Nathaniel Stern: teaching everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking
Arts Research Africa Dialogues (apple podcast)
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Nathaniel Stern, an artist, writer and teacher who holds a 50/50 dual appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a Professor in Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering where “he teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking.”
Nathaniel’s most recent art project, a travelling exhibition, called “The World After US (TWAU): Imaging techno-aesthetic futures”, is a fascinating and constantly mutating physical melange of botany and discarded electronics that challenges viewers to imagine “what our digital media will be and do in the world after us”. One aspect of the TWAU project, called “The Wall After Us”, was was recently featured as part of the SYM|BIO|ART exhibition at University of Johannesburg. The exhibition launched the newly formed Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at the University of Johannesburg led by Prof Leora Farber.
Nathaniel also has a long association with Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts. With a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, he was responsible for designing and teaching the first years of the Interactive Media studio programme in the Digital Arts department. Over that time he also won the Brett Kebble Art Award in both 2003 and 2004, thus earning the first recognition for interactive and digital art in the South African art world. Following his time in Johannesburg, he went on to do a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland writing his dissertation on interactive art and embodiment.
Since his PhD, Nathaniel has created a dazzling range of exploratory art projects, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers. In fact the journal Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.” I urge listeners to visit his website to get a grasp of the extent of his artistic and writerly practice. In this discussion, we talk about the TWAU project; and the experience of installing the “The Wall After Us” working remotely from the US together with the curatorial team at the FADA gallery. We also explore Nathaniel’s thinking about aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and activism, especially the climate activism that is central to his work. Finally we unpack the Startup Challenge which Nathaniel directs at Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I think that the expanded notions of both innovation and entreprepreneurship that Nathaniel deploys in the programme are of great value for similar work at Wits, and in South Africa more broadly.
Useful links to Nathaniel’s website, books, exhibitions, and papers:
His website: https://nathanielstern.com
His latest published paper, together with Johannes Lehmann and Rachel Garber-Cole: “Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research”. Leonardo (2023) 56 (5): 488–495. DOI https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02400
The TWU site, with downloadable PDF of the exhibition catalogue and a video documentary: https://nathanielstern.com/text/2020/catalog-the-world-after-us/
Nathaniel’s first book, with downloadable intro chapter:
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics
The Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre webpage: https://uwm.edu/lubar-entrepreneurship-center/student-startup-challenge/#
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
SYM | BIO | ART
The catalogue to the exhibition SYM | BIO | ART: INTRA-ACTING AT THE CRITICAL NODE BETWEEN BIOTECHNOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY ART (FADA Gallery, 2023) – a gorgeous 106-page electronic publication – celebrates the creative visual outputs, scholarship and political agency of the first exhibition of UJ’s Creative Microbiology Research Colab.
The Foreword by UJ Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Letlhokwa Mpedi, underlines imperatives of the arts and sciences working together, quoting African American engineer and astronaut Mae Jemison who said, “Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience…they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing…the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”
The Introduction by CMRC founders Professors Leora Farber and Tobias Barnard locates the work of the Colab internationally and, more importantly, within the African continent. They note that, “[Creative Microbiology Research]…can be a powerful platform for African…bio-art/ design practitioners – to express and address concerns that are relevant and particular to the continent – be these socio-political, historical or environmental.”
The essay by Dineo Diphofa – titled Intra-actions and Intra-sections: Bioart as a means of Critically Engaging with the Colonial Canon – provides an art historical and political context for contemporary bioart practice. Diphofa draws parallels between canons and exhibitions as dynamic sites of evolution and flux – not static and dogmatic as history tries to make us believe, but “as sites for inquiry, critique and debate.” The essay defines for the reader the broad themes underpinning the exhibition, which “include intersectionality, environmental politics as well as colonial discourses pertaining to race. More specifically, these themes include an exploration of the colonial impact on land ownership and labour; indigenous connections to the land and language; displacement; the exploitation of natural resources; pollution, and ecological degradation.” By examining and interpreting how the artists and artworks on exhibition challenge colonial dichotomies, the essay maps ways in which bioart may be applied to undo the inner workings of coloniality. Diphofa writes that, “By subverting historical western notions linked to power and control, bioart can serve as a means of reclaiming agency and challenging the hegemonic forces that have shaped colonial relationships with living and non/living matter… and foster a more inclusive and equitable society.”
The second part of the catalogue is dedicated to the artists on exhibition, and provides edited excerpts of interviews with, and depictions of artworks, by Tobias Barnard, Nadine Botha, Xylan de Jager, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Leora Farber, Brenton Maart, Miliswa Ndziba, Nathaniel Stern and Nelisiwe Xaba. These pages, along with the text, help in constructing a vibrant and vivid view of the contribution of contemporary art to the evolution of a new practice based on new methodologies, new materialities and new forms of knowledge, new insights and perspectives, and how these may come together to redress some of the insidious effects of colonialism and other forms of human rights abuse.
download the full catalog
See on UJ site
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Culture3
Art as an embodied internet —
Nathaniel Stern talks 25 years of practice
WE ARE MORE THAN THE DATA WE LEAVE BEHIND.
What does it feel like to move and be moved? Where does play become play-full, and make new meaning? Why is the body so often forgotten in front of our screens? Nathaniel Stern shares the story of his interactive art, and why it led him to the blockchain.
More than two decades ago — after excitedly monologuing to Professor Dan O’Sullivan’s class about an idea I had for an interactive installation — Dan O, as we affectionately called him, asked if I could create the installation such that the art’s participants “moved like I move when I talk.” This led me to so many questions: what does it feel like to be moved? Where does play become play-full? Why are our bodies so often forgotten in front of our screens?
In a post-pandemic and web3 world, I find myself again posing questions about bodies and screens, matter and meaning — but with new and different twists.
How does remote presence change our bodies, online and in real life? Can blockchain-based ownership of digital assets be physically felt in a moment? Can meanings be transformed by how we experience them, physically? By sitting down, via our laptops in bed, at a desk in a not-so-private cubicle at work? How do virtual spaces like Zoom, Twitter Spaces, or Decentraland create unique experiences? Where can generative AI amplify the work of interactivity?
Why are our bodies so often forgotten in front of our screens?
This article briefly looks back on some of my interactive art and writing over the last twenty-five-plus years. And it calls for new critical art and writing, now that the blockchain has such expanded potential in the digital realm.
What is interactive art?
Interactive art combines three pieces of technology: some form of sensor, like a camera, but beyond the everyday mouse and keyboard; a computer to process that input; and any form of sensory output — audiovisual, tactile, olfactory, mechanical, or otherwise. These three pillars are placed together in a system that responds to the participation of its viewers, and that participation is required for the system to realise its qualities as an artwork. The transition from viewer to participant occurs concurrently with the transition from system to artwork.
But this framing establishes a problematic hierarchy: an emphasis on the sensor, computer processing, and output, an emphasis on the tools we use, rather than the situations they create. If we explain what interactive art is primarily through technology, then we experience it merely as a technological object. Instead, we should emphasise what interactive art does — and what we do with it.
