implicit art

So, I managed to land myself in the last issue of Leonardo, Leonardo - Vol. 38, Issue 3 - June 2005 - The MIT Press. It’s a short artist statement about a show I did with Marcus Neustetter last year, and a li’l image. Given their circulation, it’s a pretty big deal for an unknown artist such as myself, and I’m very excited about it. About nathanial stern getting in Leonardo.

nathanial stern.

One problem: that’s a bloody misspelling. my name is not nathanial stern; it has an ‘e,’ not an ‘a’ before the ‘l.’

Sigh.

I thought if I wrote nathanial stern (misspelled) enough times in a post, then a search for my name (misspelled) might eventually lead people here (rather than to the few places where my name is misspelled online - Leonardo being first and highest ranking). Maybe they spelled it right in the magazine, even tho it’s misspelled online? Wishful thinking.

circa rhizome and their net.art news, but I wrote it:

Drawing on the success of the Johannesburg Biennales of the nineties, local chemist/ composer, Dimitri Voudouris, decided that it was time to bring attention to South African electronic musicians by connecting them with other internationally-renowned talents. Hoping to promote experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration, he initiated the Unyazi Festival, so–named for the Zulu word for ‘lightning’ (there is no non-anglo word for ‘electricity,’ in South Africa–an absence with spiritual connotations). Unyazi will be the first festival of electronic music and sonic art in Africa. Local highlights include interactive pieces from Toni Olivier’s Studio for Interactive Sound, a collaboration between loop masters Carlo Mombelli and Joao Orecchia, and more experimental trips by the likes of James Webb, Chris Wood, Pops Mohammed, and Brendon Bussy. Pioneering performers include American-Egyptian Professor Halim El-Dabh–who began his tape work in North Africa in the ’40s–and Pauline Oliveros, an American philosopher and composer who works with a concept she calls ‘Deep Listening.’ The festival will feature a broad slate of workshops, multimedia theatre, interesting music, and film, all of which students and teachers can attend free. The storm is coming. The lightning round begins September 1st. - Nathaniel Stern

http://www.newmusicsa.org.za/unyazi2005.html

Since I’ve been talking about my excitement around working in linear video again, I thought I’d put some of it online. They’re both listed from the video works page on this site.

a song for the is the one I made for Kaganof’s upcoming Festival in Rotterdam (spent the weekend on it; the poem had been written for years). It’s a video poem about relationships and listening, and there’s even a very lo-res version of the piece available for download (5.5MB)! eat is an older installation I made for Abrie Fourie’s gallery in Pretoria, about identity construction through mass consumerism - and the download is even lower res (2.5MB). Enjoy!

Friday was a pretty fun day of working with hands, and Polite Forcing it around the downtown area with Nerf’s crew of (mostly student) artists. It became a kind of creative class of healthy, steady “makin’ stuff,” most of which was only interesting because of the odd collaborative process by which it was made, and I think that was the point of the experiment. My favorite part was when I got to make sculptures out of wood racks and cable ties…. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the screen.

Christian Nerf is taking some of the crit from Art South Africa and artthrob to heart. This time, his 24-hour residency is over a shorter span of time (eight hours per day for three days), and has a lot more people in a smaller space. The big difference, tho, is that short, specific tasks are given to the artists all day long, in order to insure collaboration, and work further towards complete “exhibit-able” art objects (I find this very amusing, in that the 24-hour residency concept’s strength is just that: its concept… it seems, however, that objects are still more than desired. Buh-dum-cha ;).

Anyhow, the new 24-hour residency project started yesterday, and artists can do between one and three days, as they see fit; I’ll be giving it my all from 9 - 5 today, and will let you know how it goes….