does a close observation reveal new challenges to these theories?