implicit art

Had a great email exchange with Brian Sherwin of myartspace.com over the last few days, which culminated as an interview published on the myartspace blog. There’re bits on my work,  dissertation, inspirations, even a question on Creative Commons and a few other little tidbits not published anywhere else to date. Check it out.

snip / teaser:

Art Space Talk: Nathaniel Stern

“… Brian Sherwin [myartspace.com]: Nathaniel, I’ve read that you are inspired by the Interactive art of David Rokeby and Myron Kruger. Can you tell us about these influences? What else inspires you?

NS: I believe Kruger’s core contribution to understanding interactivity was a concentration on action rather than perception - ’seeing’ in particular. He had little concern for illusion-based and simulated VR that replicated reality, and was more interested in stimulation - with a ‘t’ - and how people moved / getting them to move. I think Rokeby is brilliant in many ways, and his work, Very Nervous System (1986-1990), was one of the first and most important pieces to accomplish an affective intervention in embodiment through this kind of inter-activity. But what inspires me most about him is his contrariness. He almost always tries ’something else,’ never really accepting the limits or taken for granted in any given medium.

The Odys Series: The Storyteller, archival print on watercolor paper, 1189 x 841, edition 3, 2004
(screenshot from video)

My other influences are fairly idiosyncratic: from Hiroshige, the Impressionists and Homer’s epic tales to Liam Gillick or Camille Utterback and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. I often turn to contemporary fiction, theory and philosophy in my thinking and making. I should also say that my wife, Nicole Ridgway, is the most wonderful muse and crit I’ve ever met: my biggest fan and supporter precisely because she is also my harshest critic before a work is done….”

read more (2500 word interview)

I’ve done some work with Jeanette Ginslov in the past, and she often re-uses my CC / open source ware from elicit in her productions - in ways I never imagined or foresaw. Jeanette was an early adopter of new technologies in the dance world, and that goes double for the fact that she is based in South Africa. Should be interesting!

Click for larger image / full advertisement.

You can tell I’m uber uber busy (who isn’t? But I still used to make time for blogging…) when I am not only posting very infrequently, but also mostly / only in response to comments left here (and it’s not as if my comments section is very forthcoming). Last week it was something on my Northern Ireland holiday in response to Laine. And now, artthrob editor Michael Smith asks - after chiding me about MWEB / artthrob down time - for some news. And he called me Sterny. Which is frakkin hilarious, on so many levels.

Admittedly, most news these days is dissertation-related, and / or not yet announcement-ready. There are a handful of exciting shows potentially forthcoming for me, but the operative word is potentially, and so I don’t want to make them public just yet. I am 5 weeks from a too short visit to Joburg and Cape Town - just a holiday, which I’m thrilled over - and then, after a 2-day stop in NYC to see family and hit galleries for a day, I start my new job at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts. See more on that here. I’m actually on track to have a draft of said dissertation in before I leave Dublin, which is startling for most people, myself included (I’ve been working on it less than two years). The original proposal is here, and we’re lookin at 230 or so pages of academic text and case studies (5 chapters, intro, conclusion; this doesn’t include the bibliography or any of that extraneous stuff yet).

Confirmed shows include a group one in Pretoria with some older prints, and a new commission for Carine Zaayman’s NRF-funded project at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT, Jozi and the (M)other City. The latter show features work by myself, Ralph Borland, Nicola Grobler, Stephen Hobbs, Svea Josephy, Marcus Neustetter, Johan Thom and James Webb, creative writing by Sean O’Toole, and a catalogue with an essay by Zaayman herself. I’m very excited about the work I’m doing, as it’s a huge departure for me both conceptually and aesthetically - more of a performative and sociopolitical intervention than anything else - and is specific to a South African context and art world. The exhibition and catalogue and web site will all see documentation-as-art, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but the title may clue you in a bit: Doin’ my part to lighten the load… I will post upcoming international stuff when it’s confirmed.

In press news, there’ll be a full feature on me in the Winter issue of Printmaking Today, which is pretty exciting, and it also looks like I’ll be one of the featured artists in the sequel to Richard Noyce’s Printmaking at the Edge, by the same author and tentatively titled Printmaking Beyond the Edge, due for release in early 2010.

On a final note, I wanted to mention that I went to see Ralph Borland (fellow South African artist and Trinity grad student) and Julian Jonker’s Song of Solomon at the Project Arts Centre here in Dublin last week.

 A computer program samples many versions of the song ‘Mbube’ (the source of the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.

Although the original work was intended as a looped installation, this version was a 20-minute performance that did not disappoint. I have to say that the above statement reads like it could potentially be interesting, but might be better in concept than in practice. NOT TRUE. And the work was exceptionally potent as a performance, in the dark, sitting centered between the speakers, and as a common experience between all those present. It was a moving tribute and memorial which I’d sit through several more times, given the opportunity.

That’s all I got for now.

Had a fairly productive week working on my dissertation, and am now off to Belfast for a self-proclaimed long weekend - to celebrate Sid’s 2nd birthday, Nicole and my 6-year wedding anniversary, and my own birthday (all of these in the span of 2 weeks)! We’ve never been up to Northern Ireland, and I have no idea what my better 2/3rds has planned, but it should be just grand. Will try to post some photos of that, and my folks’ recent visit to Dublin for Sid’s b-day (on her blog), when we’re back.