Affect is, most simply, unqualified emotion. My palms are sweaty; my heart is racing; I have butterflies in my stomach. These are embodied sensations that do not have a name or category until we “decide” on what we are feeling. Affect is not-yet emotion, which is abstract as much as it is embodied by us. It is intensity without direction.
Our pre-conscious affection is a moving-thinking-feeling that accompanies our conscious reflection. We sense affection when viewing beautiful works of art. We feel them immediately, only then to reflect on where and what and why, on their context and meaning. But affection and reflection are continuously at work, always influencing each other in our daily lives and relationships.
enter, the piece I eventually produced for Dan O’s class, attempted to explore the entanglements of affection and reflection. As I initially explained to my classmates in the year 2000, the work’s participants (I performed a half-spin) use their full bodies to grab animated words that constantly retreat from them in a large projection. If they touch any one, it stops, turns red, and recites related spoken word in the space. Words run away from us, as we turn on a phrase, or reach for the end of a sentence.
Affect is not-yet emotion, which is abstract as much as it is embodied by us.
enter is not about reading words projected on a screen, and nor is it simply a choreographed performance in front of an image. It is a situation that highlights embodiment and meaning as always together. Embodiment: how bodies transform over time. Signification: the process of making meaning. Embodiment and signification emerge together, and enter makes that co-emergence felt.
Ecological aesthetics
I firmly believe art amplifies who we are, and more importantly asks who we could be. Across hundreds of exhibitions and articles, I always seem to wander and wonder around ecology, around affect — both human and non-human — and its effects.
Wait… nonhuman affect? It is actually an easy leap to make when we consider that there is nothing human at the centre of my human body. My body is always acting and reacting both to its environment (affection… then reflection), and as an environment (with the millions of particles, bacteria and cells, both living and otherwise, constantly working inside me). Nonhuman affect refers to the sensations and responses of physical, nonhuman matter. Like a human body, matter has various bodies that also sense and react in the world. We are always more than the boundaries of what we know, or feel, or make.
An ecological approach, then, takes account of various agents, processes, and thoughts. We concern ourselves with how, for example, humans and nonhumans; matter and not-yet-things; past, present, and future, are all actively shaped by their interrelations.
What happens when we add blockchain to that ecological mix? Which new forms, affects, and effects might the distributed ledger technology that underpins web3 make possible? In other words, what does critical interaction feel like, onchain? How can the ecological forces at play through consensus mechanisms, like proof of stake — which keep every participant aligned with the state of the distributed ledger — change what we embody and mean? How might that change what we see, what we do, what we are?
Projections and screens
According to Kate Mondloch, the space between bodies and screens is always worthy of study. Screens, she says, are both windows into other worlds, and physical things themselves. Even before Mondloch, Nicolas Bourriaud asserted that the ‘aura’ of contemporary art lies in the relationships it develops in the gallery — the social space in front of the work.
We are more than the data we leave behind.
So what better way to explore the new performances that occur at home and work, on Discord and Twitter, through Instagram and TikTok, Excel, and Outlook… than in how we physically act in front of our computers? Why do we only think of these machines as windows, of ourselves as brains uploading and downloading to and from ‘faraway’ virtual spaces? I’m tapping my foot and whispering to myself as I type… yet I so often forget the flesh I cannot see when wrapped up in my laptop, until I feel the pain of sitting in one position for too long. “Here I am,” I say aloud to the room as I type this, feeling like an idiot but proving my point.
My laptop-chained movements are vastly different from how I may engage with art in the gallery. But, in some ways, that makes them even more worthy of study. We are more than the eye and the finger that most computers ‘see’ pressing keys, reading screens, clicking mice. We are more than the data we leave behind; we are also how our bodies twitch and creak, how our eyes dash and how our necks and shoulders follow suit; we lie down and spill our coffee, get up to use the loo and return half-naked without a care, scream “I’m coming!” to our kids or partners while commenting on just one more Twitter post. And each affect on us and effect on our environment, each action and reaction, changes who and how we are.
Networked interactive art, where the participants connect to each other through a blockchain that is inherently connected and immutable, is uniquely positioned to have us move, think, feel, and reflect anew, with our behaviours around our computers and their always-tethered screens.
Meaning motion, in the museum and at home
A second gallery-bound interactive installation, stuttering, was initially produced in 2003 in Johannesburg. Developed and shown in dialogue alongside people with stutters, participants use a real-time outline of their entire bodies to touch and trigger 34 invisible buttons laid out in a grid inspired by Piet Mondrian’s art. When activated, each rectangle in the work’s projected image is not filled with primary colours, but animated text and spoken word. The saturation of these virtual buttons creates an inverse relationship: move quickly, and the piece will itself stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage; move slowly, even cautiously, and stutter with your body, to listen with all of your self, and hear its words.
What if we performed our bodies, concepts, and materials with this level of care all the time?
We feel a potency within that interactive space. We must navigate our limbs laboriously back and forth, on and off each individual button. We listen with our entire bodies. stuttering asks, ‘what if we performed our bodies, concepts, and materials with this level of care all the time? In parliaments or business meetings, with our families or in nature? What could that be and do?’ stuttering invites us to rehearse speaking and listening more carefully.
In another interactive artwork, elicit, every movement of the participant, small or sweeping, births fluidly animated text on screen. And these “characters,” in turn, elicit fluid performances from us. The software responds to small movements, writing letters on the screen slowly for us to read, and to fast ones, like rapid passers-by, whose bodies birth hundreds of flying characters, impossible to decode. While enter performatively entwines text and activity, and stuttering asks us to listen with our bodies, elicit has us experiment with the continuity between text, technology, and touch. It situates us as part of a language of constant movement, where meaning and motion are always in flux, and in synthesis.
elicit would have very different affects and effects in a home or office space, but after some consideration and experimentation, I realised that it would be no less worth exploring. And so STILL MOVING was born. Like elicit, with STILL MOVING, motion-tracking software births animated text in front of you, but it is a browser-based interactive artwork, so works ubiquitously, including on smaller, more intimate screens — phones, tablets, and laptops —, and each version has unique attributes created by code. It ‘unreads’ a poem written by my collaborator Sasha Stiles (and her AI alter-ego, Technelegy, this time additionally trained on my writing about interactive art).
The animated texts in STILL MOVING — which might go in any number of directions, depending on your mint — completely stop whenever you do. The text, your attributes, the code, and its relation to how you move and are moved, live entirely on chain, making a paradoxical pact between movement and immutability, connecting your piece, and how you engage with it, with each and every other edition and their participants. Here, because of sensors and sensitivity, even in stillness, we are moved and moving; we are together, apart, and a part of something much larger than ourselves.
We listen with our entire bodies.
