implicit art

Phossils

Hello world! I have a baby. And am getting married next week. So blogging has been slow…. But then, there’s this new stuff I’m excited about.

Phossils are, more or less, fossilized phones. Here I subject media devices to extreme heat and cold, artificial pressure and geological time, or other intense conditions that weather and turn these materials intoâ€¦ somethingelse.Â Through research, experimentation, and craft, I have tried to transform phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels, into synthetic archives and simulated relics for a future time. Cook, freeze, burn, smash, blend, and moreâ€¦ and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes, on pedestals and stands, and/or as archaeological finds.

Yay, art!

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09 January 2018 by nathaniel

Briefiew: Art and Tech at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee

Maksym Prykhodkoâ€™s shout, an interactive installation.

Happy New Year, Everyone! I apologize for the minimal posting of late. Aside from the obvious holiday season, my son Julian was just 4 weeks old on Sunday – so I have literally had my hands full quite a bit over the last while (usually full with baby). Things will pick up again, if slowly, as we get into a routine… Here’s my first in a while: aÂ Briefiew of the Art and TechÂ exhibition at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee, at which – disclaimer -Â Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and I have a few of our collaborative pieces.

It seems a bit dated and broad to call an exhibition, simply, “Art and Tech” in the year 2018, and yet the content and context of this show give it an edge that is both genuine and enlightening.

Artist-curatorsÂ Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, in front of 3D printed works by Fred Kaems

First: context. The artist-curators,Â Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, are both graduates of the once-quite-large but now-defunct Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, andÂ every single artist exhibiting has either taught within, guest spoken at, or graduated (or, in two cases, at leastÂ taken classes) from, that same program. And more than half of them have exhibited, and received press, internationally for that work.

Given its success (and there’s plenty of it, if you look at its graduates), what does it say that this program no longer exists? Is it because of the overly territorial environment of academia, amplified by cuts, cuts, and more cuts? Is it that creative uses of technology are now seen as more suited to design, business, or engineering programs? Could it be that technology has become so integral to all forms of art that it need not be its own major any longer? But what does that mean for the discourses of the digital, or for more advanced skillsets that require faculty and labs, like programming, electronics, and fabrication? These questions are part of the overarching background to the show.

More than anything, however, Art and Tech seems to be placing Milwaukee’s computer fine arts scene – which, on this show alone, includes some of the progenitors behind the world’s largest Maker Faire, a coder behind one of the most popular “expensive” ($30) music-making apps, highly-regarded fellowship, grant, and residency winners, and teachers from across the continent – within both a local and global context of thoughts and thinkings-with Art, Media, and Social Change. How do we interact between the digital, selfhood, consumption, data, projection, play, community, and more? Technology and Art/Culture, I constantly remind my students, are never separate. And at the present moment: all studio practices are digital studio practices; all cultural practices are digital cultural practices. And we need much broader and deeper explorations here, also asking how, why, and where we explore, together. And Milwaukee is one hub for precisely this.

The whole show is worth your time, to be sure, but here are a few of my favorite highlights…

Scott Kildall, two pieces from Strewn Fields

Scott Kildall’s Strewn FieldsÂ mine (pun intended) impact data from Earth-bound meteorites, and transduces these numbers into mappings for aÂ high-pressure waterjet / cutting machine, which then carves into rock, producing new forms. Kildall calls the pieces from this series “data-visualizations” on his web site, but they are so much more than that. From stone to stone, marring to marring, I ask, what is lost or gained? How does Earth re-member (that is, embody again), violence, impact, or change? At what scale can we see, touch, and feel, the Earth, its climate, and the wonder that (and how) it simply is?Â Where do meaning and matter coincide, disperse, reconfigure, and relate/transform? I see all of these questions, and more, in each small tablet. I have been a fan of Kildall’s work for some time – why I chose to collaborate with him on several occasions – and yet I believe these understated sculptures are some of the strongest work I’ve seen from him to date.

Alycia Griesl’s Malfunctions

Alycia Griesl’s portraits that likely employ either desktop scanners or some form of slit scan imaging are probably the simplest of works on exhibit, yet it is precisely this thinking that shows how far we’ve come in the last decade or two. Whereas prints such as these would be considered high-tech and highly “filtered” in years gone by, we now see them only as emotive, and even recognize the procedure, the lines as moments of time, the colors as relics of the that process.

