THE CIRCUITOUS LIFE: THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATHANIEL STERN
Interview with VIRGINIA VALENZUELA – January, 2024
Original interview on 79 AU, the Mint Gold Dust online magazine
A hack saw, a trowel, a haxe. These are the tools that build homes, that dig into the earth to make way for growth, that cut into matter to form something new. They are each an ordinary object; each just as capable of becoming a piece of garbage as they are of becoming a piece of art. Each just as capable of creating things as they are of destroying them. It is to this very crossroad that Nathaniel Stern guides us in his collection, “Circuitous Tools,” which was featured in Mint Gold Dust’s “The Golden Age” exhibition in New York City last fall.
Nathaniel Stern is no stranger to paradox. Many of his works dig into the dichotomy of being: how death brings life, how light only exists in relation to darkness, how the most meaningful gift is what you can offer when you have nothing left to give. “Circuitous Tools” is no different. Originally included in the traveling exhibition “The World After Us: Imagining techno-aesthetic futures,” each piece in the series is made from circuit boards that have lost their ability to power technological tools. Thus remade into tools for construction, these artifacts reimagine the very idea of what a tool really is. Exploring the philosophical and practical implications of tools in “Circuitous Tools,” Stern invites us to consider the power that these seemingly mundane objects hold.
But to understand the work of Nathaniel Stern, one must first take stock of the circuitous route that led him to ecological waste. A visual artist, a writer, a clothing designer, a programmer, a philosopher — these are just a few of the labels that Nathaniel has associated himself with during his creative career. Going back and forth between the physical and the intellectual, the literal and the intangible, some concepts began to take shape, first in the realm of poetics.
In a collaboration with the celebrated AI researcher and poet Sasha Stiles called “The Word After Us”–a sort of homage to Nathaniel’s “The World After Us”–Sasha and Nathaniel tinkered with the idea of simultaneously reading and unreading a poem. As if Sasha’s poem–itself a collaboration with her AI alter-ego Technelegy–were a physical substance, like paint, that could just as easily be spread over a canvas as it could be wiped away, words and letters appear in the artwork in various textures. Sometimes the words come into focus one pixel at a time, like a work of pointillism coming into being. Other times, the letters are stamped onto the page, one on top of the other in spirals and swirls, like a typewriter losing its mind.
“Let me first say that, to me, I first and foremost always treat language as a material,” Nathaniel told me over a video call, his retro iMac sat atop a filing cabinet behind his desk. “And I also understand materials as always having meaning. My second book, “Ecological Aesthetics,” is also very much about, not ecology as an organism or a system, or biological system, but rather a system of forces that together push and pull to make what ‘is,’ and those forces range from matter and things and bugs and quanta to words and love and physics and concepts and categories and all these things are forces on the making of what ‘is.’ And so to me, the power of language and the power of matter–”
“Is what matters?” I interjected.
“Is what matters, right,” he said, smiling. “Language matters, and I could even go back to Karen Barad where she pushes back on language matters, fiction matters, semiotic matters. The only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter.”
Speaking to the way Nathaniel’s algorithm reproduced the text of the poem, he constantly comes back to the idea of the texture of text, how words can elicit meaning beyond the literal.
“You get a line by line, and on the one hand, the full community has to mint it to perform the whole poem because everyone gets a line,” he said. “And even some of them will never be performed because it’s random, not iterated, right? But then on the other hand, it actually unreads itself. And so it smudges into a Rothko-esque painting, and yet we can bring forth the text again with keystrokes, but then it smudges again over time and more and more.”
In another collaboration entitled “STILL MOVING,” Nathaniel and Sasha create an interactive poetry piece in which the viewer’s movements initiate movement in the artwork. The artwork, in turn, is made up of words of a poem that go in and out of legibility. The words and letters become a motional metaphor, their meaning captured, not in literal translation, but in the feeling the physical interaction evokes.
For Nathaniel Stern, the power of language is palpable. “So I remember I was a musician and a poet first,” he told me. “And then, I started making clothes and being interested in the body. And then I went back to language and I remember learning Jail Austin’s definition of the performative, and to me this was magic. The idea that words can do things with the words I do, I transform from a single person to a spouse. If I knight thee, you are Sir Vinny, and it’s like a literal ontological change in the world…but of course, eventually that also led me back to the extreme as if language is the only power, and then went to ecological art and waste, and back again, and forward, and again. It’s wondrous.”
Nathaniel Stern’s “The World After Us” interrogates the dichotomy between nature and technology. Instead of treating them as opposites, Nathaniel fuses them together into an unexpected and at times uncanny harmony. Plants grow out of broken computers, mushrooms sprout from old Apple watches, vines tie together various outdated cell phones, headphones, and keyboards. He envisions a future in which nature reclaims man made technologies, breathing new life into objects that human society has quickly forgotten (RIP Nokia flip phone).
Ironically enough, many people think that these artworks were made, not with raw materials, but with artificial intelligence. “Especially now, people often think ‘The World After Us’ is a series of AI-produced images,” Nathaniel told me. “They don’t realize this is well before AI [the traveling exhibition began in 2020]. Like, what software did you use to make that mushroom growing out of a watch? Um, I used the mushroom on a watch.” He laughs.
With our consciousness going deeper into the digital, we seem to be forgetting the tactile. Like software forgetting the hardware that houses it. For this reason, Nathaniel is increasingly excited and hopeful for the benefits of blockchain technology as it applies to art. What thrills Nathaniel the most is “the provenance of [these pieces] being actual physical photographs, even though they’re digitally native, because they come from digital tools that produce them. And then also the fact that they were shot on digital photography, to me that story and that dialogue, and being able to tell the story on Mint Gold Dust, the fact that you said you wanted to challenge it.” Challenging the notion of “digital,” and if it really is so different from the physical. And challenging the applications of blockchain beyond authenticating and monetizing digital art.
And it is in this vein that “Circuitous Tools” comes to life. But rather than allowing nature to reclaim the defunct technology, Nathaniel does this himself. Taking circuit boards as his material, he carves out pieces and shapes them into tools of labor. Each piece makes use of waste to create something beautiful, and, ironically, without a practical use. In doing so, Nathaniel emphasizes the importance of recognizing tools as not just mere objects, but rather extensions of ourselves. They are an integral part of our existence and have the ability to influence not only our physical environment, but also our thoughts and actions.
“The most important takeaway from ‘The World After Us’ as a whole,” Nathaniel said, “is to stop seeing this–I’m holding up my phone, readers–as an object, that I need the new one of, that I talk on, and understand it as not even a thing, but as matter.” He then touches on the global nature of the phone, the wondrous, dark universality of it. “I’ve got a piece of Africa in my pocket. And I’ve got some of the Congo, and I’ve got some of Silicon Valley, right? And it’s gonna dissipate there again, so blending folds, cutting them up, recognizing them as garbage, not just blackberries as garbage, but all phones as garbage.”
Through his work, Nathaniel Stern not only challenges our perception of tools and technology, but also our understanding of language and communication. “Something that [Alfred North] Whitehead often said,” he added, “was that a dog doesn’t see a chair. A dog sees sit-ability. It sees its own relation to material around it. And I wanted to bring us back to that space for our electronic priceless objects to some extent. There’s a there there, then, with, the initial question of ‘The World After Us.’ What will this look like in a million years?” In a million years when absolutely everything has turned to dust–or in the case of our electronics, toxic sludge?
Like a pensive yet hands-on philosopher, Nathaniel blurs the lines between the physical and the abstract, inviting us to question what truly holds power in our world and how we can use it to create a more sustainable future. As we enter an increasingly technologically-driven society, Nathaniel’s work serves as a reminder to not lose touch with the natural world and to use our tools wisely, with both creativity and responsibility. The intersection between art, technology, language, and nature is where Nathaniel Stern’s work truly shines, inspiring us to think beyond conventional boundaries and see beauty in unexpected places.