The poem, also called STILL MOVING, continues mine and Sasha’s explorations of language and bodies, how the networked intermingling of thought and movement are an important part of identity and culture. Each iteration might select as much as three lines to interact with, or only one word, and might display these as full words or single characters. The preview images are a different kind of text-to-image than in the AI world, with the poem’s text laid out in a low resolution grid, appearing as pixels that make up your randomly-selected extract. The interactions I have seen thus far still raise so many questions for me. I, too, am still moving after all this time.
STILL MOVING, in series
enter, elicit, and stuttering, along with scripted — where we literally perform the physical shape and sound of language with our bodies — make up a suite of interactive installations called Body Language. I try to always show them all together, facilitating a more complex experience of embodiment and affect through the subtle differences in how we perform with each.
In addition to having us explore movement on smaller screens in different environments, STILL MOVING accomplishes the same potential of Body Language, but with a single code base and variable editions. Iterations might ask, ‘what does it feel like to physically emphasise, or to explore the artwork’s font, Times New Roman, with varying probabilities affecting the typeface in each piece? Does (font) size matter? Do different words, characters, or lines prompt different affects and effects? Do various colour palettes play out mood ‘swings’? Might speed and direction influence our own speed and direction?’
Rarer attributes like curved animations, trails, and hand-drawn graphics, add different affective forces. Our interactions might be awkwardly mirrored or located upside-down on screen. It feels like a mistake when we play with it — is this a bug? Who changed my Zoom settings? — and makes us all the more aware of our physical bodies and movements in space. STILL MOVING becomes its own large-scale interactive art suite, right in front of our screens.
We are together, apart, and a part of something much larger than ourselves.
And, STILL MOVING only begins to explore interactive art’s potential via the blockchain. Even with the data-storage limitations of operating onchain, edge detection, light tracking, motion tracking, and many other simple computer vision techniques that work with a built-in webcam can be used. And alternative decentralised platforms allow for even greater possibilities, such as body-and-amplitude-tracking, face detection, or the triggering of image or sound-based assets. Perhaps even display screens (like Infinite Objects) can one day incorporate cameras themselves, or Kinect-like tech, creating another kind of exploratory and interactive NFT space.
Blockchain opens up new opportunities for interactive and generative art. Artists must seize opportunities to make work that actively entangles affects and effects between participants and their environment. Have us move and and think and feel what it means to be a human body.
Make us act what it means to be a human body, online and in real life, with the actions and transactions empowered by the blockchain. The possibilities themselves are the work of the art.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Culture3
Nathaniel Stern on creating a cyber-natural future on the blockchain
by Ola Kalejaye
For Nathaniel Stern, life extends far further than the human experience. Connecting the dots between human feeling, nature, and technology, he explores the endless bounds of sensibility through his art. He speaks to Ola Kalejaye about The World After Us, and using art to ensure that world is good.
When Nathaniel Stern speaks about his work, his passion for the subject matter enlivens the conversation, steering it down tangential alleyways that enlighten his process with glorious context, while also bringing a cascade of new and interesting insights.
Such are the makings of the eclectic mind of a natural polymath and interdisciplinary artist. Nathaniel holds a joint appointment at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, teaching both Art & Design and Mechanical Engineering. It certainly scans for someone who embodies the mind of both artist and academic through the way they approach, well, everything.
Nathaniel expressed interest in a variety of creative media from a young age. The son of two English teachers, he first explored his creativity through music while attending an engineering high school. He went on to study fashion design at university, and it was there that Nathaniel faced the first major turning point of his artistic journey, and quite by chance.
One of Nathaniel’s undergraduate professors sent him a link to New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), which he interpreted as a suggestion that he apply. In reality, as Nathaniel learned a decade later, his professor had sent the link as a reference for what she wanted to hire Nathaniel to do with her own website, but the decision had already been made.
Founded in 1979, the NYU ITP explores communications technologies, and how they can serve as vessels to spread art. The programme is also well known for its contributions to interactive art, which has been one of Nathaniel’s primary vehicles for expression.
During his time at NYU, Nathaniel explored the notion of performativity, “how text and activity intertwine.” A major guiding inspiration came from his teacher, Professor Dan O’Sullivan, who noted Nathaniel’s particularly animated style of speaking, prompting him to explore the relationship between speech and the body. “That’s where my two loves kind of came together,” reflects Nathaniel. “It wound up completely changing my life. That’s where I became an artist.”
“What might that cyber-natural future look like?”
— Nathaniel Stern
As Nathaniel’s interests evolved, he honed in on his corporeal relationship to the environment, through the lens of affect. “Affect is the body’s response to the environment that doesn’t have a name yet,” he explains. “It’s an emotion without a qualification.”
One of his early explorations of this phenomenon was through a series of what he labels Compressionist images. Nathaniel would make custom imaging rigs by attaching battery packs to desktop scanners, rigging them to his body and moving through different landscapes.
Nathaniel’s experimental and ingenious project spanned over a decade, taking him and his imaging rigs scanning over hedges, through parks and streams, and wading through lakes and waterfalls.
He even spent three months learning to scuba dive with his equipment, to take his compressionist observations underwater. He and his team built five different sub-aqueous systems, and Nathaniel dived with three of them at three different sites.
Thanks to Nathaniel’s uniquely unusual method of capturing these “melty, slit-scan images,” the thoughts and questions they stimulated were beyond what Nathaniel could have ever planned. He was viewing the interrelationship between his body, technology, and the world around him in a wholly new way. He had found a way to visually represent affect.
Nathaniel began to wonder, what if the landscapes that he had been surveying had their own, unprocessed responses. Could there be some kind of nonhuman affect? And if there was, how might it express itself in an environment increasingly tampered with by human activity? This exploration manifested itself in what is perhaps Nathaniel’s signature work thus far, and the centre of his NFT collection launching on Quantum Art, The World After Us.
“We need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
— Nathaniel Stern
The title of the series is inspired by the book The World Without Us, which explores the progress of planet Earth if humanity were to go extinct. In The World After Us, he explores how biological life and the waste that humanity produces would intertwine in our absence.
“If matter can move and think and feel,” Nathaniel asks, “what if it’s not just the plants that retake the planet? What if the digital materials themselves started to incubate and fester and spread?”
The World After Us is Nathaniel’s representation of what such a future would look like. For him, that future is neither blindly optimistic, nor some post-apocalyptic dystopia. “I wanted to imagine a space that is full of garbage, but life finds a way, because it always does,” he explains. “What might that cyber-natural future look like?”
The collection falls into three categories: old appliances reclaimed by plant life, fossilised phones and laptops, and devices repurposed into tools. Contemplating the future of our tech-driven society, Nathaniel’s images recontextualise our relationship to these quotidian items.
“How can I change my relationship to this thing?,” he muses, asking both of himself and the viewer, “How do I understand it, no longer as this object of beauty and utility, but also as garbage.”
Art is just one platform through which Nathaniel pursues these aims. A self-professed “Jack-of-All-Trades”, Nathaniel co-founded the climate action startup, Eco Labs, and sits on the Board of a battery company seeking to replace the lithium ion with the much more plentiful sodium ion in the battery-making process.
