theory | implicit art

happy birthday, blog!

This blog is 4 years old today.

I don’t recall being 4, really, but according to the stories I’ve heard, I mostly enjoyed it.

Lately I’ve been obsessing over scanner art on the Internet, trying to find anyone else who has been doing things on the more performative side (like Compressionism), and also remembering (I had forgotten) that I did a series of textile designs with scannings of water, spices and various other objects in 1993, when I was at Cornell. Wish I could find those files somewhere….

Been reading this Hansen book, which is oftentimes unnecessarily dense and self-congratulatory (whilst mocking other theorists), but it has more than a few great ideas that I certainly would never have come to on my own. Also started Brian Massumi’s 2002 book, Parables for the Virtual, and it’s kind of blowing my mind a bit; he’s such a generous thinker! One passage on writing (the whole introduction maintains this level of intimacy and playfulness along with the integrity and conviction of an inventor-writer):

The essays in this volume work through examples. The writing tries not only to accept the risk of sprouting deviant, but to invite it. Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didnâ€™t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognizable to you as your own. This means you have to be prepared for failure. For with inattention comes risk: of silliness, or even outbreaks of stupidity. But perhaps in order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to â€œaffirmâ€ even your own stupidity. Embracing oneâ€™s own stupidity is not the prevailing academic posture (at least not in the way I mean it here).

… page 18

And so on. I like to think I produce (in my various media, including text) much in the same way Massumi writes.

Archives

19 January 2007 by nathaniel

Call and Response: Nathaniel Stern at Art on Paper Gallery

You are invited to the opening of

Call and Response
performative prints and iterations

On Saturday 27 January 2007 at 15:00
Art on Paper Gallery, 44 Stanley Avenue
Johannesburg South Africa

^{satin bed, lambda print, 220x600mm}

To be opened by Professor Jane Taylor
Preview by appointment

Walkabout with the artist, Saturday 3 February at 15:00
The exhibition closes 24 February 2007

http://callandresponse.co.za for information, catalogue and images

^{satin bed II, aquatint, 195x245mm (455x370mm support)}

Art on Paper Gallery
44 Stanley Avenue Braamfontein Werf (Milpark)
PO Box 91476 Auckland Park 2006 Johannesburg
+27 11 726 2234 +27 11 482 7995
info@artonpaper.co.za www.artonpaper.co.za
Tues to Sat 10:00 – 17:00

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

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

And, opening on the morning of the same day @ the David Krut Print Workshop (also in Joburg), a group show of Recent Work.

Archives

14 January 2007 by nathaniel

updata

Howdy y’all.

Apologies for the lack of updates on this blog or my daughter’s site over the last few weeks. I realize now that I really only cut out a few hours per week (my online teaching), but added a full-time PhD post, a daughter, a new country to learn, and (the usual) a few new writing and art projects. The blog has (and will likely continue to) suffered a bit. Also expect more on the academic / philosophy art-geek side, and less on the techy and local stuff… But, a few things to report nonetheless.

I’m in Joburg in 10 days! I’ll be coming in for my solo exhibition, Call and Response, at Art on Paper Gallery, in the 44 Stanley Avenue complex. It’s going to be opened by the gregarious Professor Jane Taylor; click the link to preview the beautiful catalogue Ellen designed, with texts by Clive Kellner (Johannesburg Art Gallery) & Wilhelm van Rensburg (University of Johannesburg), edited by Nicole Ridgway (Best Wife Ever). Also just put up a slideshow of all the prints there… Please try to make it, 27 January, 3PM (map).
And in the spirit of updating my online stuff, I’ve added a few things to the main site, like new descriptions (and a new page) of older performances – I never wrote statements for those collaborations, so wound up finding some text online. There’ll be a few more updates in the coming days.
But more in line with printmaking, I can confirm I’ll be working with printer and artist Zhane Warren on my three week residency at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium this July. Very excited to work with her, as well as keep up the SA link.
Last and most of all, if there’s one important thing I’ve done towards my PhD over the last couple of months, it’s solidify my research goals. Woo woo. Below is a 300-word abstract proposal I wrote for a potential upcoming conference. Multiply it by dissertation-length (by adding several sections on methodologies and sub-concepts through case studies and my own arts production), and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the next 3 years of my life!

Without further ado,

In and Around: the Implicit Body as Performance
by li’l ole me

Theorists and producers of the “mixed reality” movement within interactive art argue that inviting action and enactment, rather than producing illusion and simulacrum, creates more immersive spaces. Mark Hansen’s concept of the “body-in-code,” for example, reads the sensorimotor body here as an “activity” and a “being-with,” where the body is “distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.”

Others, such as Brenda Laurel and Chris Salter, have sought to re-think critical histories of digital practice in order to locate interactive and digital art more precisely in the theatrical or performance realms.