Each artwork is available as both an NFT on Mint Gold Dust and, for those buyers, as a physical sculpture on Iterati. Find your favorite tool and add it to your wallet and your living room.
Original interview on 79 AU, the Mint Gold Dust online magazine
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
EXPANDED.ART
NATHANIEL STERN & SCOTT KILDALL IN CONVERSATION:
DATA-DRIVEN ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS
PERFORMANCE ART AND BLOCKCHAIN
conversations – Interview with Anika Meier – 7 January, 2024
This interview coincided with the release of hashnadoes with Expanded.Art on fxHash
See the original interview in context here.
The artistic collaborations between Scott Kildall, who transforms data into tangible art, and Nathaniel Stern, an artist deeply engaged in a multidisciplinary approach to technology, invite viewers to step into the transformative power of words, ecological aesthetics, and data.
In conversation with Anika Meier, Stern and Kildall explore data and words, performance art and interactive art, and delve into the broader realm of blockchain and generative art.
Anika Meier: Scott and Nathaniel, being creative alone is already a challenge. How does being creative and creating together work for you?
Scott Kildall: My primary focus of my artwork is around transforming data into sculptures and sound installations, and my collaborative work combines my art practice with that of someone whose work can amplify mine and theirs. But, since art-making is so deeply personal, trust and care are vital to a successful collaboration, and this is why I keep working with Nathaniel.
Nathaniel and I have a lot of similar skills and approaches: working with top-level conceptual ideas combined with our strong technical skills, but more than anything, we just get along so well. We’ve collaborated on many projects since 2008. We get excited, argue, laugh, and bicker, and we’re like an old married couple who work together to succeed. Neither one of us knows who wrote what, and we don’t care who came up with which idea first. We put aside our egos and make sure, in the process, that we both feel good about what we’ve done.
When working alone, I certainly don’t have that level of self-care. The artwork is in my head somewhere, and the process of making something solid takes longer, like mining some gold from my psyche.
Nathaniel Stern: I actually collaborate a lot, and I have pretty different relationships with most of my collaborators. When Scott and I work together, we tend to spend a fair amount of time going back and forth between form and concept. We talk a lot, put in some time playing with code, drawing, or materials, write up what we see and feel (and what we hope to see and feel), and back and again.
It admittedly often takes longer than working alone, at least for me, which is counterintuitive when you have a partner, and it’s sometimes unclear who needs to do what next, but in the end, because of both our tastes and how we push each other, I feel like the work is always stronger for it. Honestly, even when I work alone, I show versions of my work to others and ask for critique until it’s the best version it can be, sometimes even abandoning pieces after years of work, before deciding to show it in public if they don’t feel right. In fact, this is part of how Scott and I began our friendship: we used to do virtual critiques of each other’s work until it grew into ideas we decided to do together.
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, Hashnadoes, 2024, on-chain interactive and generative NFT series (edition 128), test mint, with ‘m’ keypress toggled, to show live movement in the camera.
AM: When did you meet for the first time? And what made you realise you would like to work together as artists?
NS: This is a pretty funny story. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, Turbulence.org was a major commissioning organisation for net.art that Scott and I had both done some work with. They had a call for what they had started calling mixed reality art—between the Internet, a physical gallery, and a virtual space (back then, most commonly, the latter was Second Life). When I had some ideas for the project but no experience with SL, I asked a mutual friend if she knew anyone who might be interested in working on it with me, and she introduced me to Scott. Funnily enough, we both decided to go in a different direction—me working with another artist and him working with Victoria Scott.
In the end, he got the commission, and I didn’t! Still, we liked each other a lot and started our monthly Zoom meet-ups; I even got him a show with the gallery I was working with in Ireland at the time (where I was completing my PhD). He came to visit me when I moved back to the States for the job I now hold as a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) in 2008, and that’s more or less when we finally cooked up WIKIPEDIA ART, which became a bigger deal than we ever expected.
Here’s a bit on that work:
A collaborative project initiated by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, Wikipedia Art was originally intended to be art composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone can edit. Since the work itself manifested as a conventional Wikipedia page, would-be art editors were required to follow Wikipedia’s enforced standards of quality and verifiability; any changes to the art had to be published on, and cited from, ‘credible’ external sources: interviews, blogs, or articles in ‘trustworthy’ media institutions, which would birth and then slowly transform what the work is and does and means simply through their writing and talking about it. Wikipedia Art, we asserted at its creation, may start as an intervention, turn into an object, die and be resurrected, etc, through a creative pattern / feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that we called “performative citations.” Despite its live mutations through continuous streams of press online, Wikipedia Art was considered controversial by those in the Wikipedia community, and removed from the site 15 hours after its birth. But the debate and discussion there, and later in the art blogosphere and mainstream press, produced a notable work after all. These communities still “transform what the work is and does and means simply through their writing and talking about it,” despite its absence from Wikipedia.
There was a whole host of press and academic articles on the piece, making what we called “performative citations”—when something is on Wikipedia, even though truth is not their threshold for inclusion, it becomes true. We were finalists for the Transmediale Prize and showed versions of that work in various venues across the world.
Internet culture is weird.
SK: Yes, this is more or less the story of how we met up, though I think it was pre-Zoom and we were on Skype some. Gosh, that seems like such a long time ago. If memory serves, we looked at one another’s proposals for that Turbulence Commission and gave feedback and thoughts on them post-submission. I was impressed by Nathaniel’s poetic approach to net art, and we stayed in touch on a regular basis.
Our first collaboration was when we cooked up WIKIPEDIA ART, which Nathaniel just described. We slowly poked at the conceptual framework behind doing something with Wikipedia after being frustrated with the reality that Wikipedia articles on contemporary artists were routinely getting deleted, specifically of women in the field. And this started a research project around the behind-the-scenes decision-making culture of Wikipedia, which was, well, revealing.
It was during this process that we became friends, and I learned how to collaborate with Nathaniel on a slow build, developing our conceptual framework fully before executing the work.
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, Wikipedia Art, networked performance 2009 and dynamic installation 2011. Installation view at Furtherfield Gallery, London.
AM: Scott, you have been working with art and technology for over 15 years. You focus on transforming data from the natural environment, such as water quality, air quality, and plant data, into sound installations, sculptures, and video works. How did you get into digital art and later become interested in NFTs?
SK: My work often uses a combination of digital and analog practices, so a form of digital art has always been core to my practice. This includes virtual world performance art, VR, AI, and other actions in spaces of emergence. I see this as a push-pull between technology and territory, such that when a new technology becomes available for general use, a territory of possibilities opens up, and this is when I prefer to jump in with artistic participation before the territory has become colonized by various startups and corporate entities.
NFTs certainly captured my fascination early because they solve the problem of digital authenticity that many of us in the field have been grappling with. When doing deeper research and in conversation with Nathaniel, we discovered so many other possibilities around the technology: a platform-independent, browser-based experience; replicability through transaction hashes; performance possibilities; and much more. We decided to create our first collaborative NFT project, called NFT CULTURE PROOF.
AM: Nathaniel, your medium is also words. You have collaborated in the past with Sasha Stiles and Anne Spalter. How did you get into digital art and later become interested in NFTs? And how do you choose the artists you would like to collaborate with?
NS: I went to an engineering high school in New York—Staten Island Technical High School—but found myself wanting more creative outlets. I wound up studying fashion design (I still have a passion and flair for style) and music (I was one of the singers and songwriters and the saxophone player in a 7-piece band for years) at Cornell University. But some time in my second or third year, around 1997, I took a textile design class that was taught in PhotoShop—it must have been version 2!—and was blown away. I was thinking, “Why did no one tell me computers could do this?” I started combining my interests, learning code and design, and more, not yet realizing the potential for art, writing, and intervention online.