However, for Nathaniel, art provides the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to inducing systematic changes to our attitudes on waste. Nathaniel quotes his friend and collaborator, the soil scientist Johannes Lehmann: “I can tell you how to solve climate change, but we need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
“What the blockchain has afforded me is that I get to live in both worlds at once.”
— Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel’s appreciation that much of that will could be inspired by the blockchain required a 180-degree change in perspective, from contempt to admiration. Indeed, he intended to make a “critical and negative work” about the blockchain with longtime collaborator Scott Kildall.
However, when Nathaniel and Scott began their research, their opinions swiftly changed. “We came to it and we were like, oh shit, there’s something there,” he explains. “Yeah, there are crypto bros, but there are also really earnest people who want to leverage its power.”
Nathaniel recalls finding the work of artists and writers in the blockchain space, such as Simon de la Rouviere, and future collaborators Rhea Myers and the AI-collaborative poet Sasha Stiles. Their opinions on the blockchain firmly changed Nathaniel and Scott’s perspectives, who decided to instead create a work celebrating the blockchain, starting Nathaniel’s web3 journey in earnest.
“We need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
— Nathaniel Stern
To him, the NFT ecosystem provides a space for experimentation that had been eroding in the face of demands of galleries and museums, and more akin to the Net Art days of the 1990s. “I would just make something, throw it up, get feedback and see what happened,” he reminisces.
By contrast, whilst a gallery would support his work, all experimentation had to happen behind the scenes. In providing Nathaniel the means to sell and distribute his work directly, web3 lets him pursue his true interests.“What the blockchain has afforded me is that I get to live in both worlds at once.”
Top of mind for Nathaniel is a longstanding desire to archive his work, which the blockchain enables for a digital work far better than any gallery. Though he does not fully buy into the concept of the blockchain lasting forever, he does find the concept of permanent immutability on the blockchain to be “a beautiful idea.”
“The blockchain is already a promise we can’t possibly keep,” Nathaniel says, as he ponders what forever looks like, and beyond. “But I think that putting our trust in the trustless and timeless is itself beautiful. And romantic and cynical, and problematic and hopeful all at once.”
by Ola Kalejaye – read full article in context on Culture3
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Public Art
A Korean, full-length, feature article on electronic waste in art, including two images of The World After Us.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Creative Mornings talk
This is the CreativeMornings Milwaukee talk in January 2020. It’s 20 minutes with 15 mins of Q&A.
Nathaniel Stern gives a dynamic artist talk about his experimental and beautiful work between art and science. By artificially aging phones, growing non-human life inside of media devices, and turning electronics into other tools, he inspires us to change our relationships with various technologies. Stern tells us more about where our computers come from, where e-waste winds up, and what we can do to improve our future.
Free events like this one are hosted every month in dozens of cities. Discover hundreds of talks from the world’s creative community at https://creativemornings.com/talks
CreativeMornings Manifesto
Everyone is creative.
A creative life requires bravery and action, honesty and hard work. We are here to support you, celebrate with you, and encourage you to make the things you love.
We believe in the power of community. We believe in giving a damn. We believe in face-to-face connections, in learning from others, in hugs and high fives.
We bring together people who are driven by passion and purpose, confident that they will inspire one another, and inspire change in neighborhoods and cities around the world.
Everyone is welcome.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
New City Art
Time Versus Technology: A Review of Nathaniel Stern at MOWA | DTN
By Rafael Francisco Salas
What will my laptop, phone or tablet look like in a million years? How might we imaginatively repurpose our e-waste? Where might electronics lead our environmental and economic politics? Can we plan and act for a sustainable future? These questions are the core of Nathaniel Stern’s exhibition “The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures,” currently on view at MOWA|DTN.
Stern’s proposal is grand. He has cooked, smashed, melted, stacked and carved out phones, desktops and other e-waste and transformed them into an imaginary future in geologic time.
Stern is following the thread of Alan Weisman’s 2007 book, “The World Without Us.” In it, Weisman imagines how the natural world would reclaim our mechanized detritus in the absence of humans. Stern has created a visual document of this process. “The Wall After Us” is a network of screens, desktop computers, phones and cassette tape interwoven with ferns, potting soil and other greenery. The effect is of the damp, drippy understory of a forest that emerged from someone’s former office space.
Other sculptures in the exhibition show expand on themes of degradation and rebirth. A pile of remote controls, receivers, fans and a pirated CD of David Bowie’s “Blackstar” are partly submerged in a terrarium filled with water. A dismal tube eternally dribbles water over this mass. As I leaned in I could smell the plastic and metal interacting with the water. It was vaguely noxious, the splashing water wafting decomposition into the air.
Elsewhere cellphones have been pressed and heated into a vestige of ash and carbon. These sculptures were powerful. Seeing what happens to objects we are so intimately connected to reduced to literal rubble had the effect of looking at a corpse.
In addition to describing the result of time on our technological devices, Stern also remarks on possibilities for repurposing them. Carapaces from Apple computers have been formed into a hammer, a wrench. The aspirational concept of beating swords into ploughshares is poetic, though undercut by Stern’s cheeky title: “Applecations.”
Interestingly, the strongest work here emerges in photography and film. Stern has a designer’s eye behind the camera, and at times his photos of plant life growing from our old gadgets has a greater impact than the objects themselves. The color and light in the photos give them an atmospheric romanticism and a greater visual impact. The artist also includes a documentary where he eloquently presents his proposal. There is an irony in this, however, as the film is of course projected from a sleek, sexy flat screen.
At times the exhibition felt overly familiar, reminiscent of other art and literature describing the world emerging from the tide of mechanical reproduction, though ultimately it remains an important message. Our crisis of electronic consumption is happening now. Stern tells us there are ten billion phones produced per year, more than there are people to use them. Art can, and should, be a vehicle to expose this crisis to ourselves. (Rafael Francisco Salas)
“The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures” is on view at MOWA|DTN in the St. Kate Arts Hotel, 139 East Kilbourn, Milwaukee, through March 25.
See original review on Newcity Art
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Cornell Chronicle
Lehmann, alum artificially age tech waste for new exhibit
By Daniel Aloi
Millions of years from now, long after mankind ceases to exist, what will the technology we use every day look like? What happens to all the devices and digital media we leave behind? Are there ways we can plan for and enable a different future?
Artist Nathaniel Stern ’99 is posing these questions in dramatic ways with “The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures,” an exhibition through March 29 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in Milwaukee.
It includes installations, sculptures, prints and photographs featuring plant life growing from electronic waste, and various media and devices – such as books and floppy disks, cellphones, laptops, keyboards, punch cards, audiotape, and Ethernet and USB cables – altered to resemble fossils.
