Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research
above link free, here’s the MIT link (firewalled) in the Leonardo Journal
by Johannes Lehmann, Rachel Garber Cole, Nathaniel E. Stern
Abstract
This paper builds on research around novelty and utility to argue that the value of arts thinking should be applied in the generation of scientific questions. Arts thinking is often playful, less goal oriented, and can lead to new modes of questioning. Scientific thinking often solves an existing question, serves a purpose in solving the question, and must be predictable. The “problem of the problem” is that asking creative questions is the linchpin of the quality of research across the sciences, just as the best of art “does things” that make us move and feel moved; yet we posit that it is useful to consider that what each teaches and celebrates typically tends more toward either utility or novelty as an entry point. A new theoretical basis is presented in identifying questions primarily based on novelty rather than utility, and a catalogue of methods proposed for creating questions to employ in education, practice, and project planning.
full paper download now freely available: Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research
or via MIT site (firewalled)
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Crypto Writer Talks
Crypto Writer Talks is a weekly podcast about crypto writing, organized and hosted by members of the Crypto Writers (CW) Discord. In this podcast, crypto writers talk shop and share their work in panel discussions, one-on-one interviews, dialogues and poetry and short story readings.
On Nov 10, 2021, CW founder Kalen Iwamoto interviewed Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall about their first-of-its-kind Blockchain Performance, NFT Culture Proof.
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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.
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Bad at Sports
Bad at Sports Episode 662: Nathaniel Stern
This week, Ryan and Dana are pleased to welcome Milwaukee-ite Nathaniel Stern back to the show. We discuss his latest art historical publication, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics. Stern gives our hosts some insight into what he considers Ecological Aesthetics with examples and artists ranging from South African artist Doung Anwar Jahangeer, to the Overpass Light Brigade. Dana gets to say the word marginalia as she tries to discover Ryan’s Term Up the Volume. All this and clearly lots more on this episode of Bad at Sports.
More on Ecological Aesthetics
listen to or download interview on B@S
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NPR / WUWM
‘Ecological Aesthetics’ Encourages Thinking Differently With The World Around Us
with MADELINE ANDRÉ on Lake Effect
How do you think about the objects around you? What do they do for you? What do they want? Are they art? These are some of the ways that local artist and author Nathaniel Stern wants us to think about our surroundings, our planet and the art within it.
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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
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Gathering Ecologies
What might an interactive artwork look like that enabled greater expressive potential for all of the components of the event? How can we radically shift our idea of interactivity towards an ecological conception of the term, emphasising the generation of complex relation over the stability of objects and subjects? Gathering Ecologies explores this ethical and political shift in thinking, examining the creative potential of differential relations through key concepts from the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Michel Serres. Utilising detailed examinations of work by artists such as Lygia Clark, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nathaniel Stern and Joyce Hinterding, the book discusses the creative potential of movement, perception and sensation, interfacing, sound and generative algorithmic design to tune an event towards the conditions of its own ecological emergence.
Author: Andrew Goodman
Publisher: Open Humanities Press in the Immediations series
Date of Publication: March 2018
Language: English
Print ISBN: 978-1-78542-052-8
PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-053-5
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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
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Companion to Digital Art
Image from Scott Snibbe’s Deep Walls, featured in my chapter, Stern Nathaniel. ‘Interactive Art: Interventions in/to Process.’ A Companion to Digital Art. Ed. Christiane Paul. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell (Blackwell Companions to Art History), 2016.
Digital art is a complex and vibrantly dynamic form whose diversity reflects the exponential growth curve in computing power. This new companion to the genre gives readers an inclusive, in-depth understanding of digital art, covering its history and evolution, aesthetics, and politics, as well as its often turbulent relationships with established institutions. The volume provides a platform for the most influential voices shaping the current discourse surrounding digital art. Their nuanced insights afford a robust and coherent appreciation of the current state of the field – and the possible paths its future development may follow.
Combining the seasoned perspectives of leading international experts with fresh work by emerging scholars, the companion tackles key issues in digital art. It showcases critical and theoretical approaches from across the spectrum, taking in art-historical, philosophical, political, and gendered perspectives, among many others. The volume also covers digital art’s primary practical challenges – how to present, document, and preserve pieces that could be erased forever by rapidly accelerating technological obsolescence. Up-to-date, forward-looking, and critically reflective, this authoritative new collection is informed throughout by a deep appreciation of the technical intricacies of digital art.