At this time, it was thought web sites were difficult to make, and that was left mostly for programmers and computer science folks. But when my professor, Charlotte Jirousek, saw my skills and interests, she offered to pay me to learn how to make her website, thinking I could do a snazzier job. During this process, she pointed me towards the ITP web site, an amazing Art and Technology graduate program at New York University. Years later, I found out she was merely telling me to make her site look like theirs, but at the time, I thought she was telling me to apply to the program!
I remember getting off the elevator to interview at ITP in the spring of 1999 and seeing a prototype of Danny Rozin’s WOODEN MIRROR, an amazing piece that reflects a live video feed back at you as an image through hundreds of tilted concave wood pixels. I knew I had to go there, found myself a fellowship to pay for my studies, and never looked back. My entire first year was spent working in navigable and interactive poetry, where I published HEKTOR.NET (video poetry pre-YouTube) and made the first version of ENTER, an immersive, interactive installation where you chase animated texts with your body to trigger spoken word. Here, music, rhythm, poetry, and my interest in embodiment (initially through fashion) all came together in so many ways. And although these lasting pieces were produced solo, even back then, I would often collaborate with others to play differently and learn more.
Most of the time, my collaborations come out of mutual respect and ongoing discussions. I meet someone who suggests we have regular chats to catch up about our work—just out of interest—and then sometimes an idea and/or proposal deadline pops up that pushes us to try out working together. That’s how it was with Sasha Stiles; we had been shooting ideas around until Art Blocks and I were talking, and we decided to try together (that piece, THE WORD AFTER US, wound up launching on fxhash, but we later released STILL MOVING on the AB curated program). With Anne Spalter, we had met and been talking a bit after she had an amazing solo show in Milwaukee, where I live, that truly inspired me—which is in fact when I started working with AI and NFTs—and it was the invite to be part of theVERSEverse’s genText program that prompted me to court her directly for FUTURE MYTHOLOGIES.As mentioned above by Scott, my first major NFT collaboration was with him: NFT CULTURE PROOF. This was an experimental, participatory NFT project and performance on Polygon, launched back in 2021. We at first planned a more snarky intervention about “the market,” but found such amazing and earnest artists in the scene that we decided to go for something more community-oriented. The idea was that the dialogs happening off chain were the best part of the crypto art world, so why not put them on chain? We made a series of text-based SVGs with collaborative content—submitted and the time of mint—prompted by some of the biggest NFT artist names at the time.
Scott Kildall, Cut-up Poet Trees, 2023, generative sound installation using tree data.
AM: Your latest project, HASHNADOES, follows your longtime playing with performance and performativity online. Can you share a bit about your background in performance art with us?
NS: The performed—that which is in the process of being formed—has been a vital part of my practice from the beginning. But in a more literal performance mode, Hektor—of hektor.net—began as a slam poetry character on the stages of the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe and CBGBs in New York in the late nineties. And his web site, too (which no longer runs because it was mostly built in Flash but is slowly being re-minted with theVERSEverse), performed and unfolded a non-linear story of his past for its viewers. My interactive installations began as explorations of performativity, where text and activity entwine, a la JL Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, and then during my time in South Africa (2001–2006), I worked extensively making performance poetry and video projections for dance companies like the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative. My first book is titled INTERACTIVE ART AND EMBODIMENT: THE IMPLICIT BODY AS PERFORMANCE, and my second, ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS: THINKING WITH HUMANS, NATURE, AND POLITICS, continues by exploring conceptual-material formations—everything that is—as ongoing and performed events. I’ve been at this for 25+ years, and although some works that are years apart can seem vastly different from others, taken as a whole, I see a clear trajectory of performance philosophy and aesthetic activism, continually asking myself and others not only to look but to look again. For me, art frames and amplifies who and how we are, and more importantly, asks how we could be.
SK: My performance artwork began in the digital art space with the online virtual world of Second Life in 2006. I began looking at this space because I was doing research into various social networks to create participatory artwork to reflect that world. Second Life blew my socks off. They had digital objects that you could buy and wear! I knew there was something amazing to be done here.
I soon began performing with a group called Second Front, which was a performance art group in Second Life, and we did something like 40 different performances over an intense period of about 4 years and still occasionally work together. These were live-streamed into galleries across the world and included virtual performances such as bank heists, dancing with minotaurs, and burning cars. We used Fluxus art as inspiration, and the group was chaotic but dedicated. I really loved that time and everyone in it. The seven of us were situated in cities all over the world, and we never met up in person.
While today I work with data-inspired soundscapes, often building on the chance work of John Cage, it was the conversations with Nathaniel around performance that influenced this change. The data doesn’t allow for predictive forms and just helps delineate them. Like our scores in Second Life, which were often vague, such as “sweep leaves” (I brought a virtual lawnmower to the action), the forms of data can make things you would never guess based on the algorithm.
AM: Is HASHNADOES performance art?
SK: I consider this to be a variant of NFT performance, where we set up a framework for the creation, but the data is you, the one who is looking at the NFT, as the camera responds to your body in real-time. How the hashnadoes swirl and move is defined by the mirror into the real world.
With HASHNADOES, while not electronic circuits, the sensor is the camera on your device, and the actor is whomever is viewing the screen: a person, a couple, a family, a cat, and that idea of a conversation with nature in the form of the swirling digital data of the transaction hash itself is what excites me. It looks like a tornado of sorts, but a digital one. The palettes are based on the colors of celestial bodies in our solar system, reminding us of the physical climate, which also extends to systems outside of our planet.
NS: I think of the general category of performance art as most commonly live, with the artist’s body—or at least making an intervention into how we understand liveness—and
embodiment. I could make the case for HASHNADOES being performance art. But I think that HASHNADOES’ value lies outside (though related to) that category: in the space of human and non-human performativity.
I mentioned JL Austin above; the way he defined performativity was an “ontological” (state of being) change through words. For example, at a wedding, with the words “I do,” I am transformed from a single person to a spouse; if I knight thee, you are Sir Anika; if I ask you to “pass the salt,” that asking is itself an activity. And according to Austin, words never simply describe what is; words are, and they make change; all speech and writing has a certain level of performativity, like, I’m explaining something to you right now, as a written action. Thinkers like Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and later Rebecca Schneider then took this to a whole new level, arguing that signs of any kind—language, dance, theater, even purposefully sitting still and in silence, any form of explication and explanation, really—could birth and change, make, transform, and transport things in the conceptual-material world. In this way, these scholars and others themselves originated and formed the interdisciplinary field of performance studies.Learning about this as a graduate student in the late nineties in New York, as a slam poet and writer as well as an artist and embodiment nerd, was kind of magical to me. HASHNADOES plays with text and data, being and change, in a number of ways that speak back to that work.
Ah, my kids are waking up (banging banging banging on the doors downstairs). (Talk about birth and transportation, performance, and performativity!) To be continued… Here we go, they are now watching TV with oatmeal. I’ve got coffee cup number two; where was I? —-
First and foremost, minting this live, generative NFT births it into existence, both as performance and as text or data. When you click or submit, sending ASCII and bits and bytes as 0s and 1s, you are inaugurating that form. Our choice to use the trans-action (also a performative reference) hash itself as the material make-up of each tornado amplifies this for us. Second, when opened in its own frame and in live view, your movements—how you move and are moved—are both affective (moved-thought-felt) in your body and in the body, form, and data of the hashnadoes that follow you.
Yes, the hashnadoes “feel,” in that they take account of their surroundings and change. We often forget that the material forms of bits and bytes, as volts and current, or light, quickly starting and stopping through copper wires or fibre optics, the concepts and movements of time, what we had for lunch, my kids interrupting me, how much Eth is in our wallets… all of these things make a difference in what is and what could be, including in the simple interface of our fxhash mint. This is where performance and ecology are so interrelated. Ecological Aesthetics: humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in and as a result of their interrelation.
Again, it’s magical, humbling, and inspiring.