“You’re taught early on that data is bottomless, just ones and zeros,” Stern said. “And it’s gone if that information is lost, but the logical fallacy is that it is divorced from some material form. That is problematic in many ways. We’re constantly talking about sustainability and green environments, and we don’t take into account the matter around us.”
Stern combined scientific experimentation with artistic exploration to create the traveling exhibition.
“I’ve worked with a botanist and horticulturists to figure out how to grow the plants inside the electronics,” he said. “My first thought was, ‘Were the electronics going to impact the plants?’ In time I found out the inverse is true; the plants would filter out the toxins.”
He also collaborated with Johannes Lehmann, professor of soil and crop sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ School of Integrative Plant Science. They worked together on campus last summer to apply experimental pyrolysis techniques to burn and artificially age the items.
“He started sending me things early in 2019, anything that he could find, intrigued to see what it would look like if we artificially aged it,” Lehmann said. “Apart from the fact we do it in 20 minutes rather than 5 million years, we wanted to see what a book, or a cellphone, would look like in millions of years.”
He wouldn’t normally think of the longevity of materials put in soil “past more than a few thousand years,” Lehmann said. “I don’t think in iPhones; I think in plants and leaves. This idea is so intriguing. Our nose gets poked into questions that we didn’t ask before.”
Stern reached out to scientists working with fossil fuels and aging, and most didn’t write back, he said. His classmate and friend Julie Goddard ’99, Ph.D. ’08, associate professor of food science, told Stern about Lehmann’s work with biochar, superheated organic material used to enrich soil.
“Literally within hours of phoning Johannes, he said, ‘Let’s meet today,’” Stern said. “I was amazed how similar his lab tests and my studio tests are, how we label things … We work in much the same way.”
The artist worked with a forge and foundry to work out how to convert aluminum iMacs into tools; and [with Lehmann and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger of the University of Wisconsin] to turn phones into inks and make prints.
Stern has an experimental art background and began work on the project in 2016. Applying for a fellowship studying theory in the eschaton – the end of days – “gave me the idea for the fossils, and the degradation over geologic time of technological material,” Stern said. “I didn’t get the fellowship; however, the director of the center [political theorist Kennan Ferguson] reached out and said it was a great idea. He wound up becoming one of the catalog essayists on the show.”
Stern said he’s been playing around with technology for more than 20 years. “At Cornell, we were the only fashion program around that was doing things like 3D scanning and pattern grading,” he said. “It’s where I learned that you could be creative with technology. My interactive art comes from that basis in fashion.”
After graduating from the College of Human Ecology, he returned to Cornell in 2002 as an artist-in-residence at Risley Residential College, and earned graduate degrees in art from New York University and electrical engineering from Trinity College in Dublin. Stern now holds a joint appointment as professor of art and design and of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Stern wants to explore the potential for change in recycling practices and the regulation of waste, beginning with how we perceive the products we throw away by the millions.
“Many people understand the problem of waste and of toxicity,” he said. “There’s this intimate relationship we have with our technology; can we keep that relationship just one year longer? … Can we make biodegradable or compostable phones?”
“Artists are starting to imagine these things,” Lehmann said. “They ask the uncomfortable questions about our future and our society.”
See original article on the Cornell Web site.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Shepherd Express
Nathaniel Stern’s Mad Science at MOWA Downtown
by Shane McAdams
If I were to mention that I viewed an art exhibition of computer-based artwork that flirted with the spectacular, I think the assumption would be that the spectacle involved moving images, light and other sensational magic tricks associated with the productive potential of new media. In the case of Nathaniel Stern’s exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art Downtown (MOWA | DTN), “The World After Us” (a name modified from Alan Weisman’s fascinating account of human ephemerality), the impact of his computer-generated art is based on computers and other technology itself—like the actual machines and hardware witnessed in various stages of degradation and reclamation.
It was a gut check to walk into the gallery on my cell phone, vaguely considering the refrain that I, like many of us, are “slaves” to our devices, and then witnessing the chaotic tangle of computers, motherboards and cellphones all bent to the Frankensteinian will of Stern, professor, artist and semi-mad scientist. As I stood in front of a blender filled with ravaged old Androids and RAZRs, a toaster holding a charred smartphone and what looked like a rotating cellphone torture rack, I might have put my thumb over the camera of my iPhone to prevent it from seeing the slaughter. But my phone should rest assured that these strange medieval-looking experiments with technology are all made with salvaged hardware procured through a program at UW-Milwaukee; no phones were hurt in the making of this exhibition.
What might look like a graveyard or torture dungeon for spent hardware is actually a more redemptive setting. Stern’s no sado-technologist; rather, he’s an esthetic researcher hoping to reorient our relationship to computer waste by forcing us to look at it in new ways. Standing before a wall of degraded laptops and cables in the main gallery, appropriately titled “The Wall After Us,” I was reminded of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of accumulated technological waste. It occurred to me that he and Stern are both grappling with an inversion of that quote by Joseph Stalin that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. One personal device connects you with the world and reflects your individuality, while thousands of them in a pile is a tragic reminder of human limitations.
Confronting these limitations seems so important to Stern precisely because the marketing teams in Silicon Valley exert so much force in the opposite direction. From the consumer side, computers are presented as pure, precious, transportive, liberating and enlightened. Apple Stores are designed to be visions of positivity. Stern notes in the catalog’s introduction that one of his profound revelations in researching this project was learning that waste from mining the raw materials vastly surpasses that of the products themselves, which means that simply engaging in responsible disposal is not enough by itself to arrive at sustainable levels of technological consumption.
For this reason, Stern, who began thinking about the exhibition in terms of our “intimate” relationships with technology, soon started to look at e-waste from different perspectives. He considered the legal and regulatory issues around disposal and ultimately began to wonder about the creative and inspirational possibilities that might result from his visual research. The “Phossils” that arise from these more experimental approaches provide the show some needed optimism and an entry point for those who would naturally begin thinking about solutions.
Stern collaborated with Cornell professor Johannes Lehmann, an expert in the burning material in zero oxygen known as pyrolysis. Collaborations between the two result in some wonderfully strange attempts to denature keyboards, circuit boards and other hardware. It’s alchemy for the 21st century—trying to spin silicone back into carbon. On the brighter side of dystopia are a series of mechanical tools cast from melted down aluminum from MacBooks—a hammer, saw and screwdriver—as well as a number of prints made with carbon-based ink refined from incinerated hardware. These restitutive moments are the sugar that helps one swallow the show’s more bitter realities.
The single most beautiful vision in the show is the large photograph of a mushroom rising from the face of an Apple watch, caught at the moment a single drop of water falls from its cap. “Sporadical” is a fine metaphoric punctuation for “The World After Us.” It encapsulates the ephemerality of our precious devices, their implicit battle with the natural world and all the accidental “third things” that might arise as if by magic from those encounters. Stern confessed to me that, after seeing the show, a young girl decided to reimagine her science project and began researching e-waste. He mentioned that it made all his labor worthwhile. Even though we have no idea to what end her enthusiasm and basic research will lead, it’s hope all the same. Those unpredictable future events are the exhibition’s most precious content, but we’ll all have to wait for them patiently over the coming decades.
