“This past month, Johannesburg’s AOP Gallery, a space devoted to works on paper, hosted the exhibition “Passing Between” which showcased the collaborative output between digital artist Nathaniel Stern and printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. At the outset, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approached the collaboration as a chance to learn each other’s techniques. But they quickly chose to focus on their own strengths in a process they call [Distill Life]. For Stern, the move toward printmaking comes from a long interest in the technique. In recent work, he has engaged with an expanded form of digital print making, using a hacked portable scanner to produce densely patterned sequences of natural images, in a project called Compressionism. For “Passing Between,” Stern concentrated on using digital photo frames as a medium for displaying loops of video obtained through live filming, and sampled machinima taken from Second Life. Meuninck-Ganger responded to the framed video loops with an encyclopedic range of printmaking techniques from wood block to mono print, silkscreen, etching, and photogravure. In some cases, she printed or [drew] directly on the screens of the digital photo frames; in other cases, the prints were layered over the screens creating a delicate conjunction between the fibers of the paper medium and the illumination of the underlying video. In The Gallerist, a prominent New York art dealer is portrayed anxiously perched on a [raft] in [the] middle of a lithograph while below the surface of the paper machinima sharks circle him endlessly.”

“The effect is both magical and subtle. Jessica’s images often capture a static moment from the subject matter of the video in etching or ink. The pleasure offered by the composite images comes from the interplay between the stasis of the printed image and the temporal flow of the video, producing witty and sometimes fascinating results. In the diptych [Twin City] the 2009 tornado is represented with an animated twister from Second Life. Jessica’s lithograph shows a flying pig coming to rest momentarily in alignment with its outline before whirling back to the beginning of the looped tornado. In general, the artist’s subject matter is deliberately low-key and it presents samples from their lives as artists and young parents in Milwaukee and Johannesburg exploring moments of fun, awkwardness and good humor. However, the rich range of techniques and visual allusions layered over the works also references an entire history of contemporary art and print making, ranging from Hokusai to Velazquez.”

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Artist Nathaniel Stern likes to take media from the past and present and put them together without compromising the integrity of either, revealing them to be equal in artistic expression.

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Stern has used Second Life as a medium much like oil paint or marble, hand-drawing two Second Life avatars and pulling them from out of their universe and into ours. In the gallery, they exist on two large screens facing each other, and the viewer may only encounter them by walking between the screens. Thus the figures become actual existing beings in our own dimensional plane.

“Second Life became the perfect environment to situate this piece in, in that there is no time; there is no body, and yet you cannot access this space without a body,” Stern said during an interview this week. “There is no avatar without a person actually sitting there. Here, the viewer lends their body to the piece, and they become the avatar — and there’s this feedback loop where the avatar we’re looking at we’re only seeing through the other avatar’s eyes.”

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Stern was inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” a minimalist piece that featured two clocks together, slowly winding down to their deaths — it was inspired by news of Gonzales-Torres’ partner’s diagnosis of being HIV-positive.

“Part of the beauty and the devastation, once you find out what these clocks are pointing to, is that they are precisely not anthropomorphized until you know, and then there’s that shift and that visceral wrenching on your stomach,” Stern said. “Once the decision was made to use this medium, then the depth and the layers aren’t going to be the same… with ‘Given Time.’ It’s not going to be this amazing shift once you hear this story but rather much softer layers that you slowly dig out to feel…. Hopefully, because of their enveloping experience, that can become more visceral. Rather than seeing two clocks on the wall, you actually enter between two projections.”

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It’s in this nexus of the two ends of art technology that a warmth has been created — digital technology has been brought into the human senses and is related as such, emotionally. It’s a huge leap forward in not only the presentation of creativity, but also the harnessing of it — and Stern points out that it’s not unattainable to those from outside its realm; it just takes an effort to use it as a material in an artist’s creative arsenal.

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Exhibition Booklet

Title: Arrested Time / Nathaniel Stern with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Essay: Jo-Anne Green
Design: Jesse Egan
Date of Publication: 2010
Language: English
Download as PDF (1 mb)

Second Life (SL) is a 3D social network accessed exclusively by logging in as a representational character. Real life “residents” experience SL through a computer game-like first-person interface, and are seen by others as human-like forms. Every avatar in SL’s virtual buildings and streets has a corresponding person somewhere in the physical world. There is no entry to SL without a user, computer, and avatar; we perceive, act, activate and are activated through our virtual interactions with its residents. In Given Time, however, there are no users, and the SL “in-world” location is not made available. These avatars are realized only through each other and their publicly shared installation and engagement, incarnated through a feedback loop across virtual and actual space.