With another of my collaborators, Erin Manning (who I made physical tornadoes with as WEATHER PATTERNS: THE SMELL OF RED at Glasshouse Gallery in Brooklyn (2014) and the Vancouver Art Museum as part of ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (2015)), I like to compare ecological thinking to the complexity of weather patterns, to think about celestial bodies, winds and weights, gravity, food and thought, and the news, all making change. These are referenced everywhere in HASHNADOES, from the coded gravitational pushes and pulls of your movements and the tornadoes on each other to the palettes we chose from extra-terrestrial planets and bodies.
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, Hashnadoes, 2024, on-chain interactive and generative NFT series (edition 128), test mint, with rare “rain” attribute.
AM: How did you approach working on HASHNADOES?
NS: A couple of years ago, inspired by early Art Blocks works, I started teaching myself p5.js, a javascript library for artists initiated by Lauren McCarthy, because I wanted to make more ubiquitous work easily available on the internet and via blockchain via any browser. Before that, I had mostly been working on gallery installations, where I could give my own specifications on a case-by-case basis. These older works were projects made in a variety of ways: in the early days with things like Lingo and Director, later with Max/Msp+Jitter, and then OpenFrameworks (C++) and Arduino (among other tech). As a custodial effort, I sometimes re-made earlier works on new platforms to keep them running on modern machines. Another issue I talk about in this article I wrote in 2021 is: CUSTODIANSHIP, COPYRIGHT, AND PROVENANCE: ON THE NON-MONETARY VALUE OF NFTS.
Anyhow, I was playing a lot with texts and performances in p5, given my background, and just prototyping a lot of different ideas, most of which grew into very different projects I released later down the road. THE WORD AFTER US, with Sasha Stiles, came out of these early experiments when I approached her to play with its content and form, though it of course changed drastically once she was on board. Some solo stuff inspired by On Kawara and Felx Gonzales-Torres will be released on some major platforms later this year.
HASHNADOES, too, began here. I liked the early look, feel, and idea, but it was far from feeling right—or feeling at all. I approached Scott to ask for his help and thinking, and when we decided to tackle it together, our dialogs took it in all kinds of new directions, suggesting and implementing all the gravitational pulls, coming up with the idea for planetary palettes, and making the tornadoes more ethereal and cloud-like. Whereas with Sasha Stiles, I did all the coding, she did all the embedded writing, and we would meet frequently to discuss aesthetics. Scott and I both code, so we used GIT to push and pull, make and remake. We’d write in a Google Doc and text message each other alongside our javascript efforts, all of which also led to making it interactive and highlighted our performative and ecological understanding, which finally led us to decide that on-chain was an absolute necessity.
SK: HASHNADOES was originally from one of Nathaniel’s experiments in NFT-based artwork, and he made these sketches in 2021, just before we launched NFT Culture Proof. He was quicker to embrace the NFT world than I was and wanted to play around with generative art on the blockchain. Since my work tends to be more physically situated than digitally, this made sense, and like all of our collaborations, one of us often comes up with the seed idea.
He showed me several sketches and invited me to collaborate with him. I zoned in on this one as I found the preliminary forms to have something that intrigued me. I could see it and where it could go, and I began restructuring the code and form to make them feel complete, adding the fine touches, improving the color palettes, and making the behaviors dynamic. We’re both strong with code, and my approach tends to be more structured, coming from a professional software development background, and his to be more fluid. This was also amazing because it was the first code-based project that we truly collaborated on, where we both worked on the code itself.
To make it feel just right took a lot of work, since we were making editions that had to appear differently within a tight framework of swirling transaction hash data.
It was the camera interaction, though, that was the big challenge here and where our collaborative efforts sparkled. Nathaniel has more experience with interactive camera systems, and I have a lot more experience with interactive museum design, having worked as an exhibit developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco for a couple of years. Together, we leaned into his rapid prototyping techniques along with my more structured approach to building a quadrant-based tracking system that doesn’t rely on any external libraries, making the p5.js sketch able to be put on-chain in a more feasible way.
AM: What comes first when you work on projects? The title and story, meaning the concept, or do you start with a thought and start exploring what might come out of it?
SK: I have a methodology that I call “art thinking,” which is a 5-step process that is similar to design thinking but only for artists. It starts with an inquiry-experiment phase, where I have some sort of idea and I just play around to see if the idea “has legs” and can shape into a more cohesive whole. It usually fails at this point since there are many exciting ideas that I can’t cohere into meaningful artwork.
With HASHNADOES, Nathaniel approached me with something that was already in the experiment phase, and together we worked it into a finished form. I have expert skills in p5.js and teach it and use it in my own practice, so I could see the pathway for compelling artwork from my own skill set.
It becomes easier over time, with a mastery of tools and years of successful and less successful artwork, to see how a story emerges. The story itself is then an iterative process. I talked about mining earlier, and that feels like the right metaphor. Sometimes you get the nugget of the story itself, and other times, you have to really work at it. The title is the dressing and comes last.NS: Every project is initiated so differently, so I could point to each of your examples in different works. WEATHER PATTERNS and GIVEN TIME, a mixed reality installation circa 2010, began with titles and a story, respectively; HASHNADOES came out of experimenting with p5 as a medium, material, or discipline; ENTER started as a thought—to literalize performativity – and then became a whole body of work over more than a decade, BODY LANGUAGE. HEKTOR.NET started as a single poem.
I guess I am saying that my entire practice is performative and ecological.
Dunewind Resonator, 2023, Scott Kildall, Michael Ang, Tegan Ritz McDuffie, generative sound installation using wind data.
AM: Scott, you work with data. Nathaniel, you work with words. What influences your artistic practice?
NS: Everything.
Life and love, breakfast and children, technology and culture, materials, processes, and thoughts—together, this magic and tragic world. It is poetry and reality, physics and feelings, and more.
All of it. I feel all of it and want us to feel it, too. I want us to feel it, make it, and make it better.
SK: I guess mine is more focused. It has shifted for me. In the last several years, it has become the natural world, and we are thinking about the invisible layer of data that we can’t see and what is really going on there.
I’m beginning to shift my perceptual space into what non-humans might sense. Vibrations in the air, magnetic energy, the flow of electrons, and what else is out there. It feels like magic, but it is, in fact, reality, just not what we can perceive.
This exploration feels profound and in many ways circles back to what Nathaniel talked about, which is everything, and that most specifically includes dynamic ecological systems and, for me, tracking the data from that world so that we can better understand, respect, and love the physical world we inhabit.
AM: Thank you, dear Nathaniel and Scott, for the conversation.
—
This interview coincided with the release of hashnadoes with Expanded.Art on fxHash
See the original interview in context here.
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Waiting to be Signed
Technology of Poetry: Interview w/ Sasha Stiles & Nathaniel Stern
Waiting To Be Signed, by Willpop + Trinity, is a podcast dedicated to fx(hash), the generative art NFT platform on the Tezos blockchain. For this episode (79), Will & Trinity sit down with creative partners Sasha Stiles (sashastiles.com) & Nathaniel Stern (nathanielstern.art) for an epic interview.
Discussed:
- The creative background of both artists and how they came to become collaborators
- Nathaniel’s “The World After Us” show
- Sasha’s relationship with A.I. as a collaborator and student
- What is poetry and how is it influenced by new media disciplines
- Using Midjourney & Stable Diffusion & the issues and appeal of prompt-based systems
- Mother Computer & exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
- A.I. Language models and entering the era of the next great language leap\
- The challenges of selling ambitious work in the NFT ecosystem & the forces of value
- The story of 0RAL B1N4RY on fx(hash)
- Pushing back on what “generative art” looks like
- The potential of fx(params)
- Sci-Fi recommendations!
Follow Sasha on Twitter @sashastiles and follow Nathaniel @nathanielstern
Check out (and consider minting) their Art Blocks Curated release Still Moving
Find their Tezos work on fx(hash) here and here and on OBJKT here and here
Follow us on Twitter @waitingtosign and Instagram/Threads @waitingtobesigned
Consider supporting the show by donating to wtbs.tez or wtbs.eth
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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.