Editor: Christiane Paul
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, Blackwell Companions to Art History
Date of Publication: May 2016
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118475208
ISBN-13: 978-1118475201
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Art Education
Cover image and feature article on Nathaniel Stern’s work and practice.
“In this month’s Instructional Resource, Christine Woywod presents the interactive artworks of Nathaniel Stern who often blends art and technology to generate participatory installations through which audience members may bodily experience art, performing images into existence.” – James Haywood Rolling Jr.
Woywod, C. (2016). “Nathaniel Stern: Performing images into existence.” Art Education, Volume 69 Issue 4 pp 36-42.
Downloadable PDF of the above article is forthcoming. Firewall version here.
A companion web resource is available here.
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The Minor Gesture
Cover image: detail from Weather Patterns: the smell of red (2014).
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date of Publication: June 2016
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822361213
ISBN-13: 978-0822361213
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Other Frames
Title: Other Frames: Malcolm Levy and Sensing Images
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Transfer Gallery
Date of Publication: February 2015
Language: English
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TEDx talk
Slow innovation: Ilya Avdeev & Nathaniel Stern at TEDxHarambee
How do we get from point A to point B, in the fastest way possible? It seems this is the shape of almost every question we hear today. Answers are valued above all else, questions are a close second, and very little else matters. But innovation requires time, space, and a willingness to try and fail, with crazy and sometimes impossible ideas. Avdeev and Stern will talk about how to teach, model and facilitate innovation through practices that seem counterproductive, but almost always succeed: play a lot, move very slowly, and don’t build anything until the very end.
What is TEDx?
“Imagine a day filled with brilliant speakers, thought-provoking video and mind-blowing conversation. By organizing a TEDx event, you can create a unique gathering in your community that will unleash new ideas, inspire and inform…. A TEDx event is a local gathering where live TED-like talks and videos previously recorded at TED conferences are shared with the community.” – from the TED web site
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Interactive Art + Embodiment
Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance
An Arts Future Book, published by Gylphi Limited, 2013
ISBN-10: 1780240090 and ISBN-13: 978-1780240091 – paperback
978-1-78024-010-7 – Kindle
978-1-78024-011-4 – EPUB
Buy Interactive Art for $30 directly from the publisher
‘This remarkably readable and passionate text makes important contributions to the discourses of embodiment, perception, and affect in relation to the performativity staged by interactive art. Stern’s “implicit body” framework and the mantra “moving-thinking-feeling” offer insightful and comprehensive tools for grasping the complexity of contemporary aesthetic experience and for imagining future potentials.’ — Dr. Edward A. Shanken, author, Art and Electronic Media
‘In his very intelligent book, Nathaniel Stern shows how dynamics work: he mobilizes a range of theory and practice approaches so as to entangle them into an investigation of interactive art. Stern maps the incipient activity and force of contemporary art practices in a way that importantly remind us that digital culture is far from immaterial. Interactive Art and Embodiment creates situations for thought as action.’ — Dr Jussi Parikka, media theorist, Winchester School of Art, author of Insect Media
‘In Nathaniel Stern’s Interactive Art and Embodiment, Stern develops a provocative and engaging study of how we might take interactive art beyond the question of “what technology can do” to ask how the implicit body of performance is felt-thought through artistic process. What results is an important investigation of art as event (as opposed to art as object) that incites us to make transversal linkages between art and philosophy, inquiring into how practice itself is capable of generating fields of action, affect and occurrence that produce new bodies in motion.’ — Dr Erin Manning, Research Chair and Director of the SenseLab, Concordia University
‘Nathaniel Stern’s book is a marvelous introduction to the thinking and practice of this innovative new media artist, and to the work of others in the same field. Philosophically informed and beautifully written, it is sensitive to the many complex issues involved in making such work.’ — Prof Charlie Gere, Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, and author of Digital Culture, Art, Time and Technology, and Community without Community in Digital Culture.
About the book
How do interactive artworks ask us to perform rigorous philosophies of the body?
Nathaniel Stern argues that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways we experience embodiment – as per-formed, relational, and emergent. He provides many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. He offers a valuable critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms.