The World After Us runs through March 25 at MOWA | DTN in Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn Ave.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Spectrum News
‘Phossils’ phones and electronics after we stop using them
By Magaly Ayala Milwaukee
MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) — Downtown Milwaukee’s Saint Kate Hotel is hosting a one-of-a-kind exhibit, showing a different perspective on reducing our carbon footprint. The exhibit explores the destiny of electronics and phones once they are discarded.
“I wanted to know what would happen to them after I threw them out, what world are we leaving behind?”, questioned Nathaniel Stern, UW Milwaukee professor, artist, and writer.
Upon asking himself that question, Stern began to work with scientists to artificially age electronics and find out if they would actually ever decompose. “None of them broke down the way that we expected, the way that we hoped for,” said Stern.
The observations and data collected when experimenting led Stern to new ideas for the outdated devices, like creating ink and repurposing parts of the electronics. “The ink itself is made out of crushed phones extended with different kinds of printmaking oils. The utilities that I called circuities tools where you see my hacksaw my ax and a trowel that is made out of old Dell circuit boards,” Stern continued.
He’s hoping to postpone some of the long-term damage this type of waste can create. “A lot of the rare earth minerals in our phones are toxic and are toxic to the soil and they can get into our water supply,” added Stern. The exhibit is gaining attention, raising awareness and sparking curiosity in those who visit it.
“I feel like it just brings a lot of awareness for kind of how our society is going about life and the overlap with nature, you know what’s gonna happen with all these products down the road when we’re putting them in landfills and stuff like that,” said exhibit visitor Justin Dischler.
Allowing people to get up close and personal with Stern’s experiment, where . they might even encounter something they previously owned. Giving people a perspective of just how long they can hold up.
“Maybe we should take a second look at how we’re going about technology and how we’re gonna be sustainable for the future”, finished Dischler. Making people consider postponing that new mobile upgrade or electronic purchase just a little longer.
Nathaniel Stern and scientists who collaborated in the exhibit . will be hosting a free panel discussion on the topic Saturday, February 15th at the St. Kate Hotel.
The World After Us exhibit is open to the public until March 29th 2020 from 6 am to 1 am.
See story in original online context
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
WIRED
Nature Will Triumph—and Reclaim All Our Gadgets
A new art exhibit, “The World After Us,” shows the power and ingenuity of nature to make use of machines in a world without humans.
Arielle Pardes
Most of your electronics—your phone, tablet, smartwatch, desktop computer, laptop, beeper, pager, e-reader, smart television, dumb television, soundbar, speaker system, camera-enabled doorbell—will outlive you. It is a matter of fact, and a fact of matter: Technology consists of stuff estranged from the earth, plastic and metal and silicon, while our soft bodies will one day returneth to dust.
Never mind that the usable life of most gadgets lasts about as long as the average betta fish, fated to swim around a glass bowl for a year or two until it is dumped, unceremoniously, down the toilet. Consumer electronics are both disposable and indestructible. They are designed to be coveted, and counted on, only until manufacturers can develop the next version. Then the old gadgets are turned off and thrown away, rather than reused, repaired, or otherwise reimagined.
Imagine, then, the world beyond the Anthropocene—an era that will be defined by this great amount of electronic refuse. By some estimates, 4 million mobile phones were sold every day in 2018, to say nothing of the unsold phones or the outdated phones they replaced. The human legacy will not be the Pyramids of Giza or the Taj Mahal but this great quantity of refuse, things that once turned on, that once held humanity’s collective attention.
Such a future is confronted in “The World After Us,” an art installation opening today at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in downtown Milwaukee. Walking into the gallery space is like traveling to a time millions of years from now, where humans no longer exist but our devices endure. In this future, Mother Nature has reclaimed the motherboards. Moss and fungi sprout from the remains of an Apple Watch. Vines wind through petrified keyboards and hard drives. Towers of e-waste stand like statues, and a series of fossilized phones greet visitors like rare finds from a futuristic archaeological dig. “I wanted to create a space that was overwhelming,” says Nathaniel Stern, the artist behind the installation, “but also then provoke what it might be, what it might become.”
As an artist, Stern has an obsession with the ways technology and the earth relate. He spent years scuba diving with a desktop scanner to create prints of jellyfish, coral, and the undersides of lily ponds. In 2012, he launched a series of messages into space (no longer than 140 characters each), using a high-amplitude, high-frequency radio telescope. In another installation, he rigged tornado machines to respond to microscopic movements, like gust from a closing gallery door.
Each of these works presents art that is evolving, changing in the gallery, sometimes as a result of the viewers themselves. “The World After Us” is no different. Many of the pieces are alive, sprouting or wilting in real time. One of the artworks, “Server Farms,” features iMacs, laptops, and rotary phones gutted and repurposed as planters. Another, “The Wall After Us,” shows a jungle of wall-mounted laptops, keyboards, headphones, and circuit boards with vines growing through them.
Creating this cybernatural work led Stern to experiment with various methods of destruction to mimic the effects of geological time. One piece, the Ecokinetic Sculpture, features a pile of phones that have been melted in an air fryer. For another, he pulverized phones until they were ground to a fine powder. In one of his more demanding experiments, Stern combined forces with Johannes Lehmann, a biogeochemist at Cornell and an expert in pyrolysis—a thermochemical process in which materials are treated with high heat in the absence of oxygen. When food waste or other materials are “biocharred,” the process can sequester carbon and boost soil fertility when buried. When Lehmann and Stern replicated this process with a series of phones, it artificially aged them into fossils.
Other electronics were destroyed and then repurposed into functional objects. “We melted down those aluminum iMacs and turned them into a hammer, a wrench, and a screwdriver,” Stern says. “There’s also the circuit board cut into a hacksaw and an axe. Of course those are not usable, but it’s a hopeful rethinking.”
The project of “rethinking” may seem underwhelming (like an art novice tilting her head to consider a piece of modern art: “It really makes you think”). But in Stern’s case, this reimagining is meant to provoke political change. In a 200-page catalog that accompanies the artworks, he brings up the possibility of better regulation around manufacturing electronics; the “amount of waste produced just to make our phones and computers in the first place” is considerable, to say nothing of the waste they create when they’re no longer in use. Collectively, the artworks ask viewers to rethink materials: Could phones be compostable? Can a computer be reborn as a hammer?
Of course, Stern is not the first to call up the question of what happens to our stuff when we are gone. In the 2007 book, The World Without Us,Alan Weisman imagines Earth minus all the humans. Cities crumble, sewers clog, and new forms of fungi and flowers bloom around the plastic handles of pots and pans. A year later, the History Channel debuted the television series Life After People, a similar consideration of how the planet will evolve. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has criticized these thought experiments for their guilelessness, calling them fantasies of “witnessing the earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it with our hubris.”