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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
Download PDF (17.8 MBs)
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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.
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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
Order this book from Amazon.com
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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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Shepherd Express
‘Vital Technology’ at MIAD
High-tech fun house of art in motion
By Kat Murrell
Vital Technology” is an exhibition much enjoyed by me and my shadow. If you visit, you’ll see what I mean. Artists Bryan Cera and Nathaniel Stern have put together eight installations in the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s Frederick Layton Gallery, which are activated by the viewer through various means of physical interaction. The works synthesize strong visuals, sound and motion in a high-tech funhouse that also proposes questions about the influence of technology in our lives.
About that shadow part: a number of the installations are large-scale projections where the viewer becomes part of the piece. Stroll in front of Cera’s Supercontroller and watch your shadow grab at coins and otherwise jump around in a virtual world that borrows from Super Mario Bros. 3. You have become your own game character and your shadow stretches as you grow in video game strength. It then shrinks and collapses as you meet your demise for not avoiding pesky animated nemeses. Stern’s elicit is a wall projection of flickering text that builds like unreadable poetry, falling in color from blue to purple to paler shades. With a flick of your hand, a letter is bumped and then drifts away. It becomes legible, gaining freedom from the pack, but losing the contextual comfort of its companion language.
Many of the installations have audio tracks, including Supercontroller with its video game pings and rings. The most aurally engaging is Social-Sonic Architecture, #3, a collaboration between the artists and others. It looks like something pieced together from Radio Shack, with a series of speakers wired up on the wall. Say something into the microphone at the end of the line and your processed voice rolls like a wave along the wall, pulsing through the sound system with a strangely fascinating disembodied presence.
The exhibition is designed to elicit reflection on the ability of technology to exert influences on the way we move, speak and otherwise react to our surroundings. In the gallery, the playful novelty nearly supersedes these significant questions, but it is outside the exhibition that one reflects on these quieter notes.
“Vital Technology: Interactive works by Bryan Cera and Nathaniel Stern” continues through Dec. 6 at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, 273 E. Erie St.
read the original article on express milwaukee
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Furtherfield
The Performance of Infrastructure: Review of Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance by Nathaniel Stern
Book review by Robert Jackson
Excerpt:
… Nathaniel Stern’s Interactive Art and Embodiment establishes two first events: not only Stern’s debut publication but also the first of a new series from Gylphi entitled “Arts Future Book” edited by Charlotte Frost, which began in 2013. All quotations are from this text unless otherwise stated.
Stern’s vision in brief: in order to rescue what is philosophically significant about interactive art, he justifies its worth through the primary acknowledgement of embodiment, relational situation, performance and sensation. In return, the usual dominant definitions of interactive art which focus on technological objects, or immaterial cultural representations thereof are secondary to the materiality of bodily movement. Comprehending digital interactive art purely as ‘art + technology’ is a secondary move and a “flawed priority” (6), which is instead underscored by a much deeper engagement, or framing, for how one becomes embodied in the work, as work. “I pose that we forget technology and remember the body” (6) Stern retorts, which is a “situational framework for the experience and practice of being and becoming.” (7). The concepts that are needed to disclose these insights are also identified as emergent.
“Sensible concepts are not only emerging, but emerging emergences: continuously constructed and constituted, re-constructed and re-constituted, through relationships with each other, the body, materiality, and more.” (205)
Interactive Art and Embodiment then, is the critical framework that engages, enriches and captivates the viewer with Stern’s vision, delineating the importance of digital interactive art together with its constitutive philosophy.
One might summarise Stern’s effort with his repeated demand to reclaim the definition of “interactive”. The term itself was a blatantly over-used badge designed to vaguely discern what made ‘new media’ that much newer, or freer than previous modes of consumption. This was quickly hunted out of discursive chatter when everyone realised the novel qualities it offered meant very little and were politically moribund. For Stern however, interactivity is central to the entire position put forward, but only insofar as it engages how a body acts within such a work. This reinvigorated definition of “interactive” reinforces deeper, differing qualities of sensual embodiment that take place in one’s relational engagement. This is to say, how one literally “inter-acts” through moving-feeling-thinking as a material bodily process, and not a technological informational entity which defines, determines or formalises its actions. A digital work might only be insipidly interactive, offering narrow computational potentials, but this importance is found wanting so long as the technology is foregrounded over ones experience of it. Instead ones relationship with technological construction should melt away through the implicit duration of a body that literally “inter-acts” with it. In Stern’s words:
“…most visually-, technically-, and linguistically-based writing on interactive art explains that a given piece is interactive, and how it is interactive, but not how we inter-act” (91)
Chapter 1 details how aesthetic ‘vision’ is understood through this framework, heavily criticising the pervasive disembodiment Stern laments in technical discussions of digital art and the VR playgrounds from the yesteryear of the 90s. Digital Interactive Art has continually suppressed a latent embodied performance that widens the disembodied aesthetic experience towards – following Ridgway and Thrift – a “non-representational experience.” Such experiences take the body as an open corporal process within a situation, which includes, whilst also encompassing, the corporal materiality of non-human computational processes. This is, clearly, designed to oppose any discourse that treats computation and digital culture as some sort of liberating, inane, immaterial phenomenon: to which Stern is absolutely right. Moreover, all of these material processes move in motion with embodied possibilities, to “create spaces in which we experience and practice this body, its agency, and how they might become.” (40) To add some political heft, Stern contrasts how the abuse of interactivity is often peddled towards consumerist choice, determining possibilities, put against artistic navigation that relinquishes control, allowing limitless possibilities. Quoting Erin Manning, Stern values interactive art’s success when it doesn’t just move in relation to human experience, but when humans move *the* relation in experience (Manning, 2009: 64; Stern, 46).
Stern’s second chapter moves straight into a philosophical discussion denoting what he means by an anti-Cartesian, non-representational, or implicit body. Heavily contexualised by a host of process, emergent materialist thinkers (Massumi, Hayles, Barad), Stern concentrates on the trait of performance as the site of body which encapsulates its relationally, emergence and potential. The body is not merely formed in stasis, (what Stern dubs “pre-formed” (62) but is regularly and always gushingly “per-formed” (61) in its movement. Following Kelli Fuery, the kind of interactivity Stern wants to foreground is always there, not a stop-start prop literate to computer interaction, but an effervescent ensemble of “becoming interactive” (Fuery, 2009: 44; Stern, 65). Interactive art is not born from an effect bestowed by a particular medium of art making, but of “making literal the kinds of assemblages we are always a part of.” (65)
Chapter three sets out Stern’s account for the implicit body framework: detailing out four areas: “artistic inquiry and process; artwork description; inter-activity and relationally.” (91) Chapters four, five and six flesh out this framework with actual practices. Four considers close readings of the aforementioned work of Penny together with Camille Utterback merging the insights gained from the previous chapters. What both artists encapsulate for Stern is that their interventions focus on the embodied activities of material signification: or “the activities of writing with the body” (114) Utterback’s 1999 installation “Textrain” is exemplary to Stern’s argument: notably the act of collecting falling text characters on a screen merges dynamic body movements with poetic disclosure. The productions of these images are always emergent and inscribed within our embodied practices and becomings: that we think with our environment. Five re-contextualises this with insights into works by Scott Scribbes and Mathieu Briand’s interventions in societal norms and environments. Six takes on the role of the body as a dynamic, topological space: most notably as practiced in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Chapter seven I’ll discuss near the conclusion: the last chapter shortly.
