For Crossing the Void II, an exhibition at Ten Cubed Gallery - Haydn Shaughnessy’s new virtual space designed by New York architect Benn Dunkley - we were asked to produce unique, virtual works for sale in Second Life, which mirror our real world art. In response, we created a series of “Simulate Editions”, where every ‘print’ is individually signed and numbered by hand, making each work ‘technically unique.’ The works are copy and modification protected, but also come with a resize script, so that the new collector/owner - and only them - can grow or shrink their purchase so as to fit into their SL space.

“Three artists are showcasing their art in a new virtual gallery….

The gallery has been developed by Depo Consulting in association with Galleryica…. ‘Most virtual galleries are like your average website, poorly designed without any sense of optimising a visitor’s experience,’ announced Depo CEO and creative director Peter Dunkley. ‘Ten Cubed has been designed by a professional architect to exploit fully the showcasing opportunities of the virtual medium.’

I’m sure he’s right. The inaugural show features the work of Chris Ashley, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, all interesting artists whose use of new technology makes them perfect for this sort of project….

So - nice design, nice publicity stunt. It’s made me check out the artists online anyway, via their own websites…..”

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undertoe is the experience of walking on water and watching yourself from beneath the surface. It re-presents the imperceptible currents of vibration our bodies unwittingly produce; these are sensed by the piece and transduced into water - a medium that slows down and re-embodies this resonance as perceptible. Our sweeping effects slowly creep across the water’s surface, and perform potential interactions with other bodies in space.

undertoe is an experiment in material memory, shared affectivity and the realm of the intangible.

details:

The sculpture itself is a suspended blue tank, four by seven meters, in an even larger room with wooden floors and a marked-out interactive area. The space is charged, light refracting through the water, revealing its surface tension. A first step across the threshold onto one of the interactive pads results in a faint hum, and then waves in the water overhead. As the water ripples out, light bands itself across the room, redoubling its energy. Each step produces another hum and more waves just above where you step. If you stomp harder or softer, the waves themselves seem to form longer and shorter ripples - each combining and reforming with the last. You can tiptoe or jump, fall or run.

If more participants enter the space, the moving water in undertoe’s tank erupts outward from them, seemingly taking long strides towards you across the room. You can respond in kind, using the floor to send out signals that answer or disrupt, or you can venture a more collaborative effort; two or more carefully choreographed individuals working in tandem, whether from across the room or side by side, can create improbable and beautiful forms in the body of water above. The constantly changing light and shadow in the room only act to accent the delicacy of your collaboration…

undertoe’s participants may experience it as a moving landscape, an enveloping kinetic sculpture, an intimate collaboration, a complex and elaborate dance, or a playful game of tag.

see undertoe’s technical specifications at undertoe.org
undertoe was initially conceptualized in collaboration with greg shakar

Although the design is, itself, a passage - several doorframe shapes in series, swinging freely from atop four wooden poles - it can only move between hard and soft, virtual and actual, public and private, through its contact with people. This is juxtaposed with the inconsistencies of South Africa’s major inner-city: crumbling art deco buildings surrounded by crowded streets and busy taxi ranks, all making way for the quiet of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s neo-classical architecture, and the leisurely games, picnics and ice cream stands in the inexplicably carved-out Joubert Park. The surrounding areas of the park have historically been a bundle of contradictions - before, during and after Apartheid - sustained as civic spaces because of how they’re used by the public. performance 2 playfully mirrors the contradictions of this space and its utility, and further underpins the tensions between work and play, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence.

photos / sketches:

Click on any thumbnail for full image, then use arrow keys or mouse to navigate through them (also see Untitled 11, the main photo up top). Performers / Documentarians: Brendan Copestake, Ismail Farouk, Anthea Moys, João Orecchia, Rat Western.

The video, images, concept and design of this work are licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Read more: Part I and Part II

“One of the more exciting new features on AFC lands in our masthead, which will now feature a new emerging artist every two weeks. Click on the image and a page with the profiled artist and a full sized reproduction of their work. Kicking us off is the work of Nathaniel Stern, who headed up the residency I attended at iCommons last week in Dubrovnik.”

see screenshot of original feature

In July of 2007, I worked with printmaker Zhane Warren to complete eleven new performative prints, while on residence at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium. These are part of my ongoing Compressionism series: a digital performance and analog archive. The ’seed’ images were created a few months earlier, by traversing the Irish landscape with a custom-made scanner appendage and battery pack: for example, I scanned slowly around a curved bed of daffodils, made swooping gestures while entrenched in berry bushes, and followed a trail of Autumn’s falling leaves. The resultant, paper-sized files were later stretched, cropped and colored on my laptop, then produced as editioned, archival lambda prints on metallic paper.

Similar to my work with Jillian Ross at the David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg, we then took details from the digital prints and iteratively re-made them; I used a computer to sketch out some possibilities, and then more traditional printmaking processes for the final editions: stone lithography, silk screen, woodcut, drypoint and engraving. Here, the dialogs between virtual and actual, performance and art work, are archived as a suite of material objects.

the FMC prints:

Click on any thumbnail for full image, then use arrow keys or mouse to navigate through them.

Landscapes and Icons is a duo exhibition (alongside Paul LaRoque) with 14 new digital Compressionist prints. These were made through performative scans of the landscape in Dublin and West Cork, and published by the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery.

Excerpts from the gallery’s web site:

“Nathaniel is a true innovator who has a remarkable artistic technique…. I’ve had the pleasure of watching him at work, performing his scans of the Irish landscape and making images none of us could have imagined. Here the human and machine are … collaboratively producing artworks of depth and complexity consistently.”

“They arrive through Nathaniel’s relationship with and understanding of the technology he uses and his … interpretation of the moments he spends in the company of his subjects. Something is happening here that I am sure we will one day reflect on and see as a pivotal moment in the history of technology and the image.”

Click on any thumbnail for full image, then use arrow keys or mouse to navigate through them.

Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City interviews Nathaniel Stern, commissioned by iCommons

“Inspired by pioneering artists in the field of Interactive art such as David Rokeby and Myron Kruger, Nathaniel Stern builds upon their work by reintroducing traditional art-making techniques to reinterpret digital records of movement. In the first half of my interview with the artist we discuss works leading up to and informing his current body of prints he titles Compressionism. In these images Stern manipulates visual documentation of movement distorting memories or impressions of the body….”

Read more: Part I and Part II