Stern’s version, though, seems to dodge this idealism. His artworks are neither beautiful nor grotesque, neither dire nor reassuring. They function more like science experiments. What happens when you shatter an Apple Watch, plant some moss inside, and leave it to grow under the scintillating studio lights? The Apple Watch doesn’t returneth to dust—it becomes something else entirely.
See the original article on WIRED.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
The World After Us
Traveling exhibition catalog and documentary
Title: The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures
Texts: Edward A. Shanken, Nathaniel Stern, Amanda Boetzkes, Kate Mondloch, Jennifer Johung, Kennan Ferguson, Coe Douglas
Style: Hardcover and bound, 200 pages
Publisher: Nathaniel Stern and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Date of Publication: 2020
Language: English
Download The World After Us as PDF (27.2 mb)
Object list (with prices)
The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures is Nathaniel Stern’s traveling solo exhibition of sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration. They take the forms of: a wall-hung jungle of computer detritus and biological reclamation; fossilized and reconfigured phones and laptops; and reimagined and re-formed electronics.
What will digital media be and do, after us?
What will my laptop, phone, or tablet look like in a million years?
How will our devices weather or grow over time?
What else might our techno-waste be, and how might we sense and feel this?
Where might electronics lead our environmental and economic politics?
Can we plan and act toward new and different futures?
This body of work transforms what we discard so as to rethink conversations, thoughts, and actions around media production, use, and waste. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
The World After Us makes available this 200-page hardcover catalog, a short documentary, and an audio tour. It is generously supported by the UWM Office of Research.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
CNET
Your phone in a million years: When electronics outlive humans
Visit Nathaniel Stern’s “The World After Us,” a strange and provocative place.
Leslie Katz
Nathaniel Stern has spent the last few years torturing consumer electronics. Burning them. Freezing them. Smashing them. He’s not a gadget sadist. He’s an artist and engineer imagining what today’s devices might look far, far down the line.
Like a million years from now.
The gadget torment started when Stern, a professor of both art and designand engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, looked down at his iPhone in its hard, plastic case and found himself pondering the product’s future — not from a design perspective, but from an ecological one. How, exactly, would the phone disintegrate over time? Would that plastic ever decompose?
Those questions led him to expose a series of devices to extreme conditions, like high temperatures and pressure, that mimicked the ravages of time. These “Phossils” (fossilized phones) will be on display as part of The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures, a traveling solo exhibit of sculptures, installations, prints and photographs aimed at provoking a conversation about technology use and waste.
“The World After Us is not post-apocalyptic,” reads a description of the project. “Rather, it imagines potential futures while asking viewers to be mindful of their media in the present.”
The exhibit takes inspiration from Alan Weissman’s book The World Without Us, which asks what the world might look like when humans have been replaced by other forms of biological life. The exhibit premieres Jan. 17 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, which calls it a “timely provocation that will leave viewers contemplating how we might change our ecological trajectory.”
Exhibit visitors will encounter a wall climbing with moldy laptops, keyboards, drives, phones and other degraded e-waste sprouting and tangled in botanicals. The green vines and electrical cords intertwine to form a strange jungle. Also on display are a live water fountain that cracks and peels the glass off a different iPhone over the course of each show, and a flipping hourglass that sands down a phone every [6] minutes.
Viewers will also find examples of gadgets given new life.
“We should not only ask what digital media will be and do, after us,” the artist’s description reads. “We must reinvent what digital waste can be and do, in the present.”
There are fine-art prints of mobile devices drawn from ink made up of phones ground into a fine powder. On closer inspection, the newfangled ink sparkles with bits of embedded metal and shards of glass. Melted aluminum iMacs from the late 2000s have been shaped into a hammer, screwdriver and wrench. Routed circuit boards have been reborn as a saw, ax and trowel.
Stern estimates that the exhibit encompasses about 250 computers, 100 phones and a few dozen keyboards and mice, plus hundreds of feet of audiotape and ethernet and USB cables.
The goods were culled from second-hand electronics stores and local e-waste surplus operations, as well as companies that had heard about the project and donated their discarded electronics. The artist says he and his team will recycle much of the art after the exhibit makes its rounds.
Past projects have involved him hitching a flat-bed desktop scanner, computing device and custom battery pack to his body and swinging over flowers or jumping over bricks to capture images of objects and spaces. He also went underwater with custom DIY photography rigs toggled from custom electronics to image the mysterious deep-sea world. Because Stern wore the devices, his movements helped compose the shots.
Stern says viewers have called this latest project, his most ambitious to date, “intense yet hopeful, sad and beautiful, all-consuming around our consumption.” Some have said it scares them. But, he says, “Everyone agrees on one thing. It is a call to action.”
See the original article on CNET.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Fast Company
See what your iPhone will look like in a million years
Our gadgets will outlive us. Artist Nathaniel Stern explores how.
Elizabeth Segran
We’re kissing our plastic straws goodbye. And many of us have started carrying around a trusty reusable bottle to cut down on our need for disposable plastic bottles. But as we work on reducing our plastic consumption, we often lose sight of some of the most obvious forms of plastic we use everyday: the tech devices that keep us tethered to the modern digital world. In 2018, an estimated 4 million mobile phones were sold every day—a figure which does not include phones that were manufactured but unsold. Once you include phone charges, computers, and tablets, the scale of our technology waste is astronomical. And since most of these products are encased in plastic, they’ll take hundreds of years to decompose.
This has been on Nathaniel Stern’s mind for a while now. The Wisconsin-based artist has always been fascinated by technology, ecology, and design, having received a BA from the school of human ecology from Cornell University and a PhD from the department of electronic and electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin. In his most recent exhibition, entitled The World After Us, Stern creates sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that weave together plant life with electronic waste to help us imagine how our devices will live on in the world even after we’ve discarded them for the next device-of-the-moment.
Stern was inspired by a book by journalist Alan Weisman of the same name, which invites readers to imagine how our massive technological infrastructure would crumble and fossilize once humans no longer walk the earth. Stern has given us some visual cues about what would happen to our everyday objects. There are many curious items on display, including a piece cleverly called Photosynthesis that features a small plant growing out of a Panasonic Lumix camera. There’s a large wall covered in plants whose tendrils snake around open laptops, keyboards, cassette tapes, and pieces of a motherboard that have been hung up. There are even pieces of electronic equipment that have long been out of use: An old-fashioned corded phone has leaves growing out of the dial pad.
Everything about the exhibit—including its title—reminds us of our own eventual demise. But it also forces us to consider that while we’re organic creatures that will return to the earth, we have fashioned materials that will long outlive us. And we don’t give enough thought to how these items will live on—and perhaps take on new lives of their own—once plants and animals find a way to live around them.