Firstly, the good stuff. Interactive Art and Embodiment is probably one of the most sincerest reads I’ve encountered in the field for some time. Partly this is because the book cultivates Stern’s sincerity for his own artistic practice, together with his own philosophical accounts that supplement that vision. His deep understanding of process philosophy is clearly matched by his enthusiastic reassessment of what interactive art purports to achieve and how other artists might have achieved it too. And it’s hard to disagree with Stern’s own position when he cites examples (of his work and others) that clearly delegate the philosophical insights to which he is committed. One highlight is Stern’s take on Scribbes’ Boundary Foundations (1998) and the Screen Series (2002-03) which intervenes and questions the physical and metaphorical boundaries surrounding ourselves and others, by performing its questioning as work. This is a refreshingly earnest text, proving that theory works best not when praxis matches the esoteric fashions of philosophical thinking, but when art provides its own stakes and its own types of thinking-experience which theory sets out to faithfully account and describe. Stern’s theoretical legitimacy is never earned from just digesting, synthesising and applying copious amounts of philosophy, but from the centrality of describing in detail what he thinks the bodily outcomes of interactive art are and what such accounts have to say: even if they significantly question existing philosophical accounts.
Stern leaves the most earnest part of his book towards the end in his final semi-auto-biographical companion chapter called “In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)”. This is a snippet of a much larger story, available online and subject to collaboration [4]. Here, Stern recounts or modifies the anxiety inducing experience of being a PhD student and artist, rubbing up alongside the trials of academic rigour, dissertation writing and expected standards. Quite simply, Stern is applying his insights of performative processual experience into the everyday, ordinary experiences faced by most PhD students in this field, and using it to justify a certain writing style and a sense of practice. It’s an enjoyable affair – in large part because it outclasses the dry scholarly tone usually associated with writing ‘academically’, elevating imaginative, illuminating redescriptions for how the experiences of interactive art broadly hang together rather than relying on relentless cynical critique. And most of that is down to Stern’s strong literary metaphorical technique for grounding his vision, perhaps even more effectively than the previous chapters.
Yet earnest experiences aside, there are two problems with Stern’s vision which, in my eyes, leave it flawed. That isn’t a bad thing: all visions are flawed of course. That’s why the similarities between art and philosophy feed our heuristic, academic compulsion to come up with them and debate: well, that and sometimes the most flawed can end up being the most influential…
Read the entire review in context (with introduction and conclusion) on Furtherfield
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TEDx talk
“Nathaniel Stern is an awkward artist, teacher and writer, who likes awkward art, students and writing. Stern’s talk, Ecological Aesthetics, discusses tweets in space, scans at the bottom of the sea, interactive installations, and art in virtual worlds – all work about the complex relationships between humans, nature, and politics.”
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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De Arte
Interactive art and embodiment: The implicit body as performance
Reviewed by Rob Myers for De Arte
Nathaniel Stern. Interactive art and embodiment: The implicit body as performance. 2013. Canterbury: Glyphi Limited. £ 18.99.
This review is copyrighted and available from Sabinet, though some highlights follow:
Abstract
In Interactive art and embodiment, artist and art theorist Nathaniel Stern develops and applies a rigorous set of frameworks for reconsidering the concepts of interactive multimedia, performance, and the creation of bodily meaning and experience. Stern begins by building a lineage for his novel understanding of these ideas. He then develops a framework for the critical evaluation of interactive art based on this understanding, and applies it to some exemplary artworks. Finally he applies the parts of this framework that are relevant for non-interactive multimedia art to some well-known examples of that genre in order to show their further applicability.
“The book as a whole continues this concern both with bodily experience through interactive art and with grounding discourse in examples of art and criticism.”
“By collapsing and making strange what we think we know both intuitively and critically about our bodies as ‘performed and emerging emergence’, Stern lays the concept of the body open to productive re-thinking.”
“Interactive art, Stern argues, can interrupt and intervene in the performance of bodily relationality. ‘Moving- thinking-feeling’ is both limited by and amplified by art, as it is by games or drama.”
“Stern’s use of examples – both familiar and unfamiliar – illustrates the strength of the implicit body framework and makes it useful both to critics and to artists who wish to better understand what makes successful interactive art.”
“The implicit body framework concentrates on artistic enquiry and process rather than the ontology of such a piece, and on the experience of it as interaction and interactivity, beyond merely describing its technological construction or mechanical appearance. Doing so allows interactive art to stand or fall on its merits as interactive art, and highlights the value of a work…”
“Interactive art and embodiment makes a considerable contribution to the state of criticism andtheory of interactive art. It is useful for critics, theorists and artists who wish to further their understanding of interactive art and serves as an introduction to its worth for those unfamiliar with or unconvinced by it.”
Read the entire review in De Arte
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Art Journal
Beyond Technology and Representation: What Can Interactive Art Do?
Nathaniel Stern. Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. Canterbury, UK: Gylphi, 2013. 291 pp., 41 color ills. $29.99 paper
Troy Rhoades, for CAA’s Art Journal, Spring 2014
Download Art Journal’s PDF spread of this article from Taylor and Francis
Forget technology.
Forget representation.
Remember the body.
Re-member: Embody again (6).
In Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, Nathaniel Stern would like us to remember the body’s potential for moving, thinking, and feeling in relation to digital interactive artworks. He wants this triumvirate of bodily activities – what he defines as embodiment – to be placed in the foreground of thought when we discuss interactive art. It is his contention that technology and representational content have been the focal points of interactive art for too long, and it is time for a paradigm shift. “We must get away from concentrating only on the signs and images on the screen or the interface, away from privileging the technology and what it affords. We must engage with the quality and styles of movement that are rehearsed with interactive art” (15–16). Stern sees the need to stop explaining what interactive art is as a technological object or a generator of signs. He asserts instead that our attention should be placed on what interactive art does as it shapes our potential for embodiment, that is, our ability to move-think-feel with the work. It is important to note that Stern is not completely rejecting technological and representational approaches to interactive art and solely focusing on embodiment. Rather, he wants us to notice that there is a glaring absence of embodiment in many of the present methods used to analyze this type of work. This book is his attempt to address the long-overdue need to reevaluate this field of art. He reveals that we have always been moving-thinking-feeling with interactive art.
Stern begins his reassessment of interactive art by clearly defining his approach to this work. First, he declares that he will not value or define the potential of any individual artwork categorically: “I begin and end with singular works in the gallery space, and am interested in creating a discrete critical framework for encountering interactive art” (5). Stern then defines the interactive artwork as digital and electronic art that uses “various forms of sensors or cameras for input; computers, microcontrollers, simple electronic circuits, or other digital or analogical terminals for processing; and any form of sensory output – audiovisual, tactile, olfactory, mechanical, or otherwise; where all are placed together in a system that responds to the embodied participation of viewers, either in real-time, and/or over lengths of time” (5–6). From here Stern states that his theoretical approach is aligned with process philosophy and affect theory, primarily based on the work of the philosopher Brian Massumi, in order to “explore interactive art’s potential, outside of signification alone” (9).1 By approaching interactive art from an affective and processual approach, Stern associates himself with other contemporary new media thinkers (some of whom he cites) such as Anna Munster, Steve Goodman, and Stamatia [Portanova].2
With his approach and theoretical foundation clearly stated, Stern delineates in the first two chapters how recent research practices in interactive art, which have focused on technology and representation, connect and diverge from his understanding of embodiment as the body’s potential for moving-thinking-feeling. In the first chapter Stern tackles the notion that digital technology is somehow incorporeal, as espoused by thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler and David Rodowick.3 He argues against the notion that data, computational processes, and networks do not have any physical presence or materiality. For Stern all of these technologies and digital processes take on some physical form, on hard drives, computer chips, or fiber-optic cables: “Neither bodies nor information can exist without form and embodiment, and intelligence encompasses far more than informational processing” (33). Stern wants us to be aware not only of the corporeal aspects of digital and electronic technology that interactive art uses but also how we are affected and effected when participating in these technologies. He sees a real challenge in keeping “the participant’s attention on the quality of their own movements, rather than the response of the machine” (45). In Stern’s view, we need to become more attuned to the moving-thinking-feeling experience we have with interactive art, rather than focusing on the technology that drives the work.
