implicit art

Both on my implicit art and “now on youtube” kick, my ‘04 Brett Kebble-winning work is up. With voiceover, or just documentation, as below.

Implicit Art, or as I more often call it, Implicit Body Art, is art that asks us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. A different mode of thinking about interactive art - whether for critique or production or both - the Implicit Manifesto does not look to measure simulation or immersion, but instead explores stimulation and relationality.

Artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, David Rokeby, Char Davies, Scott Snibbe and myself have long been interested in embodiment as engaged (perhaps even initiated) through activity. For my PhD research, I’ve begun coupling our work, and that of similar artists, with the art of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and the research of Performance Studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Phillip Zarrilli. The results are simple-but-awkward interfaces that ask us to chase and stutter with our arms, smell and breathe with our legs, or see and hear with our hands. Always performative, usually interactive, and mostly digital, Implicit Art asks us to accent, and examine, the feedback loop that is embodiment. It looks at couplings between flesh and world through the lens of clumsy maneuverings.

enter:hektor, by nathaniel sternBelow is a recent abstract (full presentation and info further down the post) based on my dissertation research. More Implicit Art readings and writings will be forthcoming over the next 10 months…
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The Implicit Body as Performance

Brian Massumi, in his Parables for the Virtual, asks us to put “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” back into our understandings of embodiment without “contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory.” Mark Hansen’s ‘body-in-code’ echoes this call, reading the sensorimotor body as an “activity” and a “being-with,” which is “distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.” They want to explore “a semiotics willing to engage with continuity” (Massumi), and examine our agency in the “scope of body-environment coupling” (Hansen). As a producing artist, my parallel question is, “How might the body’s continuity, and its potential disruption, be attendant, provoked and contextualized in contemporary art?”

My research contends that the body is performed. A body in space can “act” as a site of emergence, a boundary project, and an incipience. While Rebecca Schneider’s “explicit body” in feminist performance art performatively unfolds (Latin: explicare) and explicates, the implicit body concordantly enfolds (Latin: implicare) and implies. Inter-action is both constitutive of, and always already involved in, the flesh. Like an animated moebius strip, the body feeds back between affection and reflection: the implicit body.

This paper attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. Interactive art has the power to “put in quotes” continuous, relational bodies and their immediate environments; it accents our dispersion and interference across borders, putting into crisis both our conscious and non-conscious perceptions and actions. I’m interested in work or environments that ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. By setting the stage, interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of “body”. At stake, are potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends.

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A PDF version of the academic presentation: The Implicit Body as Performance

Versions of this presentation have been given at Perspectives on the Body and Embodiment at the University College of Dublin and the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK; I also presented some of its initial ideas at the Ars Virtua ‘Body in Quotes’ panel in Second Life.

Howdy all. If you remember, early last year I developed a new WordPress theme as part of the launch of SAartsEmerging.org - promoting and critiquing emerging South African artists. That site is now maintained by Bronwyn Lace and Rat Western, and you should keep an eye out for upcoming changes.

Given the popularity of this theme, I’ve decided to release a new, widget-compatible version, and you can expect all future releases to be maintained from this site. I believe the most beneficial aspect of this 2-column design is its easy customization. The zip file includes:

• new design, with different sidebars for posts, pages and single posts - these are now customizable using WordPress’ built-in widgets
• header and footer images using a detail of Nathaniel Stern’s Compressionist work
• layered Photoshop file to put in your own image; includes gradient, curved edges and “pre-cut” slices (and instructions)

Download the zip file. (open source CC/GPL)

As you can see, this blog now also uses the new artsemerging theme (with a “widgetized” sidebar - note that all changes happened in the WP interface - I needed no code in any of the php files to customize this), and this coincides with the announcement of some upcoming changes around here — as I concentrate on my PhD research and writing over the next year, blogging will again pick up pace, mostly concentrating on thoughts and works related to my dissertation topic. You’ll see texts (rants?) that intersect between performance studies, art, embodiment and technology, and eventually a re-design of this whole site to match my thesis (this, over the next 4-5 months). In the meanwhile, note that “nathaniel and the non-aggressive” is no more, and this blog is henceforth to be known as “implicit art.” Enjoy the theme, and the blog, and please let me know if you encounter any problems, in the comments section.

More soon!

(PS Technorati Wordpress and Theme)

Paddy’s favorite piece of mine is now on YouTube. See the work in action, stuttering (also below), or watch a video with voiceover of me telling what it’s all about….

Got some pix up on a flickr set of some new friends and their work from the “Organic Motion: Kinetic and Interactive Sculpture” 2-week workshop at the Anderson Ranch out by the Rockies, Colorado. A fun time, and I hope to make it back. Also, click below for a li’l YouTube video of my first kinetic sculpture (I welded! I forged! I chopped and sanded and shaped and worked with motors, gears, drives, shafts, etc!!! Woot!), titled per this blog post…. I probably won’t shoot to push it into a gallery, but many of the ideas brooding, and skills I’ve gathered, certainly will….

I went and updated the Compressionism documentation video a bit, and put it up on YouTube. These are performative prints made by strapping on a scanner, computer and battery pack, then traversing the landscape - sometimes printing digitally, other times transforming the images with hand-made / traditional techniques. The video shows some work, and how it was made, from my Call and Response solo show earlier this year; new digital work is now showing at Haydn Shaughnessy, and here are some new prints (both digital and traditional) I just finished producing for Art on Paper Gallery (Johannesburg).

Am over in Aspen, Colorado at the Anderson Ranch doing a 2-week workshop / residency by the above title (basically kinetic sculpture), with Mark Koven and Anat Pollack (and special guest Jim Campbell next week). Didn’t really know what to expect, but the place is gorgeous and the other workshoppers are amazing (will give links to sites as I have time to find them). Anderson is def a place to consider…. Pics up when we actually make anything! -n

So, we’ve got two extra beds/couches in a lovely house in Kassel from 20 - 25 July (had cancellations). Self catering, and we’ll cook together… €195 per person for all 5 nights, including taxes and exchange, and we will have a car to get to/from the festival (if we squeeze for the 5 minute ride, otherwise there is also public transport). See the room here. Any takers? Email me.

litho stone in progress, piece will be 1080 x 380 mm

Am on residence at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium at the moment, working on a new series that is being printed by printmaker and artist Zhane Warren, and published by Art on Paper Gallery (Johannesburg). It’s an extension of my Compressionist works, and my last solo show at AOP, Call and Response.

Compressionism is a “digital performance and analog archive.” I traverse bodies, spaces and objects with my scanner face, while its head is in motion. After being Compressed into digital images the size of a small sheet of paper, the files are then stretched, cropped and colored by hand, then printed as editioned, archival works. Later pieces in the series further transform details of these prints into hand-made art objects: etchings, engravings, aquatints, planographs, carborundum, monotype and more.

Compressionism is an exploration of media and perception, a transfiguration in time and seeing.

I’ve done some new performative scans since my show with Haydn Shaughnessy (these will be printed on metallic paper through photographic processes), and am amidst working in stone litho, silk screen, wood cut and dry point. We’re playing up the bands of light and color that Brenton Maart remarked on in Art South Africa, a relic of the digital scanning performances, by creating manufactured spaces on our stones and screens. Will post links to images of the finished works in a little over a week!

LINK: the flickr set in progress :)