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

This paper attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. I’m not necessarily interested in work or environments that are more illusory or more immersive, but that, rather, ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. Like space itself, bodiliness is “susceptible to folding, division and reshapingâ€¦ open to continual negotiation” (K Kirby). By setting the stage, interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of “body”. At stake, are potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends.

Archives

19 November 2006 by nathaniel

John Gerrard: Dark Portraits

Went to see this beautiful show at the Royal Hibernian Academy on opening night this week, with Ralph Borland. Not much time to write (still no internet at home), but the Smoke Tree work was just breathtaking (liked the smaller one better, and the interactivity was not really necessary – tho it did make people look at the work for longer – but what a beautiful moving image!), and the Portrait to Smiles Once a Year made me smile for so long that it kind of made up for her not smiling. Also, was especially wonderful to witness the buzzing -lack of a better word- provenance around the Dark Portraits themselves, as viewers moved in to see the dilated pupils of the subjects in Gerrard’s portraits (taken, as the title suggests, in total darkness)… Note the new "Ireland Art" category on the blog (which will include Irish and non-Irish art I see in Ireland)! John Gerrard’s site.

From the RHA site:

John Gerrard, Smoke Tree 111, 2006, Realtime 3D, 6+2 A/P

John Gerrard is an artist whose varied works investigate the emotional possibilities of digital technologies, creating pieces that allow us to question our physical and psychological identities, our relations to each other and toward the physical environment.

Working in the arena of new technology, Gerrard’s understanding and manipulation of the medium is extraordinary. He explores the rift between real and the virtual by his insistence that real space and time be programmed into the behaviour of virtual. His sculptures and images frequently hinge around the new temporal and experiential possibilities to be found in real-time 3D.

The works could be described as virtual sculptures, which makes them somewhat like film in that they are time based but are also sculptural and photographic. New works in this show include Smoke Tree (2006), a virtual sculpture with the central basis formed by an oak tree that is transformed as it emits plumes of dark and swirling carbon, creating a mesmerising and ever-changing tableau. The work operates from dawn to dusk, constantly moving around the central motif.

One Thousand Year Dawn (2005) presents a portrait of a young man on a beach, looking out to sea. There is no movement apart from the roll and ebb of the tide. The scene seems still and yet the sun rising in the screen will finish it’s journey in September 3005.

In addition, Gerrard will show a series of photographs titled ‘Dark Portraits’, which are part of an ongoing project of placing subjects in a completely dark room and then photographing with a series of flash bulbs. The sitter appears lost, staring into a void, the visual relationship with the world suspended.

Gerrard was born in 1974 and lives and works both in Dublin and Vienna, Austria. A recipient of various awards and residencies, including the Siemens Residency at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz and an Arts Council residency in Banff, Canada, Gerrard has exhibited widely in Ireland and abroad. He first exhibited in the RHA as part of Eurojet Futures in 2004 and again in 2005 as part of the anthology exhibition. Gerrard is represented by Hiliger Contemporary Gallery, Vienna.

A full colour catalogue with essays by Shane Brighton and Christiane Paul, Curator of New Media at the Whitney Museum, NY will accompany this exhibition.

Archives

19 October 2006 by nathaniel

Teaching Humanity

My wife handed me this article by Martha Nussbaum in the newsweek a while back, and it’s been sitting on my desk waiting to be read since then. I went for a walk with my daughter swinging in her sling across my chest this morning, reading it as I sang her to sleep, and was enthralled by its simplicity and clarity on that which seems so ingrained in me, misunderstood and underused by education systems and mass media world wide. If you don’t have time to read the whole article, I ask you to read the following (last) paragraph TWICE. Once, as is – accenting the importance of liberal arts education – and a second time, replacing the word “education” with “news media” – for shits and giggles…

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. Yet they also are prone to irrationality, parochialism, haste, sloppiness and selfishness. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies–to the point that they threaten the very life of democracy itself. We need to favor an education that cultivates the critical capacities, that fosters a complex understanding of the world and its peoples and that educates and refines the capacity for sympathy. In short, an education that cultivates human beings rather than producing useful machines. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away. They don’t make money. But they do something far more precious: they make a world worth living in.

Archives

15 October 2006 by nathaniel

Art Review Digital

Something like this was in my inbox (paraphrase edit type thing):

The ArtReview Power 100 is out on Monday and you can get the whole issue of the magazine for free on your computer screen.

This is ArtReview:Digital. It’s the entire magazine online, in the exact same format as the print edition. The next six issues are free actually. You can register here to receive it (with no future obligations):

www.artreviewdigital.com

On Monday October 16 you will get an email with a link so you can access the Power 100 issue.

Obviously, some kind of promotional deal, and you’ll likely get mailers, but Art Review has been around long enough that I’m willing to give it a shot and see what it’s all about; sign up takes less than 30 seconds….