In the second chapter Stern challenges recent thought concerning the body and representation in interactive art. He asks that we pay attention to the body as “more than its signs and significations, more than what we see or look at, more than skin, flesh, and bone” (54–55). According to Stern, for a body to be understood as a series of signs or an object, it needs to be static or “pre-formed,” like the many static points of Zeno’s famous arrow. A body becomes “explicit,” lacking any potential to experience embodiment. For a body to move-think-feel, Stern contends, it must be seen as a continuously changing entity that “situates embodiment as always per-formed: emergent and relational” (67). A body that experiences the ongoing activity of embodiment during an encounter with interactive art is, for Stern, an “implicit body” as performance.
After critiquing technological and language-based approaches to interactive art, Stern outlines a potentially paradigm-shifting method for understanding interactive art and embodiment through what he calls the “implicit body framework.” This framework comprises four areas of examination: “artistic inquiry and process; artwork description; inter-activity; and, relationality” (91). The first area looks at the artwork from the artist’s perspective, focusing on his or her approach to the work and the techniques chosen for its production. The second area gives us a detailed description of the artwork: how it looks, sounds, and plays. For Stern, these first two areas of examination are standard in most investigations of interactive art. They also represent the point at which most inquiries stop. As he states, “most visually-, technically-, and linguistically-based writing on interactive art explains that a given piece is interactive, and how it is interactive, but not how we inter-act” (91, emphasis in orig.).
Stern sees the third and fourth areas of examination – interactivity and relationality – as the missing elements in discussions of interactive art. The two areas focus on the potential for an awareness of embodiment to emerge in the viewer-artwork encounter; they foreground our capacity to move-think-feel our potential for change when we experience interactive art. The third area specifically examines the interaction itself, that is, how viewers and artworks connect at the level of embodiment. It focuses on the emergent affects, feelings, and movements generated in the midst of the viewer-artwork encounter. The final area of examination focuses on the relations that emerge in our encounter with interactive art and how these “relationships intervene in our transformation with the world around us” (97). Stern wants us to become aware of the extensive potential for relations to alter and affect our ability to move, think, and feel with regard to an interactive artwork.
In the next three chapters Stern presents a series of case studies using his implicit body framework, approaching several interactive artworks under three different thematics: body-language, social-anatomies, and flesh-space. For Stern these thematics reveal various emergent relations between embodiment and some other sensible concept, such as “language, society, architecture, other matter, forces, and matters” (97–98). The body-language chapter examines the work of Simon Penny and Camille Utterback and its parallels with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “excription,” looking specifically at body and language as “mutually immanent” (104). The social-anatomies chapter investigates Nick Crossley’s idea of “intercorporeality” – the capacity for the body and society to reciprocally produce each other – through the work of the Millefiore Effect, Mathieu Briand, and Scott Snibbe. The third thematic chapter, on flesh-space, approaches the interactive work of David [Rokeby], Rafael Lezano-Hemmer, and Norah Zuniga Shaw through the thought of José Gil and Erin Manning, investigating the ability of these artworks to make viewers aware of the ways in which “bodies and space are made of their relations” (176). These three chapters demonstrate Stern’s implicit body framework as rigorous yet flexible when applied to the analysis of interactive art.
In the penultimate chapter Stern takes his implicit body framework further, demonstrating that it can be used beyond the limits of interactive art. He investigates a large cross-section of new-media works by artists such as Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, Brandon Labelle, and John F. Simon, Jr., as well as his own work, which he calls “potentialized art.” For Stern all of these works have the capacity to “amplify action, affect, embodiment, performativity, transformation, and/or materiality” (206). Potentialized art enables us to become aware of our ability to move-think-feel with a work in the midst of our mutual encounter. We can experience the potential for embodiment as we perform with these artworks. We can become aware of our ability to move-think-feel.
The most rewarding and riskiest chapter of Stern’s book is saved for the end. “In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)” is a case study of Stern’s own art and writing practices from 2000 to the present. What makes this chapter such a rewarding and refreshing read is that it is written in an unconventional autobiographical style that is also academically rigorous, a style Stern calls an “autoethnographic experiment” (254). This experiment blends conversations, personal narrative, and several analyses of his interactive artworks using his implicit body framework in order to “amplify” and “potentialize” the reading experience (259). Stern consolidates everything he has advocated about the relationship between embodiment and interactive art into a personal story about himself and his work, effectively exposing us to an example of the experience of moving-thinking-feeling that we have been reading about throughout the book.
Stern’s experimental approach to writing is also one of this chapter’s many risks. There is the possibility that more traditional readers of art theory and history may find such a self-referential and unconventionally written account off-putting, even jarring. However, Stern’s storytelling ability is strong and will likely win over even the most curmudgeonly reader. Another risk this chapter takes is the form in which it has been published. The book surprisingly ends by giving us only the introductory section of this concluding chapter. We are invited to go online to view or download the remaining sections (253, 259).4 We are allowed just a taste of this chapter and then must shift our attention from the written page to the written screen. The risk here is that readers may be lost in this transition from the book to the Internet, leaving some of Stern’s best writing unread.
The book is part of the Arts Future Book initiative, a research project and academic book series investigating the future of academic publishing in the arts, led by Charlotte Frost. Placing this final chapter online appears to be part of the series’ mandate to exploit “recent technological advances in publishing” (xxi). Readers who go online and read the complete text of “In Production” will find the possibility to interact with others, in the ability to make comments at every paragraph. This gives readers a platform to share thoughts about some of their favorite (or less agreeable) passages. The ability to comment is an appealing feature, but publishing this chapter online has the potential to take away some of its affective impact. Moreover, it feels like an unnecessary use of digital technology, one that does not appear to follow the spirit of the book, as the online publication breaks a sense of continuity and makes it more difficult to experience moving-thinking-feeling in the work itself. As Stern states, “Embodiment only is through its ongoingness and continuity” (57, emphasis in orig.). If this chapter – which encapsulates everything Stern advocates with regard to interactive and potentialized art – were printed in its entirety at the end of the book, readers would have a better opportunity to experience the embodied potential the book commands. Despite these misgivings, everyone who reads Stern’s book (and those who are interested in reading it) should visit the website and discover the complete text of this wonderful final chapter.
It will be interesting to see how those behind the Arts Future Book series continue to explore the potential that digital and online media offers to expand the form of the book. Interactive Art and Embodiment is the first from this series, making it the first to experiment with the hybrid approach to publishing. I hope the editors will embrace Stern’s notion of embodiment and ensure that digital incarnations of future titles emerge from the potential activated within the texts themselves.
By asking us to engage with interactive art at the level of potential for movement, thinking, and feeling, Stern alters the idea of what inquiry can be, changing it from an analysis of something static into a dynamic event. The act of examination becomes as much a performance as the interactive art it investigates. Through the use of Stern’s implicit body framework, artworks become more than mere descriptions placed within a historical context. Through his writing, artworks become alive in the reading, giving us a sense of how the embodied interactions and emergent relations feel as they are encountered.
1. Throughout the book, Stern focuses on three of Massumi’s texts: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: An Interview with Brian Massumi,” in Interact or Die: There Is Drama in the Network, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2 Pub./NAi, 2007), 70–91; and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)
2. See Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
3. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and David N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. The concluding chapter in its entirety is at http://stern.networkedbook.org, as of February 11, 2014.