In the meanwhile… a proposal I’ve written with California-based artist and friend Scott Kildall (if you don’t know his work, you should definitely check it out; he’s an innovative and generous voice in the digi-arts community, and much of his work is not only smart but also beautiful) has been voted into the final round for a rhizome commission: Wikipedia Art. If you’re a member of rhizome, please take the time to rank the top 25 - and by all means, if you like ours (I’m biased, but I think you will), we’d really appreciate your rating it tops! Vote here (you need to log in first).

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge supporter of Creative Commons (CC), and more specifically iCommons. The former is an organization dedicated to open source coding and content for creative technologists, designers, artists, musicians, scientists (and more!), and promotes access and re-mixing through distribution licenses that are alternatives to copyright worldwide. The latter (iCommons) is an international community of the same types, all of whom may use or promote CC, copyfight, pirated content/material for activism and/or art, remixing and reusing legally and illegally, or anything around “the commons” of content and community; this is mostly manifested as a yearly summit of amazing individuals talking about and furthering the state of the (communal) arts (and the community itself).

In 2006 and 2007, I participated as an artist in resident (AIR) for iCommons (in Brazil and Croatia, respectively), and in the latter year I ran a larger AIR programme, where there were 6 interdisciplinary artists (and one arts critic!) from 4 continents. Although I’m sitting out this year (Sapporo!), I’m still a friend, as evidenced by the logo/link below and in my sidebar.

I highly recommend checking it out and getting involved - my life, art, networks and activist tendencies are better having been involved, and I’m sure to be participating again in the future.

Marcus Neustetter and my net.art project / turbulence commission circa 2005, getawayexperiment.net, has been written up on the project page for artthrob this month, by their newly appointed new media editor, Chad Rossouw. Link.

First, a congratulations to Chad on his new position - I’ve read some of his writings and know he can be very thoughtful and interesting, and I’m glad to have his expertise covering and furthering new media art in South Africa.

I was admittedly surprised to see getawayexperiment.net reviewed by artthrob (again). Not only is it a relatively older work - by net.art standards, anyhow… although, in fairness, it is currently on web exhibition at Greylock Arts in the states, so I can see why Chad came across it and may have wanted to give it some attention now - but it was also already written about, more extensively, on Artthrob’s project page in Feb 2005, by Carine Zaayman. I know Ed Young may have started this trend when he decided he needed to let SAartsEmerging know how much they now suck after a good first year (Ed maintains this original goodness before the suckiness, and this site was also first more positively covered by Zaayman on the same page as Ed’s review - and also a site I used to be involved with; Linda Stupart’s adjoining bloggy piece, around Art Heat’s conception time, is worth mentioning here, too…), but if it’s not a new work you want to write about - and especially because the work has not changed, as opposed to in Ed’s case - then at least a little nod and link to Carine’s original (and much longer and more positive) review by Chad could have been included (Ed fails here, too; and is less generous than either Chad or Carine; and also oddly claims the site is easy to ignore while simultaneously writing the third artthrob piece about it). They are all in the same publication after all, so an ongoing discussion would be appropriate. (Those are some long sentences there, with lots of parenthetical thoughts in both brackets and dashes. Sorry, that’s just how it goes some times….)

All that being said, I can’t deny that Chad’s criticism has merit. While I stand by the strength of both the concept and its resulting pages for getawayexperiment.net (and Chad seems to like this, too), I think that the lack of a large number of participating artists uploading their own images once the work was launched comes precisely from the fact that the world the piece creates is extremely idiosyncratic - his point. While I don’t generally think this necessarily a bad thing in the art world, this particular piece is meant to be both about participation and empowerment, and so while it represents those concepts well, as an interactive work, it does not initiate them, in the literal sense, as much as it could.

I think the piece, overall, is successful in creating various dialogues around these issues, as is evidenced by these two texts, and another by Eduardo Navas. But I appreciate Chad’s fair review and feedback when it comes to getawayexperiment.net’s shortcomings, and am looking forward to more of the same from him - whether about my own work, or those of other South African artists.

Fantastic interview here. Snippet:

Two years ago Caitlin Jones observed in NYFA Current that net artists working in multiple formats were increasingly finding venues to show. Today, the art world is still figuring out how to manage the practicalities of dealer and artist relationships. I spoke with Aron Namenwirth, of artMovingProjects, in an effort to better understand the challenges, and solutions, digital media presents to contemporary galleries with a focus on New Media. - Paddy Johnson

One topic that’s come up on Rhizome’s blog is the rematerialization of art (the idea, according to Ed Halter, “that innovations such as the flat-screen monitor, the digital print, and the editioned DVD, have helped transform immaterial forms like video and net.art into a new generation of physical, sellable objects”), so I wanted to talk to you about this a little. Is it critical to display new media art in the gallery?

