Babak Ahteshamipour is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer and musician based in Athens, Greece with a background in mining and materials science engineering. His practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs the actual, aimed at correlating topics from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity, exploring them via gaming and internet culture with a focus on themes of coexistence and simultaneity.

His work has been presented at festivals, venues, galleries and spaces, museums and institutes such as Centre Pompidou, New Art City, The Wrong TV, Neo Shibuya TV, University of North Texas, McMaster University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Biquini Wax ESP, Experimental Sound Studio, Milan Machinima Festival and Rijksmuseum Twenthe.

He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast and on the cassette label Jollies. His music has been played on radio stations such as LYL Radio, Radio Raheem and Internet Public Radio. He has performed and shared the stage with artists such as HELM, Zoviet France, MSHR, and Matthew D. Gantt. He has created video clips for artists such as Fire-Toolz, Digifae and B.Michaael.

His work has been featured on magazines and platforms such as CTM Festival’s magazine, Bandcamp daily, KIBLIND, VRAL and [ANTI]MATERIA.

Violent Violins Exposed was not only an album but also a show at Okay Initiative Space. What was the relationship between the music and the visual elements? How did you curate the interplay between sound, video clips, and the AI-generated visuals?

The concept of the show and its visuals had existed in my mind for quite a time before the album was produced. My desire was to set up an installation that would consist of a variety of artworks from video, animation, prints, texts, music and objects that would delve into accelerationism and transhumanism. The aim was to seek commonalities between these ideologies with accelerating technocapitalism, its pursuit of immortality, its links to extractivism and its relationship with decay. The metaphor with which I desired to address this was through cars, since I found them to be emblems of fossil fuel consumption and extractivism, due to their gasoline reliance and the fact that their material counterparts are derived from extracted materials.

But additionally because of the fact that vehicles have also been used in warfare and transport. I kept putting off diving in the production of this project until I finished the album and meant to create its visual elements. The rawness, complexity, aggressiveness and mechanical nature of the compositions immediately made me feel that they would be the right music for this project. So I ended up creating three video clips for three different tracks of the album; one by mixing hyper-processed gameplay footage from Need for Speed: Carbon (2006) with AI-generated racing cars, another by combining hyper-processed gameplay footage from Twisted Metal: Black (2001) with AI-generated quarry explosions, and a third one by combining hyper-processed gameplay footage from the PS2 game Transformers (2004) with 3D animation.

I notably chose the first two games because of their antagonistic and violent nature, experienced through cars and Transformers due to the depiction of cybernetic bodies as transformative between anthropomorphic militarized cyborgs and vehicles, spreading havoc and destruction; something which I find at odds with Donna Haraway's description of cybernetic bodies in The Cyborg Manifesto (1985), as a transgressive figures that engage with technology as integral to identity and experience, challenging essentialist, technocratic and binary views on technology. Furthermore I chose these games for their dated graphics and lack of commercial value, which I found to be anti-chronormative, and by glitching them I intended to create a disruptive metaphor against the state of the art hyper-realistic video game graphics.

Your work often engages with themes of extinction and ecological collapse, as seen in Mind Flaying Flavored Flails. How do you approach these vast and complex subjects through your art, and what emotional or intellectual responses are you hoping to evoke?

I find that environmental activism, critical theory and ecology are haunted by an anthropocentrism that triggers a perplexing optimism based on a doomsday narrative that it will be the end of the world if climate change is not dealt with immediately. The optimism I refer to is that there is still hope of reversing climate change. I choose to approach environmental collapse and climate change from a non-anthropocentric and nihilistic perspective. From my perspective, cultivating a narrative in which this so-called doomsday or collapse has arrived would challenge us to reconsider who this ecological discourse developed for, and perhaps engage in a radical acceptance of collapse and decay, rather than denying it and pursuing immortality through technocratic practices that have themselves hastened the arrival of environmental collapse. Decay is inevitable, a universal force; everything grows, blossoms, withers and fades, something that anthropocentrism rejects.

In my view, approaching ecology as something that is not just about us, and breaking down the human/nature binarism, could forge a healthier and more ethical relationship with the non-human world, recognising it as something autonomous, with its own unique characteristics and similarities to the human world. Ecological discourse also seems to me to be significantly focused on a catastrophizing future, resulting in losing sight of the present. In my opinion there could be a more ethical, caring and sustainable engagement with the present, until the future arrives. These narratives are incorporated into my work mostly through worldbuilding and narratology, as in the case of Mind Flaying Flavored Flails, which is set on a futuristic garden ship in an alien landscape in space, in the future, where the artworks and sounds function as preserved echoes of the pre-apocalyptic world. I don't intend to evoke definite emotional and intellectual responses, I consider that any response to any artwork is deeply subjective; I would rather perceive my works as food for thought.