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Neural Magazine
Nathaniel Stern – Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance
AURELIO CIANCIOTTA
GYLPHI LIMITED, ISBN-13: 978-1780240091, ENGLISH, 304 PAGES, 2013, USA
Man/machine interfaces have involved the body in progressively more sophisticated ways, from the mechanical finger pressure on a keyboard to the intellectual challenge of voice-recognition-based software assistants. Media art has interpreted interfaces dynamically, abstracting the interaction and playing with its modalities, symbols and meanings. Stern analyses almost forty different artworks to augment his theory: “interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways we experience embodiment – as per-formed, relational, and emergent”. The text investigates “how we interact” and the role of the body in the interaction process is here exploded and carefully delineated. Many of the connotations that the body assumes in artworks – being perceived as a structure, a tool, a territory or an imagined space – are analysed as performative and symbolic instances. One of the qualities of this book is that it provides extensive references on the topic, while remaining very focused. The artworks are carefully described in their mechanisms and their performative dimensions are acknowledged separately, representing an annotated anthology in itself. There’s also a “digital companion” chapter (called “In Production”, partially printed and freely available online, meant to be updated and expanded at will), which has been aggregated to the book as its dynamic (in a way even performative) extension. This book is very helpful for understanding our physical relationship with the digital and how to properly relate to interactive art.
See the review on Neural.it
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Archée
Interactif, implicite, performatif, éprouvé, le corps exploré
Louise Boisclair (read the whole article, or read the google English translation)
Dans Always More Than One, Erin Manning croise philosophie ou mouvement de pensée, chorégraphie ou mouvement du corps, art et autisme. De son côté, avec Interactive Art and Embodiment : The Implicit Body as Performance, Nathaniel Stern propose de considérer le corps implicite dans sa triple relation de mouvement, sensation et pensée lors de l’appropriation interactive. Quant au collectif, Personnage virtuel et corps performatif. Effets de présence, dirigé par Renée Bourassa et Louise Poissant, quinze artistes et théoriciens explorent, chacun, chacune, sous un angle singulier, diverses facettes du corps performatif et du personnage virtuel. Pour sa part, dans L’instance du regard sur le corps éprouvé. Pathos et contre-pathos, Élène Tremblay examine les notions de pathos et contre-pathos à travers l’insistance du regard sur le corps éprouvé. Chaque auteur-e arrime son analyse à la théorie philosophique, médiatique ou phénoménologique selon l’approche singulière ou multiple qu’ils ou elles adoptent pour cheminer avec le corpus sélectionné.
…
Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Nathaniel Stern)
Pour sa part, l’ouvrage de l’artiste-enseignant-chercheur Nathaniel Stern constitue une refonte de sa thèse de doctorat qu’il a auparavant résumée dans un article intitulé : « The Implicit Body as Performance: Analyzing Interactive Art. », publié dans le Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology (MIT Press). Vol 44, No 3 (2011): 233-238. Globalement, la thèse est la suivante : au lieu de s’en tenir à la vision, à la structure et à la signification, Stern propose de recentrer l’intérêt sur le « corps en relation ». Il conçoit l’interaction en tant que performance et la manière d’être en tant que manière d’« être avec ». Dans un cadre de travail sur le corps implicite au sein de l’installation interactive, il propose une approche qui réunit quatre volets: la recherche et le processus artistique, la description de l’œuvre d’art, l’interactivité et la relationalité. Selon lui, les deux derniers volets propres à l’expérience interactive doivent faire l’objet d’un examen détaillé.
Cette prescription, Stern la met à l’épreuve dans son ouvrage. Composé de huit chapitres dont le huitième introduit un texte à paraître sur le WEB seulement, il met la table dès la première page :
« When we move and think and feel, we are, of course, a body. This body is constantly changing, in and through its ongoing relationships. This body is a dynamic form, full of potential. It is not “a body,” as thing, but embodiment as incipient activity. Embodiment is a continuously emergent and active relation. It is our materialization and articulation, both as they occur, and about to occur. Embodiment is moving-thinking-feeling, it is the body’s potential to vary, it is the body’s relations to the outside. And embodiment, I contend, is what is staged in the best interactive art. » (Stern, 2013, 2)
Lui-même artiste spécialiste de l’art interactif, sa réflexion philosophique, aussi stimulante que novatrice, est ancrée dans le corps implicite, c’est-à-dire ce corps qui vit et déborde le corps vécu, notion renvoyant au corps pensé. Stern invite la recherche à considérer bien davantage les forces et les champs en puissance dans le corps, alors que la corporéité est en « per-formance », ici-maintenant, au sein de l’installation interactive. L’incorporation s’accompagne donc de la métabolisation d’informations sensorielles issues du milieu d’immersion, sorte de sémiose corporelle pré-signifiante. Elle s’apparente au sens dynamique que lui donne Stern:
« The conception of a continuous embodiment, however, allows us to rethink bodies as formed through how we move in, and relate to, our surroundings. Embodiment, I contend, is not a pre-formed thing, but incipient and per-formed. » (Stern, 2013, 12).
Ainsi, la corporéité, dans sa dynamique, n’est pas une chose pré-formée, mais per-formée, insiste Stern; elle n’est pas constituée, elle se constitue. Continuellement en action, la corporéité évolue de façon dynamique au fil de l’incorporation, elle n’est jamais figée.
Tout au long de cet ouvrage, le lecteur, la lectrice rencontrera de nombreux artistes de l’art interactif et immersif, ce qui a le bénéfice non seulement d’illustrer le propos de Stern, mais bien davantage d’incarner sa réflexion philosophique dans une encyclopédie d’art interactif encore en train d’évoluer. Graduellement, au fil des chapitres, Stern joue avec les thèmes performatifs suivants: 1- « Digital is as Digital does »; 2- « The Implicit Body as Performance »; 3- « A Critical Framework for Interactive Art », 4- « Body-Langage » ; 5- « Social Anatomies »; 6- « Flesh-Space »; 7- « Implicating Art Works » et 8- « In production ». Ce livre d’une grande importance rend compte d’une vision actuelle non seulement artistique, mais « spectatorielle » du corps, assisté ou outillé technologiquement, comme on l’est de plus en plus même dans notre vie quotidienne. Bien plus que le corps performant, c’est toujours et encore le « corps implicite » qui sert de fil rouge pour explorer l’art interactif.
Read the whole article, or read the google English translation
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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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Meaning Motion press
Meaning Motion was a duo exhibition (with Tegan Bristow) of interactive art, at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, June – August 2013. It took up two floors of the museum, and featured 8 installations of work, including the international premiere of Stern’s scripted, and the first full exhibition of his Body Language suite of work – all with new, updated code.
Body Language (2000 – 2013) is a suite of four interactive works that has us encounter some of the complex relationships between materiality and text. Each piece stages the experience and practice of bodies and language in a different way, enabling in-depth explorations of how they are always implicated across one another. elicit invites viewers to perform the continuity between text and the body; enter effectively asks its participants to investigate how words and activity are inherently entwined; stuttering provokes its performers into exploring the labor and intimacy of embodied listening and communication; and scripted asks us to remember how the activities of writing, the shape and sound of language, are forever a part of the physical world.
Meaning Motion produced two publications, including a Body Language catalog with essay by Charlie Gere, and coincides with a panel on interactive art at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Australia), and the release of Stern’s book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance.
Various press includes:
“The Politics of Meaning and Voice,” in Business Day
“Viewers Make the Art Work,” in the Mail and Guardian
“The Games Artists Play: Performance and Failure” in the Sunday Independent
An interview with Nathaniel Stern on the Morning Buzz, WORTfm in Madison
“Meaning Maker” on Mahala.co.za
An interview with Tegan Bristow on Radio Today, Johannesburg
“Wam set to wow this June,” in the City Buzz, Johannesburg
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Body Language
Interactive art suite, Catalog and Videos
Title: Body Language / Nathaniel Stern
Essay: Charlie Gere
Design: Andrew McConville
Photos: Nathaniel Stern, Wyatt Tinder, Andrew McConville and Joseph Mougel
Documentation Videos: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Nathaniel Stern and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Date of Publication: 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-620-56861-6 (print) and 978-0-620-56862-3 (e-book)
Download Body Language as PDF (2.4 mb)
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