Although Given Time invests in and points to relationships, embodiment and time, it renders them all, literally, im-material. While SL suggests people behind every avatar, these performers are precisely no one and no-body; the time and space in which they unfold do not actually exist, except as part of a networked computer software held loosely together by intangible encounters. While the computers and projections sit side by side in the real world, and the avatars face one another in SL’s imagined world, they are only “there” as electrical pulses sent through, potentially, thousands of miles of telecommunications wires that circle the globe. It is a meeting between ever-present entities that are also not-there until we give them our eyes and our flesh. We, the viewers, act as their real-world and material avatars, giving life to the space between them.

Given Time’s minimal aesthetic and avatar-driven partnership is not dissimilar to Felix Gonzales-Torres’ slowly dying battery operated clocks in Untitled (Perfect Lovers). But this piece does not ask us to reflect on private grief or public yearning, on loss, death or desire. Instead, it asks, “When we have already given everything - our desires, bodies, and time - what, then, is left to give?” It is a tension, hovering in the air, tracing the invisible and untouchable connection that is no-thing and every-thing. All it can give is the reciprocity between its actors.

“… The work is funny, pretty and accessible, but it’s also complicated, surprising, exceedingly well crafted and rewards a long-term relationship. That’s your cue to rush out and buy a piece, take it home and plug it in.”

“I’d better take a stab at describing the pieces in the gallery, although it would be easier all round if you checked out the video of the work on www.mg.co.za/stern. Basically, it’s a new-media mash-up. Paraphrasing the artists’ own description: they mount translucent prints and drawings on top of video screens, creating moving pictures on paper.”

“That doesn’t do justice to, for example, the mesmerising, joyful experience of watching insubstantial sharks endlessly circling The Gallerist. He’s depicted kneeling on some driftwood in the middle of the ocean while sketchy vultures hover ominously. And there’s a perfect beauty to The Great Oak, the central image of which is a drawing of a sturdy tree, already complicated by the digital echo of itself, counterpointed by ghostly figures leaping at its base.”

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“So when you wander around the show at the misnamed Art on Paper, or if you’re lucky enough to have one of these works on your wall, you can choose. Do you just want to enjoy the playful nature of a piece such as Twin City — whoah! Here comes the flying cow again! — or do you want to meditate on the nature of the loop, which ‘without origin or telos … interweaves the work’s time with the spectator’s as rhythm rather than succession’?”

“I know, you’re a 21st-century art lover, so you want it all — profundity and plasticity, facile conversation piece and deep worth. Greedy. But with this work, you can have it all and, in true hypertextual style, leap from moment to moment, constantly recreating desire and satisfaction, in much the same way as the looped video constantly re-enacts the pleasure of watching.”

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Passing Between is Nathaniel Stern’s second solo exhibition at Gallery AOP in Johannesburg, South Africa. Here he shows 14 pieces from his ongoing series of collaborative works with printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, affectionately entitled Distill Life. The gallery has published a companion catalogue (with essay by Nicole Ridgway) and DVD (with documentary videos by Sean Kafer and music by Michael Szpakowski).

In Distill Life, the artists approach both old and new media as form. They permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure, etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content - print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

photo documentation

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Exhibition Catalogue and DVD

Title: Passing Between / Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Essay: Nicole Ridgway
Design: Jeff Ganger and Jesse Egan
Documentary Videos: Sean Kafer
Music: Michael Szpakowski
Publisher: Gallery AOP
Date of Publication: 2010
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-620-45908-2
Download as PDF (4 mb)
View videos on the DVD
Available from Gallery AOP, Johannesburg

Book: edited collection of essays

Chapters:
Deseriis › No End In Sight: Networked Art as a Participatory Form of Storytelling
Ulmer › The Learning Screen
Varnelis › The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality
Helmond › Lifetracing: The Traces of a Networked Life Chapter Icon
Freeman › Storage in Collaborative Networked Art
Munster › Data Undermining: The Work of Networked Art in an Age of Imperceptibility
Lichty › Art in the Age of DataFlow: Narrative, Authorship, and Indeterminacy

Editor: Jo-Anne Green
Publisher: turbulence.org
Date of Publication: 2009
Language: English (and some translations)
See the book
See the section featuring Wikipedia Art

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see video documentation