Collaboration is a recurring element in your projects, particularly with Nathan Harper on virtual game shows like The Lost Woods, Awakened and Mind Flaying Flavored Flails. How does the collaborative process shape the outcome of your interdisciplinary work, and what unique dynamics does this bring to the table?

Collaborations always make projects more fun and multi-dimensional. In my experience, they have flourished projects with approaches and ideas that I hadn't thought of before. It's invariably exciting to have conversations, exchanges of links, readings and works about mutual areas of research that act as input to develop not only a collaborative project but also personal artistic practices. Even when the interactions and conversations are about off-topic or personal issues, I consider it extremely nurturing as we grow closer and bond over intellectual and emotional worlds beyond the project that develops in a deeper and longer term relationship, as is the case with Nathan Harper. Overall collaborations require plenty of effort, back and forth and bumps to get a finalized project, but most of the time in my experience it works out best for the project, and along the process the collaborators themselves learn and grow through the project as singular entities as well. The most significant lesson I believe that one gets during a collaborative project is that sometimes you have to step back, be less self-centered and see what works best for the project.

In Machinist Auxiliaries, Needles of Needless Emphasises and When Death Parties, Everyone Shows up Dressed as a Skeleton there seems to be a fascination with decay and transformation. How do these themes tie into the larger narrative of Violent Violins Exposed?

The overall structure of the album is based on a narrative of a naive dream confronted by an insatiable, extractive technocapitalism that turns the dream into a nightmare, and the effort of dreams and nightmares to co-exist in a non-antagonistic context. In these video clips I approached digital decay by glitching and hyper-processing the outdated video games I mentioned to underline their lack of commercial value in the eyes of accelerating technocapitalism, and in Machinist Auxiliaries, Needles of Needless Emphasises I address extractivism and warfare from the perspective of the earth. These themes of decay and transformation are linked to the overall narrative of Violent Violins Exposed, as the reality of technocapitalism is one that is intimately linked to extractive practices that seek immortality and reject decay.

Specter, Spectrum, Speculum explores a dystopian landscape with the 3D animated video for Hey Plastic God please don't save the Robotic King, Let him drown in Acidic Anesthetic. How do you use technology and digital art to mirror or contrast with the more humanistic, emotional core of your work?

I particularly use and to refer to technology that is widely accessible such as the internet and video games, which are accessed via computers and phones and transmit the emotional landscapes of the operators; technologies that we constantly interact with and shape our emotional worlds. Aubrey Anable’s application of affect theory on gaming inspired my approach to technology to reflect on emotion through my works. She writes in Playing With Feelings (2018): “Video games are affective systems.

When we open a video game program on a phone, computer, or gaming console, we are opening up a “form of relation” to the game’s aesthetic and narrative properties, the computational operations of the software, the mechanical and material properties of the hardware on which we play the game, ideas of leisure and play, ideas of labor, our bodies, other players, and the whole host of fraught cultural meanings and implications that circulate around video games.” (p. xii).

Driven by this approach my work incorporates familiar elements and its narratives are linked to gaming and internet culture, critically exploring their multidimensional aspects such as the case of Hey Plastic God please don't save the Robotic King, Let him drown in Acidic Anesthetic where I have my archetypal villainous characters—such as a wizard, a unicorn, a witch and so on—inhabit spaces from the popular game Super Mario 64 (1996) and its Nintendo DS remake Super Mario 64 DS (2004), to challenge the one-dimensional hero perspective found in games and the androcentrism in their narratives, as well as in gaming and internet culture that outcast atypical, emotional or queer gameplay over skillful and linear gameplay.

You’ve mentioned the use of machinima created via The Sims 4 and World of Warcraft in projects like Paleontology of Non-existence and LFM for TCOBAC. How do these virtual worlds serve as a canvas for your reflections on language, expression, and loss?

These distinct games and franchises feature narratives, gameplay, aesthetics and structures that seemed ideal for me to incorporate within Paleontology of Non-existence and LFM for TCOBAC. Paleontology of Non-existence unfolds a narrative of the sudden extinction of humanity, leaving machines, AIs, algorithms and programs to run on their own until they begin to question their own existence. I found The Sims 4 to be an appropriate place to develop this concept, firstly because I was incorporating paintings into the show that made sense next to The Sims 4's playful, cheerful and colorful aesthetic and graphics, and secondly because I felt that the Sim's avatars were designed by the gameplay to have their lives controlled by the player, making them enslaved digital puppets.

So I wanted to explore how a digital avatar designed to have a lifestyle would feel when it was no longer a puppet of the operator, while reflecting on wider issues such as consumerism and technocracy. In terms of LFM for TCOBAC, the whole show was assembled around World of Warcraft (WoW) and featured paintings of spell icons from the game and an altar with a painting of a gargoyle from the game. The show focused on binarisms such as good vs evil, analogue vs digital, and escapism, and WoW was the appropriate canvas for me to unfold these themes because of its convoluted lore, the Alliance vs Horde binarism in the game, it's warfare, and due to its desertification over time, mirroring the collapse of the physical world. Eventually for me this posed the question of what happens when a virtual world collapses and you can no longer escape collapse anywhere?

Your work appears to blur the boundaries between the digital and the organic, particularly in pieces like Click Esc to Exit the Data Based Molecular Prison called Existence and the collage In Defence of the Undead from Digital Daydream show which features glitchy, AI-generated cyborg imagery. What draws you to this intersection, and how do you envision the role of AI in future art-making?

I'm drawn to this intersection because I see it as a path to examine technological binarisms. I don't reckon that digitalisation or technology is evil or holy; it all depends on how it is used, by whom and for what ends. I am engrossed in examining the intricacy of digitalisation and its entanglements with the organic, which often seem catastrophic and negative, as in the case of technology developed within the military-industrial complex, or more healing and caring, as in the case of medicine or engineering or movements such as solarpunk or left-accelerationism. Even much of the technology developed within the military-industrial complex has led to civilian use, such as GPS. Moreover there are plenty instances of technological development that end up being used for reasons other than those originally intended.

I think AI is a case in point, it doesn't have a specific end game or goal, it's more about who trained it, based on what and for what purposes. But it's still fluid and can go through reverse training. I believe that in the future it can be a useful assistant for artists, helping them to expand their creative imagination, discover solutions to technical problems or speed up processes that can be time consuming. However, as most of technology is still run by highly antagonistic, profit-driven and extractive forces, we need to be cautious about the future of AI and its use for surveillance, misleading narratives, technological hegemony and violence.

Across your albums and projects, you explore various artistic mediums—from music and video to digital games and text. How do you choose the medium for each project, and what informs your decision to combine different forms in one cohesive work?

There is no explicit procedure by which I choose the medium for each project, I would start with what feels like a no brainer to me and then introduce the other mediums within the project if I feel they are appropriate or necessary for what I'm trying to achieve. From my point of view, these mediums have distinct differences but they inform and complement each other when combined, in a way that I cannot separate them afterwards, as if they were meant to be together.

You often revisit the subject of post-humanism, as seen in both Mind Flaying Flavored Flails and your video clip for B. Michaael. How do you define posthumanism in your context, and what role does it play in the speculative narratives you create?

I don't define posthumanism in any particular way, rather I'm interested in approaching it through speculative narratives. In particular, I am fascinated by the question of what humanity will leave behind after it disappears or enters a posthuman phase, and more-than-human beings evolve and coalesce into a posthuman society. I believe that these questions are essential to reconsider anthropological discourse and challenge anthropocentrism and its side effects such as material waste, pollution, war, technological singularity, deluded bigotry and the endless cycles of production and consumption.

With your projects being showcased across different platforms—whether in physical spaces like Okay Initiative Space or virtual ones like New Art City—how do you see the future of interdisciplinary art evolving, especially in terms of audience engagement and accessibility?

I think due to the digitization of real life, audiences are becoming more familiar with digital art and interdisciplinary practices that combine the physical with the digital. What I am interested in, and what I see other artists working on, is the transference of digital art into physical space, which can be done in many different ways, from VR or AR to video installations. With these intentions, I believe that post-digital, post-internet and game art will influence this transference from the digital to the physical, since the internet, video games and the devices that allow access to them are the common ground between the audience and the artists. Gaming is becoming more mainstream, and a lot of social media platforms overlap with art, such as meme culture or Tik Tok, which has performative aspects.