Adam Wertel

And Adam Wertel’s kinetic sculpture (I missed the title, but it’s probably something like Drawing Machine, given his other work), sees an occasionally and slowly rotating block of charcoal drawing, building up, and sometimes dripping lines on paper and graphite on the floor… If you sneak behind, you can see the mechanical arm, guess at his use of magnets. Like in Kildall’s case, there’s a kind of deployment of authorship coupled with a purposeful amplification of the agency of mark-making, in both senses of the phrase.

Fred Kaems displays photographs of people interacting with the large 3D printed sculptures he places in public spaces, changing all of people, places, and things, at once. Pete Prodoehl shows his funny and quirky interactive sculptures that make noise and emphasize maker culture itself, “when pushed.”Â Morehshin Allahyari, who I recently wrote about, displays her Dark MatterÂ (above, video courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery), a video of binary-yet-mixed worldwide icons – barbies with guns for arms, playboy bunny scissors, and more. Most interestingly, this video is meant to travel, with NASA, to an international space station.

some of Pete Prodoehlâ€™s sculptures

Works byÂ David Witzling, Kevin Schlei, andÂ Bryan Cera (another recently covered artist), (and, as mentioned, Jessica and me) are also on show, and there will be various other workshops and screenings. Overall, it’s a microcosm of some of the most current explorations in and with digital media, what it is and does and might be, how it thinks and asks us to think.

Art and Tech is on view through February 3rd at Var Gallery.

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20 December 2017 by nathaniel

Tops of 2017: a different kind of year in review

This was a short-lived tradition I started almost a decade ago, and I’m stoked to reboot it. Here, I put forward four Top 5 lists of my own: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017, The Top 5 people Iâ€™d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didnâ€™t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!

The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017

Julian James Lafayette Stern. My newborn son. Obvs. Also his mom is AMAZING.
De Angela Duff

De Angela Duff co-runs the Integrated Digital Media program, a creative technology degree (er, set of degrees – undergraduate, masters, and PhD) in the engineering college at New York University. She restructured it to be more creative – to cover design and arts thinking along with utilitarian engineering skills – and grew it to more than double its size in a few short years. All this and she is a proud woman of color to boot. She hosted me in New York, along with Luke (below) for a talk I gave at their program last Spring.

Luke DuBois

Luke DuBois co-hosted me on my aforementioned New York visit. He and his work are fun, smart, political, and engaging on so many levels. He is most known for his “human portraits made from data” (this is Dubois’s TED talk) and for his work on Cycling74’s artful Software Development App, Max. He’s also a great teacher and composer, and a generous seeker of funds for his students; and one can get a real pulse on liberal news simply by watching his Twitter or Facebook feed fly by…
All my new studio assistants: Mary Widener, Jenna Marti, Alex Gugg, Josh Passon, Reid Finley, and Olivia Overturf (actually, I met Olivia in 2016, but it’s a fit). These folks have been working feverishly on new sculptures, new experiments, my new card game, and more. They do so with passion, creativity, and professionalism, all while having to put up with a very strange boss.
Maggie Sasso

Maggie Sasso was a Nohl Fellow (a big deal in Milwaukee) a few years back, and we were thrown together for side-by-side solo shows coming up in Madison’s Watrous Gallery in Fall 2018. We decided to meet up to discuss the space… and eventually agreed to collaborate! I’ve had a blast getting to know her, her work, and her family. She is very generous, very smart, very fun, and both creatively thoughtful and thoughtfully creative. If you don’t know her or her art… do yourself a favor! It’s humorous and tragic, with both implied and explicit narratives from the sites and lives she touches.

The Top 5 people Iâ€™d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017

Amanda Boetzkes is someone whose work I only briefly encountered while doing research for my new manuscript, and who then wound up giving amazing and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of that text, pushing me towards the book it eventually became. The book is, without any doubt, much stronger because of her constructive criticism. Boetzkes has some wonderful texts out there already, and I am eagerly awaiting her new book project,Â Ecologicity: Vision and Art for A World to Come, which “analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition.” More onÂ Amanda BoetzkesÂ via her website, or check out some of her writing via Amazon.
N. Katherine Hayles’Â How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Almost 20 years later, her 2017Â Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive NonconsciousÂ differentiates between a thinking that describes â€œthoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,â€ and â€œcognitionâ€ (2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a â€œmuch broader facultyâ€ extant on some level â€œin all biological life-forms and many technical systemsâ€ (14). Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand â€œthe specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planetâ€ through a more coherent â€œethical inquiryâ€ (3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the â€œsupporting environmentsâ€ humans are â€œembedded and immersed in,â€ which â€œfunction as distributed cognitive systemsâ€ (2). As I said in an earlier briefiew of the book, I found myself alternatively nodding with approval ,and shaking my head in disagreement, while reading, but that is precisely because this is such an interesting field with too much to debate. And Hayles’s bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and may prove to be another game-changer.
Kathy High