Countries have developed recycling systems to deal with everyday plastic waste, like plastic bottles and food containers. Consumers don’t recycle these items as stringently as they should, but these waste management systems at least exist. It’s much harder for us to recycle electronic waste since we can’t just chuck them in a bin. Part of the reason they are harder to recycle is that they are made up of many different materials—including aluminum and steel—which are hard to separate and recycle appropriately. And these products also contain toxic or hazardous materials, like lead and mercury, which can harm both humans and the environment.
Until e-waste recycling becomes more widespread, you have several options when it comes to disposing of your technology devices. There are many charities or nonprofits, including eBay for Charity and AmericanCellPhoneDrive.org, that take gadgets, refurbish them, and give them to people who need them. Tech companies including Apple and Amazon have buyback programs for newer electronic products, but will also accept and recycle older products. And finally, you can explore your town or city’s recycling program. Some have special collection days for electronics and will responsibly recycle the items they collect.
Stern’s exhibit reminds us that if we want to take our plastic consumption seriously, we need to be more comprehensive in our approach. Cutting down on straws and bottles is certainly a step in the right direction, but let’s not forget to recycle that keyboard or stereo system once its reached the end of its life.
The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures premieres at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Downtown, January 17 – March 29.
See the original post on Fast Company.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Ecological Aesthetics
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics is a plea for us to continuously think- and act-with the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; to orient ourselves in ways that we might find and express what our environments, and what they are made of, want; and then to decisively help and continue those thoughts, wants, and actions toward novel aims and adventures.
With this poetic and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, Nathaniel Stern argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently entwined, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. An ecological approach, says Stern, takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And aesthetics are a style of, and orientation toward, thought—and thus action.
Download the Ecological Aesthetics introduction (20 page PDF, 1MB).
Stern has also made a free, Creative Commons-licensed recording of the introduction to the book for streaming or download. It is a preview, released mid-April 2018 and available now. This audiobook version is read by the author, with background music by João Orecchia. Stream via Soundcloud above, or, for listening with the player of your choice:
Download the MP3 (1 hour).
Including dozens of color images, the print book narrativizes artists and artworks—ranging from print to installation, bio art to community activism—contextualizing and amplifying our experiences and practices of complex systems and forces, our experiences and practices of thought. Stern, an artist himself, writes with an eco-aesthetic that continually unfurls artful tactics that can also be used in everyday existence.
Ecological Aesthetics shows a deepening awareness of the connectivities, relations, events, and the unfolding of reality at different registers and scales. Its impact lies in its consolidation of art communities, putting weight on the significance of local interventions and aesthetic engagement. . . . It reads like a gentle manifesto.
– Amanda Boetzkes, author of The Ethics of Earth Art and Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press at the University Press of New England
Date of Publication: July 2018
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1512602914
ISBN-13: 978-1512602913
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Transcode
South African exhibition catalog, featuring stuttering, static, and works from Distill Life and Call and Response.
Title: Transcode: Dialogues Around Intermedia Practice
Author: Gwenneth Miller
Publisher: UNISA (University of South Africa) Art Gallery
Date of Publication: 2017 (exhibition 2011)
Language: English
Download PDF (17.8 MBs)
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
M Magazine
Scanning the World
MILWAUKEE-BASED ARTIST CHALLENGES HOW HUMANS RESPOND TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT
BY ROCHELLE MELANDER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT HAAS
To call Nathaniel Stern a Renaissance man might be an understatement. An associate professor of art and design in the Peck School of the Arts at UW-Milwaukee, Stern is a Fulbright grantee, published author and TED Talk speaker; his artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and he’s on the forefront of using scanner imaging photography. Stern is also the co-founder and core team member of the UWM Student Startup Challenge and the Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship, along with Dr. Ilya Avdeev, UWM assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Brian Thompson, president of the UWM Research Foundation.
In viewing Stern’s vast expertise and interests, a common theme emerges: interaction. He wants people who view his art and the entrepreneurs he coaches to think about who they are, who they can be, and how they relate to the world and one another. As he said at the conclusion of his TED Talk, “Think about the kinds of relationships and environments we’d have, if we thought more about the relationships and environments we have.”
Stern did just that when he created his stunning visual images, playing with how our interaction with technology and the world produces beauty. He strapped a desktop scanner, laptop and cus- tom-made battery pack to his body, and then wiggled and jumped, capturing images as he moved. The image you see in the gallery might be a result of his breathing, or cracks in the glass, or a fly attracted to the light of the scanner beam. Then, as Stern says, “The dynamism between the three — my body, technology and the landscape — is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival prints.” Stern’s visual images were displayed most recently at the Tory Folliard Gallery this past summer during Gallery Night and Day. (Tory Folliard represents Stern’s artwork in the Midwest.)
Perhaps the best way to understand Stern’s work is to participate in his interactive art. Stern has hacked full-bodied gaming control- lers so that viewers trigger animation, spoken words and more by moving their bodies. In a sense, the interaction between the viewer and the technology creates the art. For example, in “Stuttering,” the viewer’s movement produces words on a screen. Move slowly, and a few words appear, spouting zen-like wisdom: “Take a deep breath.” “Read.” “Consciousness.” Move quickly, and the screen stutters, lighting up with a cacophony of phrases. But as with everything Stern makes, the art is more than just art. “I like to think that ‘Stuttering’ helps us practice listening and performing in the world with a little more care,” he says.
Stern witnessed this firsthand when all four of his interactive works were displayed, alongside the work of Tegan Bristow, in a show called “Meaning Motion” at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. He watched people move from one interactive exhibit to another, sometimes stopping to teach a friend or stranger how to interact with the art. At “Elicit,” a piece in which every movement evokes a sea of text, he watched viewers silently invite each other to dance. “Their relationships to each other and themselves and the art shift, and they leave that space thinking, moving and interacting differently,” Stern says.
Milwaukee residents can interact with these works when “Body Language” is shown this November and December at the INOVA gallery at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts.
Download this article as a jpg or PDF, or see on the M Magazine site.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Critical Arts
Ecological aesthetics: thinking trees and Goods for Me
by Nathaniel Stern
Published July 2016 in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies
Abstract:
People and peoples are always in process with the world around us; we are only a small part of intricate, complicated and ongoing systems; we are always more than the boundaries of what we know, or feel, or make. ‘Ecological aesthetics: thinking trees and Goods for Me’ argues that an ‘ecological aesthetics’ is surfacing in contemporary art, which makes such linkages felt. The best of this work amplifies who and how we are, together with all of matter, and more importantly how we could be. This work can and should be experienced, practised and studied through the ecologies at play in and around that work, be they material, conceptual, environmental, personal, social, economic and/or otherwise. The article more specifically thinks with some of the work of South African artist Sean Slemon, which manifests a politics of movement, potential and composition outside standard human perception. It narrativises, through one artwork, our experience and practice of complex systems and forces. Here every-thing is continuously emergent with its conceptual-material environments, is part of continuously moving and changing assemblages. Ultimately, an ecological aesthetics calls for rethinking human and non-human relations as always mattering, always affecting, always political – together.
Related artworks:
Other related texts: