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25 June 2012 by nathaniel

Call for participation – Sentimental Constructions: an ethico-aesthetics of collaboration

As part of Performance Studies international #18 and Ludus Festival Leeds, a small group of international artists from The Sense Lab (Montreal) are asking for participants and collaborators to help in conceptualizing, creating and performing a ‘Sentimental Construction’. These are site-conditioned, publicly performed architectural structures made of rope, fabric, yarn and other local materials, which are outstretched and activated by and with the public. Here we generate an ephemeral arrangement through communal play, shifting spaces between the pre-formed and the per-formed.

Please join us Thursday 28 June at 11:30 in Parkinson, the Centenary Gallery, for an informal talk and discussion, then a project kick-off – including a brainstorming session and building for the rest of the day. We also seek participants on Friday 11:30 – 1:30 and 2:30 – 4:00, for experimentation and construction on University of Leeds campus, and Saturday from 12:00 to 14:00 for a final performance scheduled for Kirkgate Market in the city.

Organizing artists: Nicole Ridgway, Stephanie Springgay, Nathaniel Stern

Archives

20 March 2012 by nathaniel

Help Jessica and me make art!

13 Views of a Journey

Hi Everyone:

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and I are trying to raise money for our next collaborative solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP in Johannesburg, South Africa, in January 2013, through crowd-funding site US Artists. Some of this work will also be shown in Milwaukee as part of SGCI next March. Please consider donating even the smallest amount to help us cover costs of materials and catalog printing (with an essay by renowned media theorist Richard Grusin)! Every little bit helps, it’s tax deductible, and donations at various levels will get limited edition art works to boot. Contributions can be made through Amazon payments. We’ve made a video explaining the work and what your money will go towards online with the campaign at: http://www.usaprojects.org/project/matter_mediate_material

Note: If your credit card is issued from a non-US bank, or you prefer not to use Amazon payments, please consider either making a donation through GALLERY AOP via Alet Vorster in South Africa <[email protected]>, or by printing and mailing or faxing this donation form.

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The Exhibition

In our ongoing series of collaborations, a traditional printmaker (Jessica Meuninck-Ganger) and digital artist (Nathaniel Stern) merge practices to create new forms. Matter Mediate Material is an upcoming solo exhibition in Johannesburg, South Africa (January 2013), where we will permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, to make “moving images on paper.” Several of these exciting new works will also be shown as part of Southern Graphics Conference International (March 2013, Milwaukee).

We really appreciate your patronage and support. Matter Mediate Material will combine hand craftsmanship with high tech, and so requires LCD screens and media players, hours of shooting, animating and drawing, paper, ink, silk screens, wood, copper plates, frames, glass, and so much more. Your funding will assist with materials and production for the new work, as well as catalog printing. Remember that we must reach our minimum goal to get funding (it’s all or nothing!), but any moneys over and above that goal will help further: towards shipping costs, framing, travel, design, PR and public programming. Every bit helps – so please donate, and tell your friends, too. Thank you for your help!

Thanks in advance for your support! Best,

nathaniel and jessica
Distill Life: undertoe

Perks

$30
Bi-weekly updates, and a small, signed, letterpress print

$60
Bi-weekly updates, a signed letterpress print, and a signed catalog

$175
Updates, signed letterpress print and catalog, and a signed silk screen print

$400
Everything above, and a very limited edition signed digital print

$1,300
Everything above and a signed, very limited edition, 2-layer digital and traditional print

$2,400
Everything above and a signed, limited edition print+video piece -this includes a video screen + media player to make “moving images on paper”

Archives

22 July 2011 by nathaniel

Giverny of the Midwest: Nathaniel Stern @ GALLERY AOP in Johannesburg, South Africa

Giverny of the Midwest (detail), 2011, 2 x 12 meters
Nathaniel Stern scanning lilies in South Bend, IndianaGiverny of the Midwest

Johannesburg, South Africa
Nathaniel Stern at GALLERY AOP

44 Stanley Avenue
Braamfontein Werf (Milpark), Johannesburg
Saturday 30 July – Saturday 13 August 2011
Opening talk by Jeremy Wafer, 30 July 14h00
Artist talks, 4 – 5 August, Joburg and Pretoria
Artist walkabout at AOP, 4 August 18h00

For Nathaniel Stern’s ongoing series of performative prints, he straps a desktop scanner, laptop and custom-made battery pack to his body, and performs images into existence. He might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around his neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism between his body, technology and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival art objects.

Giverny of the Midwest is a panoramic installation of nearly 100 such prints, rendering water, lilies, leaves and other organic forms into lush and rippling images. The source materials were scanned during a week-long camping trip next to a lily pond in South Bend, Indiana, and edited together over the course of nearly 2 years. The piece explicitly cites Monet’s large-scale painting and installation, Water Lilies (1914-1926), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is similarly an immersive triptych of over 250 square feet (totaling 2 x 12 meters), and follows the patterns of light and color in Monet’s panorama. But Giverny of the Midwest’s three large panels move between proximity and distance, and are broken down into differently-sized and -shaped prints on watercolor paper, each evenly spaced apart. The tensions between flow and geometry, life and modularity, place it in further dialogue with other trajectories of modern and contemporary art, and simultaneously activate the possibilities of working across digital and traditional forms.

Giverny of the Midwest (detail), middle wall, 30 prints @ 2 x 4 meters

Giverny of the Midwest (detail, 2 x 4 meters; total size 2 x 12 meters)

Also part of the exhibition: The Giverny Series, 8 individual prints (edition 10, 2011) and In the fold, an artist book (forthcoming) – both produced using imagery from the aforementioned “art camping trip” in South Bend, Indiana.

****

Artist presentations

At both artist talks, Nathaniel will talk about his trajectory of thinking and making, which centers around curiosity, generosity and dialogue. He’ll present his work as a series of questions that often lead to interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and the combination of new and traditional media. The walkabout will see an open discussion about Giverny of the Midwest more specifically – the prints, the process, and the in-betweens.

Artist talk: Thursday 4 August, 12h30
Digital Convent, University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Co-hosted by Wits Digital Arts and the Division of Visual Arts
details: [email protected]

Artist walkabout: Thursday 4 August, 18h00
GALLERY AOP
44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf (Milpark), Johannesburg
details: [email protected]

Artist talk: Friday 5 August, 9h00
Sunnyside Campus, University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria
Hosted by the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
details: [email protected]

***

GALLERY AOP details

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday 10h00-17h00, Saturday 10h00-15h00

Archives

28 June 2011 by nathaniel

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger @ Gallery AOP, Johannesburg

GALLERY AOP
www.galleryaop.com


Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition (detail)  2011 Artist book installation: drypoint, letterpress, etching & aquatint,
lithography and drawing on Thai mulberry paper & muslin  2,3m high X 1,2m X 10m (open)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition
2 – 23 July 2011
Opening Saturday 2 July at 14:00

Opening address by Max Yela
(Head, Special Collections, UWM Libraries; Adjunct Associate Lecturer, UWM Department of Art & Information;
Adjunct Instructor, UWM School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)

Preview by appointment
Exhibition catalogue available (on-line version via www.galleryaop.com)

Walkabout
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Max Yela will conduct a public walkabout before the opening, at 11:00 on Saturday 2 June. All welcome!

Artist-printmakers
A special walkabout/information session will be held on Sunday 3 July at 14:00 for artist-printmakers

“Position/Opposition is an installation of over one hundred etchings and drawings assembled in a variety of presentation formats, including: a suite of six hanging print assemblages (45 x 66 cm), a large book (1.2 x 2.3 x 6 m – open); and one work from an edition of five artist’s books (maquette versions of the large book). Each work is a compound composition of expressive faces and hands that embody an emotive collaboration between two subjects. All of the prints on paper are participatory in nature and utilize the same subject imagery, but due to the ranging formats and scale, each depicts a unique conversation.” (Jessica  Meuninck-Ganger, 2011)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger is a ‘context-provider’ (rather than a ‘content-provider’, in the words of British artist Peter Dunn) in this installation of prints, folios, and books that combine traditional processes of etching and lithography with new technologies, and incorporate the structural techniques of sculpture and book arts. She says: “I compose autobiographical memoirs that unfold like journal pages made for public view. An enthusiast of fine papers, prints and books a subjects, I am interested in people’s interactions with them as physical forms and conceptual spaces.”

Meuninck-Ganger’s work involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations well beyond the institution of the gallery. Her artist’s books are catalysts or surprisingly powerful transformations in the consciousness of their ‘readers’. The conversations they generate become an integral part of the work itself, which is collaboratively achieved.

Short biography
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries regionally – near her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – nationally in the US and internationally. Her works on paper and her artist’s books are included in several private and public collections, including the Weisman Museum of Art and the Target Corporation, and in contemporary publications, such as Richard Noyce’s recent book, ‘Printmaking Beyond the Edge’ (collaboration with Nathaniel Stern). She has received residencies and fellowships all over the world, and has instructed printmaking courses and workshops throughout various states in America. Jessica received her MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2004 and is currently Head of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.

Archives

12 May 2011 by nathaniel

MADE REAL: An exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, London

MADE REAL

Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern @ Furtherfield

Date: Friday 27 May – Saturday 25 June 2011
Venue: Furtherfield Gallery (formerly HTTP)

MADE REAL
an exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the founders of Wikipedia Art.

Private View: Thursday 26 May 2011, 6.30-9pm
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

Networks – social, political, physical and digital – are a defining feature of contemporary life, yet their forms and operations often go unseen and unnoticed. For this exhibition Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, artists and co-founders of Wikipedia Art take these networks as their artistic materials and play-spaces to create artworks about love, power-play and a new social reality.

Three works are shown for the first time in the UK: Wikipedia Art, a collaborative work “made” of dialogue and social activity; Given Time, an Internet artwork that creates a feedback loop across virtual and actual space; and Playing Duchamp, a one-on-one meeting and game between an absent artist and viewer/participant.

Contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events

Wikipedia Art by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

‘if you claim something to be true and enough people agree with you, it becomes true.’ Steve Colbert on Wikiality

‘I now pronounce Wikipedia Art … It’s alive! Alive!’ Kildall and Stern

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern famously used Wikipedia as an artistic platform, creating a collaborative project that explores and challenges our understanding of how knowledge is formed and disseminated. For over a year they planned the initiation of Wikipedia Art, a socially generated artwork that exploits a feedback loop in Wikipedia’s citation mechanism. Here, a “word war” across blogs, interviews and the mainstream press, which involved Wikipedians, artists, journalists, lawyers and even the Wikimedia Foundation itself, continuously defined and transformed a work of art in much the same way that these categories define the discourses of the everyday.


This is not Wikipedia, oil on canvas?, 2010, – Wikipedia Art Remix by Patrick Lichty

‘We ask our potential collaborators – online communities of bloggers, artists and instigators – to exploit the shortcomings of the Wiki through performance.’ Kildall and Stern

(Often unwitting) collaborators ‘performed’ the work through a debate about its aesthetic, conceptual and legal legitimacy in over 300 texts in over 15 languages on the Internet via blogs and forums such as Rhizome and Slashdot, and in the press including the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian UK.

This exhibition charts the inception, birth, life, death and resurrection of Wikipedia Art, which questions the authoritative role of Wikipedia, and reveals its fallibility whilst debating the control of access to and creation of knowledge.

Wikipedia Art featured in the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2009. In 2011 it was an awarded finalist at the Transmediale festival in Berlin.

Also showing in this exhibition

Given Time by Nathaniel Stern
Furtherfield presents Stern’s polar projections of Second Life lovers. Second life is a 3D simulated and virtual world, inhabited daily by thousands of people around the globe. To access Second Life, you must embody an avatar (a virtual human representation of yourself), seeing what they see through a computer screen. Stern places us, and his lovers, in a feedback loop between virtual and actual space.

In Given Time, two life-sized and hand-drawn avatars simultaneously stare longingly across their virtual pond, and the real world gallery floor. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, supported by the gentle sounds of their breath, the wind blowing, and birds in the far off distance. The viewer is both the observer and participant of this reciprocal relationship. Through the bodies and eyes of another, we see, look and are seen. Stern says: “Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.”

Playing Duchamp by Scott Kildall


The American artist Scott Kildall, exhibiting for the first time in the UK, has fused the two worlds of art and chess in an homage to Marcel Duchamp, chess master and artist recognised for shifting the paradigm of conceptual art. Using the recorded matches of Duchamp’s 72 tournament games, Kildall has modified an open source chess engine to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp. By sitting down to this game of computer chess, visitors interact with the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, whose love for chess rivaled his attraction to art.

Furtherfield invites you to come and play because as Duchamp said: “The creative act is not performed by the artists alone”.

Events

Going the distance for fine dining with global friends
To accompany this exhibition, in June, Furtherfield will be hosting two telematic dinner parties with the aim to create a co-presence dining experience with our remote friends mediated by digital technologies (network connections, projections, laptops and sonified objects). As food is the greatest mediator, we aspire to a satisfying remote connection through the frame of the dining experience.
Contact ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org for details on how to become a dinner guest.

About the Artists

Scott Kildall
Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm to perform interventions into various concepts of space.

Scott has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums and received fellowships, awards and residencies from organisations including the Kala Art Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Turbulence.org and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He is an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco. He currently resides in San Francisco.

More information: www.kildall.com

Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa) is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, mixed reality art and multimedia physical theatre performances, to digital and traditional printmaking, concrete sculpture and slam poetry.

Nathaniel has held solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and several commercial and experimental galleries throughout the US, South Africa and Europe. His work has been shown at festivals, galleries and museums internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, International Symposium for Electronic Art, Transmediale, South African National Gallery, International Print Center New York, Milwaukee Art Museum and more. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

More information: http://nathanielstern.com

Download Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act (Creative Commons licensed)
by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, to be included as a chapter in ’ Wikipedia: Critical Point of View. Eds. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (University of Amsterdam), 2011. Forthcoming. Print.

Furtherfield, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY, +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events -contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org

Archives

11 January 2011 by nathaniel

Nathaniel Stern in Minnesota, Berlin and New York

stuttering, interactive installation

at interval screen shotMind the Gap
Minnesota

Paul Watkins Gallery
Winona State University, Minnesota
12 January – 2 February 2011
Artist talk, 14 January 3:30 pm
Opening reception, 14 January 4:30 – 6:00pm
Free and open to the public

Nathaniel Stern’s first solo exhibition in Minnesota, Mind the Gap features his recently redeveloped and award-winning interactive installation, stuttering, juxtaposed with at interval, a video art work that similarly explores both the labor of, and humor in, embodied communication. With stuttering, viewers-turned-participants use their entire bodies to touch and trigger activation points laid out in a Mondrian-styled grid. Move quickly, and the piece will itself stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage; move carefully, even cautiously – stutter with your body – and both meaning and bodies emerge. For at interval, Stern removed all dialogue from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, leaving only 13 minutes of stutters, gasps, and oral fumbles. Just as in stuttering, this work articulates the in-betweens, accents the impossibilities within language.

Wikipedia Art logoTransmediale
Berlin

Transmediale.11
Response:Ability
Various venues, Berlin, Germany
1 – 6 February, 2011
Registration required

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern‘s Wikipedia Art questions structures of power and knowledge in the Age of the Internet. Here the artists wrote about, and then initiated, an art work composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone can edit. Through a social and creative feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that they call ‘performative citations,’ the piece began as an intervention, turned into an object, and was killed and resurrected on the Wikipedia site several times over. Wikipedians, artists, critics, bloggers, geeks and journalists debated fact, theory and opinion via hundreds of sites and publications worldwide, each community continuously transforming what the work was and did and meant simply through their writing and talking about it. Wikipedia Art is a finalist for the Transmediale Award; Kildall and Stern will be in Berlin exhibiting as part of the festival, presenting as part of the conference program, and attending the award ceremony.

Nathaniel Stern scanning water liliesTalks at the College Art Association and New York University
New York

CAA 99th annual conference
West Ballroom, 3rd Floor, Hilton New York
Wednesday, 9 February, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
Registration required

At the CAA conference, Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Nathaniel Stern will be giving a talk about their work together as part of the Bio-Art, Boundaries, and Borders panel, organized by Jennifer Johung.

Nathaniel Stern Artist Talk
ITP, New York University
4th Floor, 721 Broadway (and Waverly), New York City
Friday, 11 February, 6:30 PM
Free and open to the public

Finally, Nathaniel Stern will also be giving an Artist Talk at New York University, hosted by the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Most likely, this will be followed by dinner and drinks around the East Village.

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Hope to see some of you there!
nathaniel stern
http://nathanielstern.com
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