Kathy High is the super cool bio artist behind Blood Wars, where participants contribute their white blood cells toward battle against each other in a petri dish, until only one winner in this (literally) bloody tournament remains. We’ve shot a few emails back and forth around the section I wrote about her work in my upcoming book, but I’d love to meet her in person.
Ben DavisÂ is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and ClassÂ and an all-around great writer on the arts, aesthetics, pop culture, and how they all relate to both everyday and overarching politics. He is smart, and funny, and manages to wrap up a lot of difficult-to-understand aesthetic and cultural philosophy and theory into easier to understand texts, when it is called for. Part activist, part writer, part arts and culture critic, whenever I stumble onto his writings I always read and enjoy them, and imagine a coffee or beer with Ben would be fun and enlightening.
Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a no-brainer. If you don’t know who he is, I can’t help you. Hell, I feel like I’m pretty late to his fan club myself…

The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable)

Bill Viola

Electronic Renaissance, Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. I find Viola’s slow motion and high definition video installations of the last decade to be mesmerizing; where he began as an experimental video artist, playing with time and image, he has now mastered that material and discipline. He has long been re-staging historical (mostly religious) paintings, with a few moments before and after in his detailed slo-mo imagery, and this exhibition curated his updates alongside the originals. It was a wonder to take my time with the show, an affective and curious ride…
The Venice Biennale. I finally made it out! What an amazing few days of jumping around contemporary art and ideas, and a beautiful city. I’d never been (though some of my work has been part of the periphery), and I feel like this was a very strong year. Candice Breitz has always been a favorite (since my time in South Africa, 2001-2006), and I was very pleased to be introduced to the work of Michel Blazy.
Rashid Johnson

Hail Now we Sing Joy, Rashid Johnson at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Locals: if you missed this, you missed out. Johnson is a master of mixed media and installation, using materials that allude to race and gender, identity and escape, while pushing us to explore how we think-with ourselves and our surroundings, histories and presents, materials and how and why they matter. Not only are there explicit ties to politics and its knowns and unknowns, but implications of ecology and more long-term accountability, and where these coincide with issues of race and class, interpersonal relationships and how they function.
Stacey Williams-Ng, tour of Black Cat Alley. Wlliams-Ng has amplified how Milwaukee murals are acts of politics, dialog, community, and commercialism, all in one. Black Cat Alley has launched a lot of debate and new business, a shining light on a number of locally featured artists. Yes, there was some controversy around Adam Stoner’s muralÂ (and again when it was painted over) – but in my opinion the outcomes of the conversations it spurred have had a net positive effect, mostly because of the generosity of everyone involved. It was great to get a group tour with other generous folks in the Fall of 2017.
Shane Walsh at The Alice Wilds. I did not review this show because it was before my blog was rebooted, but I did follow up with this post about Shane’s work a few months later.

The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didnâ€™t.

Nicole Eisenman in Munster

Skulptur Projekte MÃ¼nster. Only every ten years, this citywide exhibition sees new permanent commissions, several exhibitions and ephemeral projects, and a whole history of work of years gone by. I went a decade ago and … wow, it was like a treasure hunt! I hope I make it again some day.
Sara Cwynarâ€™s Rose Gold at Foxy Production. I’m just gonna pull from the text on this one, because it totally nails it: “Appleâ€™s Rose Gold iPhone [tracks] how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals â€” the artist is one of its protagonists â€“ negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the userâ€™s emotions and imagination.”
Sean Slemon’s Confluence Tree.Â I LOVE Sean’s work, and wrote the catalog essay for this one – but sadly had to miss it. More on his work and this show via this post.
â€œMerce Cunningham: Common Timeâ€ at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mostly known for his cutting-edge and revolutionary choreography from mid-last century until his death in 2009,Â Cunningham also collaborated across genres and disciplines from installations to theatre, costumes to printmaking, painting, music, and more. I’ve loved and appreciated much of the work by his contemporary William Forsythe, and I imagine this show was stunning…
WanÃ¥s Konst. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, but it looks RAD. I love it.

Comment with your lists!!!

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11 December 2017 by nathaniel

Welcome Julian James Lafayette Stern

Born December 10, 2017 at 8:44 am, 6 pounds 10 ounces, 20 inches long. Baby and mama are doing well, if a bit tired, and we are so very much in love.