I think new media art, like old media, needs a physical place for critical and social discourse. On the computer screen in the privacy of your home, you can do research, and email other professionals on the merits of a piece, but it’s not the same as looking at it in a real space, walking around it, and experiencing it. A lot of new media work requires interaction, and that interaction is mediated by the spectator and the user together.

Tom Moody, OptiDisc, 2007 (Installation at artMovingProjects)

It seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for going into a space, and experiencing that work with someone else too. A dialog can occur, that, as you mention, is more spontaneous. Which I think can be important for new media, particularly because the bias of the medium is “cold.”

Of course, the beauty of some new media art projects is that you can view it anytime you want online.

Right, which presumably has its pluses and minuses for dealers. I know you have been working on a contract between the artist and gallery. I thought maybe we could discuss some of these details a little, because I imagine they’re really important to both artists and dealers.

Sure. The contract I’ve drawn up is an agreement between the artist and artMovingProjects. It’s binding for the life of the working relationship between artist and the gallery, and that’s actually how the document starts. The stipulation is for one piece of the artist’s oeuvre — and that’s what’s so different about it than other gallery contracts. Typically, the contract between the artist and the gallery represents all the artist’s work, and ties the artist to the gallery. In this case, the artist is free to work for many different venues simultaneously, which is a real plus.

Well, there are examples of independently working artists in traditional mediums that seem to do okay, but it is very rare.

Yes, and this is very specifically tied to the intellectual content. It stipulates that the artwork will only be sold with permission of the gallery at the agreed piece in perpetuity….With editions, and video, the dealers typically increase the price of the edition as it is sold, and I feel that that’s not such a great idea in the short term because it creates undue pressure on the collector. Also, part of the contract stipulates that any deals the artist makes outside the agreement involving others will not be supported by the gallery without authorization in writing. Further, should the artwork be sold without permission in writing this will end the relationship between the artist and the gallery.

To read the full piece click here.

Ireland: Figure, Face, Home
Group show curated by Haydn Shaughnessy
Nova Straaf Gallery on the SS Galaxy, Second Life
opens Saturday 8th March 1- 3 pm SLT
til 31 March

For those not in the know: Nova Straaf Gallery is a gallery on a virtual cruise ship in SL!

Haydn Shaughnessy / traveler Auer views Nathaniel Stern’s work at the Nova Straaf Gallery

Ireland: Figure, Face, Home is a virtual exhibition of works on display at Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery based in Kinsale, Co Cork. (www.galleryica.com). This group show is running at the Nova Straaf Gallery on the SS Galaxy, one of the most highly trafficked areas of Second Life, from Saturday 8th March to the end of the month.

Clare Greene uses the software programme paintbox to capture the fine outlines of her nudes against the background of atonal colour typical of paint programmes. In the process she has created a particularly Irish pop art, focused on the country’s recent quite public rejection of repressed sexuality.

Nathaniel Stern is an interactive installation artist who has created these performance scans of the Irish landscape especially for our gallery. Here you have new technology, the desktop scanner, giving us access to new images of the most painted landscape on earth. Stern’s performative scans and prints are attracting growing attention from serious collectors in Ireland.

Home is the theme of Dearbhail Connon’s oil on canvas work. We normally don’t work artists whose metier is traditional media. Our reasoning is simply that other galleries cater well for this work. In Dearbhail’s case we wanted to exhibit her spiritual search for home. IT fits well with the diversity of work around her.

EJ Carr is an internationally renowned photographer who has been living in Ireland since 2007. His Avalon series is a provocative attempt to capture an important part of history, the Arthurian Legends. In EJ’s work you see the faces of everyday people in and around Bantry, set against the backdrop of mythical Avalon, here in Ireland.

Claire Keating plays tricks with your perceptions For her Illusion series she worked with make-up artists to paint the faces of six models in the style of well known artists. We know from visitors to our gallery that people are often confused over whether they are really paintings or photographs..

Paul La Rocque is our second Irish pop art artist. Paul trawls the Internet for iconic images from around the world and combines them with images he captures from the streets of Cork. This series of icons combines Irish emblems with iconography from China and the USA and signals the arrival of Ireland on the world economic and cultural stage.
- Show quoted text -

getawayexperiment.net, a work of mine with Marcus Neustetter, is part of the first net.art exhibit by Greylock Arts in Massachusetts, in collaboration with turbulence.org:

A group exhibition of net art commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site.

Turbulent Works features a selection of Turbulence commissions which represent the broad spectrum that is net art. In these works you will experience new interfaces for sound expression, art created within virtual worlds, art which is politically and socially motivated, video performances, photographic explorations, and websites re-interpreted through painting.

Now celebrating 12 years, Turbulence has commissioned over 150 works of net art and exhibited and promoted artists’ work through its Artists Studios, Guest Curator, and Spotlight sections. As networking technologies have developed wireless capabilities and become mobile, Turbulence has remained at the forefront of the field by commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving the new hybrid networked art forms that have emerged. Turbulence works have been included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial (‘00, ’02, ’04), and its Bit Streams and Data Dynamics exhibitions; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; C-Theory, Cornell University; Ars Electronica, Austria; International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Montreal; European Media Arts Festival, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival, among others.

Read more / see the works