Nathan Harper - Flower Burial | Cassette Tape
In Flower Burial (2024), Nathan Harper explores the ironic disembodiment of healthcare by manipulating personal experiences with medical debt collection while alluding to early humans compulsion to lay flowers with their dead. Harper utilizes destructive digital processes to drop the viewer into a harsh, monolithic, and ambient soundscape of digital noise. One is left pondering the connection between our ancestors’ mortality rituals and our present day dealings with death and medicine.
In Flower Burial (2024), Nathan Harper explores the ironic disembodiment of healthcare by manipulating personal experiences with medical debt collection while alluding to early humans compulsion to lay flowers with their dead. Harper utilizes destructive digital processes to drop the viewer into a harsh, monolithic, and ambient soundscape of digital noise. One is left pondering the connection between our ancestors’ mortality rituals and our present day dealings with death and medicine.
In Flower Burial (2024), Nathan Harper explores the ironic disembodiment of healthcare by manipulating personal experiences with medical debt collection while alluding to early humans compulsion to lay flowers with their dead. Harper utilizes destructive digital processes to drop the viewer into a harsh, monolithic, and ambient soundscape of digital noise. One is left pondering the connection between our ancestors’ mortality rituals and our present day dealings with death and medicine.
“Flower Burial is an experimental sound project constructed from a single sample of a voicemail I repeatedly received from 2022 to 2024 from medical debt collectors. The call was in regard to an emergency room visit I had during my time as a student without medical insurance. This artificial human’s speech with a dispassionate yet confrontational voice is the basic building block used to build a harsh monolithic wall of digital noise that periodically breaks down into swaths of ambient soundscapes. The different sections are constructed improvisationally utilizing destructive digital processes, with each distinct section taking a name from one of eight flowers found in Shanidar Cave amongst the fossilized remains of Neanderthals. The presence of these floral samples has sparked a debate on the intellectual capabilities of Neanderthals. They suggest the possibility of a burial ritual that requires a kind of abstract ideation not previously associated with Neanderthals. The floral samples also each hold a medicinal property that suggests a prehistoric medicinal tradition. Whether these flowers represent medicine or mysticism (or a space in between), they hold a primordial prequel to our human plight of dealing with the limitations of the body and mortality. A plight echoed thousands of years later in my relationship with the modern medical system.”
Nathan Harper is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of Digital Art and Creative Technology at Florida SouthWestern State College. He received his MFA from The University of North Texas with a concentration in New Media.