In the companion chapter (offered in partnership with Networked Book at Turbulence.org), Stern offers a semi-autobiographical account of his own research trajectory, and invites comment, critique, and contributions of new work. This creates a participatory stage for rehearsing the performance of scholarship.
Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, by Nathaniel Stern, was released August 2013 as the first in the Arts Future Book series by Gylphi Ltd. Arts Future Book is published and supported by an international editorial board. It represents a substantial practical and theoretical investigation into the future of books about the arts. As a book series it publishes unique works that establish new systems for considering art. Their aim is to explore the relations between the form and content of art books and to exploit new technologies that expand their literal and philosophical capacities. What is a book about art, and what can and should it do? The Arts Future Book project has been explained, modelled (and remodelled) in the open-access journal article/artwork: ‘Is Art History Too Bookish’ by series editor Charlotte Frost.
In its various modes, Interactive Art and Embodiment performs the philosophical environment of interactive art, and embodies Arts Future Book’s investigations into how we can and should perform art scholarship.
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Critical Point of View
‘Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act’ – a chapter by Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall
Wikipedia Art is many things: an open-ended concept, an immanent object, a collaborative text, and a net-work that complicates the very possibility for these distinctions. This chapter most specifically explicates and unfolds the performance of Wikipedia Art as an intervention into, and critical analysis of, Wikipedia: its pages, its system, its volunteers and paid staff. Both the art work and our chapter use and subvert Wikipedia itself – the definitions it puts forward, the discourses engaged by its surrounding community on and off the site, and as a venue/space ripe for intervention. In the chapter, we briefly unpack how the art work speaks back to the structure and performance of Wikipedia, online consensus, the mythologies behind Wikipedia, and Wikimedia’s power more generally.
Book Title: Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader
Editors: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz
Chapter Title: Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, University of Amsterdam
Date of Publication: 2011
Language: English
ISBN: 978-90-78146-13-1
Download or order this book (free!)
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Cyberculture + New Media
Book: edited collection of essays
Table of Contents:
Preface: ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
PART 1 The Empirical
Francisco J. Ricardo: Formalisms of Digital Text
Sheizaf Rafaeli, Tsahi Hayat, Yaron Ariel: Knowledge Building and Motivations in Wikipedia: Participation as “Ba”
Mahmoud Eid: On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture: International Communication, Telecommunications Policies, and Democracy
Rita Zaltsman: The Challenge of Intercultural Electronic Learning: English as Lingua Franca
PART 2 The Aesthetic
Nicole Ridgway and Nathaniel Stern: The Implicit Body
Leman Giresunlu: Cyborg Goddesses: the Mainframe Revisited
Maria Backe: De-Colonizing Cyberspace: Post-Colonial Strategies in Cyberfiction
Tony Richards: The Différance Engine: Videogames as Deconstructive Spacetime
Alev Adil and Steve Kennedy: Technology on Screen: Projections, Paranoia and Discursive practice
Seppo Kuivakari: Desistant Media
Reviews:
‘Cyberculture and New Media,’ Leonardo Electronic Almanac
‘Forgetting Media Studies: Anthologies, Archives, Anachrony,’ Electronic Book Review
Editor: Francisco J. Ricardo
Publisher: Rodopi Press
Date of Publication: 2009
Language: English
ISBN: 978-90-420-2518-9
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Antinomies of Art + Culture
Title: Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
Editors: Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date of Publication: 2008
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0822342038
Excerpt from “Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art,” by Colin Richards
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Excerpt from “Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art,” by Colin Richards
‘Perhaps the most sustained elaboration of the relation of human body and techno-machine is to be found in the works of Nathaniel Stern and Marcus Neustetter. Stern’s Compressionism is a digital performance that invokes a “complex conversation between artist, performance, mediation tool, art objects(s) and viewer,” while Neustetter, Stern’s sometimes partner in art, has produced “digital frottage” in which he scanned, photocopied, and photographed the screen of his laptop… This is sly work, and both artists seem to shove a digit in the air at the cybermyths of boundless, dematerialized, “democratic” connection and communication, without rejecting the myth of a borderless global community and boundless processes of radical interconnectivity. Theirs is not the techno-utopia or dystopia promised and warned against by apologists for globalization and its opponents; one senses instead a slightly perverse smile that knows it is in the thrall of some kind of retromaterialist libido on a humane and doggedly human scale.’
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