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07 December 2017 by nathaniel

Artist feature: Gregory Klassen AND Review: Back to School at Villa Terrace

The only disappointing thing about my visit to Gregory Klassenâ€™s studio a few weeks ago was that I hadn’t, rather, visited with him years ago, so as to include him in my upcoming book,Â Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics. Just… wow.

I define anÂ ecological approach as one where we take account of, and speculate on, agents, processes, thoughts, and relations – together. We concern ourselves with how humans and nonhumans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry, past, present, and future, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelations. We wander and wonder around â€œHow?â€ and â€œWhy?â€ and â€œWhere to?â€ for each. I argue that it is both an ethical and aesthetic practice to think- and act-with in such a way. After all, we must look and see, sympathize and desire, as part of thinking and acting and making decisions with and for our world, with and for and each other.

And Greg’s work approaches ecology and relation in precisely this way. ItÂ embodies and amplifies theÂ generally imperceptible “actions” of “things” around us, so we might sense and perceive what they do, and want, andÂ are -Â what they could be, how we might be, and what weÂ might all make, looking towards the future.

The image above, for example, pictures a snapshot result of Klassen’s studio sweepings. I kid you not; for Nature Floor, he continuously swept piles of dirt and dust and garbage from the floor, into one large mound, and let that build. Over months, as he fancied, he also began to sprinkle it with water, some seeds, some interesting bits he found walking outside around the studio, and gift it with light. And… there it is, teeming with life and signs, compositions and decomposition. At stake here are our understandings of, and interactions with, the fields of influence, the potentials and capacities for birth and transformation, which are a part of each and every thing.

Greg sets up systems that help us to see and feel these forces, and just a fraction of their outcomes. Or, sometimes, he just puts extant systems (and/or their results) on display.

Retrospective Aggregate was more of an “accident,” and what, in part, set him on this path of ecological framing. Klassen spent almost a decade attempting to coerce paint – through splashes, drips, and swings of both the paint and canvas – into organic movements about… well, mostly, organic movement. And the results were indeed beautiful, written about brilliantly in this review by Mary Louise Schumacher in the Journal Sentinel. But it was when Greg rolled up his studio carpet, which he had been working “on” (in the more literal sense, as in, “on top of”), and found paint that hadÂ actually escaped to its underside – seeping and drawing, pooling and crawling, saturating and evaporating – that the artist felt he was really onto something. This became his solo exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art: an eight-year work of art, where the paint itself did all that he had been trying to urge it to do, and more, but without his explicit direction. Here, and elsewhere, Greg presents works that are less an expression of human gesture or symbolism, and more a result of what paint, or plants, or dirt, themselves, do andÂ want.Â Klassen encourages life and non-life as they are: growing, decaying, and growing again – and exhibits how they move and are moved.

For Greg’s Nature Table, he had the help of artist Brent Budsberg in constructing a wood structure to house and display dirt, and he gives it cycles of light and water, occasionally dropping whatever seeds are on sale at the hardware checkout over the top. Over years, it sees death and prosperity continuously emerging in and out of earth and rubber, grain and compost.

It’s nothing, really. It’s every-thing. It’s his interest or the lack thereof, the temperature in his studio, the light it gets or doesn’t, what’s on sale, what’s in the water, what people see and say, point out and ask him to enhance, and, and, and…

Currently, at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Greg is showing Plants: a room full of upended and upside-down, dead, potted plants, on tripods and dramatically lit, that mirror the strange, vintage, designer floral wallpaper in one of the upstairs rooms. Here is a forest of “dead media” in the most literal sense; it’s dusty and rigid, but also tangled between its own organic feel, and the sprawling desire to “be alive” from the papered shrubbery around the room.

At moments, it feels like Greg’s not-yet-decaying plants are bursting from the walls themselves. Infesting, propagating, taking over; aestheticizing, slipping through cracks, making strange; presenting, performing, redirecting; intervening, interacting, interesting.

This all “matters.” The etymology fits: all matter matters. Yes, I too am a life-long humanist, who spends more time worrying over the homeless than rainforests, thinking about American politics than recycling lithium ion batteries (for better or worse)… But Klassen reminds us that we humans are not the center of everything. Far from it. What lives in the dirt, comes from the sun, floats around the water… these “facts of the matter” are far more consequential. As a matter of fact (so to speak),Â there is nothing human at the center of a human. We are made of the same quarks and electrons as that table, the same liquids and bacteria as that yoghurt, are much smaller to the earth (universe!) as that rat or rock are to us. We are a habitat as much as we inhabit, and can easily fall prey to what we ingest or what infests us, to pollution or other environmental factors.

And we must start to think in different scales and times if we are to survive, together.Â Klassen asks us to attune to the usually softly-spoken life and non-life around us. He makes it sad but beautiful, quirky and ethical, humorous and loud.Â Attunement recognizes different notes and tunes we make and are a part of, which always resonate with and across one another in the everyday. We may not hear or perceive each and every note, we may or may not be in harmony, but there are always multiple songs and scales, improvisations, chords, and tunings. When we attune, we listen to and act on our and other resonances, creating purposeful harmonies and amplifications, interferences and differences, in dialogical, playful, and/or productive styles.

And while I’m on the topic…an exhibition review within a feature!

Greg’s Plants is shown alongside another work of his: Tropical America, a colorful drawing of a toucan, circa 1973 – a very early artwork for Klassen. Obviously somewhat tongue in cheek, Greg also not-so-subtly reminds us that we think about these things, though perhaps can’t articulate them quite so precisely, from an early age. Who among us has not played with life and death, with color and matter? What child does not wander and wonder on where they themselves, and their rooms, homes, and habitats begin and end? And… a tropical America. I mean, why not?

These two works are exhibited as part ofÂ “Back to School,” which, according to the organizers, “invited a select list of accomplished artists to display artwork from their current portfolio alongside work they created while they were in school, presenting unexpected juxtapositions of past and present that reveal insights into both the changing perspectives and the persistent threads of artistsâ€™ pursuits over time.” (Co-curated by Brent Budsberg.) It’s an impressive list of regional artists, several of whom I’ve already written about even in the short time since this blog’s relaunch:Â American Fantasy Classics,Â John Balsley,Â Demitra Copoulos,Â Nicholas Frank,Â Nina Ghanbarzadeh,Â Zach Hill,Â Jon Horvath,Â Greg Klassen,Â Kim Miller,Â Harvey Opgenorth,Â JoAnna Poehlmann,Â Miguel Ramirez, andÂ Lynn Tomaszewski.

What I like about this “back to school” show (launched shortly after the semester started!) is that it is almost like a bunch of abridged retrospectives. The reason why I love solo exhibitions so much is that these are less about a curatorial vision that is umbrella-ed by a current theme, and more about a kind of material research practice, over years, which we can engage with in an artist’s work. And here, we see some art from each artist (or collective) from decades ago, alongside their current inquiry, to see and feel a similar long-term quest. And each artist also writes about that trajectory, in a fun and free notebook/catalog as part of the show.

For example, there is Jon Horvath (my first reboot review!) and his ongoing and playful portraits of and with his father (recent video clip shown above as a GIF). Harvey Opgenorth shows his ongoing material/visuality investigations, which have become more subtle over time. And Nina Ghanbarzadeh explores life and materiality with/in paint, contrapuntally getting rougher and more physical over the years.

Check out “Back to School,” and especially Gregory Klassen’s work, at the Villa Terrace in Milwaukee until January 28, 2018 (Wednesday – Sunday, 1-5). The show overall provides several interesting, potential research narratives, and Klassen, specifically, asks us to listen to humans, nature, and politics, together and apart – then act in accordance. His is subtle and important work.

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04 December 2017 by nathaniel

Details for “The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project” roundtable, Wed, Dec 6th 2:00

Please join us this Wednesday afternoon in the Digital Humanities Lab (2nd floor, UWM Golda Meir library) for the latest installment of our Research Round Tables – refreshments provided! Discussion and feedback encouraged! Co-sponsored by the Office of Research.

Wed, Dec 6th | 2:00 p.m.
The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project (A “Working on it” Research Round Table), Nathanial Stern, PSOA and Carol Hirschmugl, Physics.

Tentatively titled â€œThe World After Us,â€ Physics Professor Carol J Hirschmugl and Art and Design Professor Nathaniel Stern are working towards a multidiscplinary project that will hopefully have outcomes in the forms of new coursework, educational gallery installations, and more fine arts-oriented sculptures. Drs. Stern and Hirschmugl are together asking: What are aesthetic, conceptual, and pedagogical ways of re-presenting geological time and concerns, and their relation to our media devices? How might we artistically embody and point to real and cutting edge sustainability research? How can energy concerns be manifest, as digestable information, affective installation, and understandable curricula? They are speaking and working with engineers, artists, physicists, and environmental scientists to learn about such things precisely so that they might embody them in a series of artworks, narrativize the process, and make this project pedagogical as much as it is aesthetic and conceptual.