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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Arts Research Africa
Nathaniel Stern: teaching everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking
Arts Research Africa Dialogues (apple podcast)
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Nathaniel Stern, an artist, writer and teacher who holds a 50/50 dual appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a Professor in Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering where “he teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking.”
Nathaniel’s most recent art project, a travelling exhibition, called “The World After US (TWAU): Imaging techno-aesthetic futures”, is a fascinating and constantly mutating physical melange of botany and discarded electronics that challenges viewers to imagine “what our digital media will be and do in the world after us”. One aspect of the TWAU project, called “The Wall After Us”, was was recently featured as part of the SYM|BIO|ART exhibition at University of Johannesburg. The exhibition launched the newly formed Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at the University of Johannesburg led by Prof Leora Farber.
Nathaniel also has a long association with Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts. With a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, he was responsible for designing and teaching the first years of the Interactive Media studio programme in the Digital Arts department. Over that time he also won the Brett Kebble Art Award in both 2003 and 2004, thus earning the first recognition for interactive and digital art in the South African art world. Following his time in Johannesburg, he went on to do a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland writing his dissertation on interactive art and embodiment.
Since his PhD, Nathaniel has created a dazzling range of exploratory art projects, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers. In fact the journal Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.” I urge listeners to visit his website to get a grasp of the extent of his artistic and writerly practice. In this discussion, we talk about the TWAU project; and the experience of installing the “The Wall After Us” working remotely from the US together with the curatorial team at the FADA gallery. We also explore Nathaniel’s thinking about aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and activism, especially the climate activism that is central to his work. Finally we unpack the Startup Challenge which Nathaniel directs at Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I think that the expanded notions of both innovation and entreprepreneurship that Nathaniel deploys in the programme are of great value for similar work at Wits, and in South Africa more broadly.
Useful links to Nathaniel’s website, books, exhibitions, and papers:
His website: https://nathanielstern.com
His latest published paper, together with Johannes Lehmann and Rachel Garber-Cole: “Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research”. Leonardo (2023) 56 (5): 488–495. DOI https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02400
The TWU site, with downloadable PDF of the exhibition catalogue and a video documentary: https://nathanielstern.com/text/2020/catalog-the-world-after-us/
Nathaniel’s first book, with downloadable intro chapter:
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics
The Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre webpage: https://uwm.edu/lubar-entrepreneurship-center/student-startup-challenge/#
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Forbes
‘The Moon Is A Trick’: AI Flings Greek Mythology All-Stars Into Space
by Leslie Katz
Persephone, queen of the underworld in Greek mythology, has some pretty powerful advice for those of us roaming the overworld.
Don’t turn around; just
navigate Empty
Take a breath, forget how to breathe.
Stare at the moon.
That moment of zen is brought to you by “Future Mythologies, 2023,” a series of poems co-written with AI to explore the voices and stories of Greek mythological characters including Odysseus, Achilles, Icarus, Medusa, Artemis and Ariadne—with a sci-fi twist.
For the project, Nathaniel Stern, a professor of art and design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, turned to AI for help imagining the kind of performance prose 12 mythic leads might recite at a poetry slam in space. He tapped Sudowrite, a fiction writing generative AI tool powered by the same OpenAI natural language model that drives ChatGPT.
One fairly common perception when it comes AI-assisted art is that algorithms automatically usurp all human creativity. The poems in “Future Mythologies, 2023,” however, represent a true collaboration between person and machine.
“What came out often had a gem or two, but a lot of things that didn’t work for me effectively,” Stern said in an interview. “And so I’d very often go back and forth, edit and rewrite, reprompt, change the order and back again. In the end, most of the poems are a mix of my and the AI’s texts.”
The results are weird, intriguing and sometimes beautiful. Medusa overwrites tragedy with adventure. Icarus imagines flying upward in a spaceship (toward what, it’s unclear). Odysseus gets existential when pondering his journeys:
I don’t fear the unknown.
But I feel it.
The whole picture is:
as it were,
as it will be,
as it could be;
it might be.
“My favorite things were the surprises, when occasionally the AI would confuse two myths,” Stern said, “or I’d prompt it to stutter … then shift to the voice of a demi-god.”
ANNE SPALTER
Stern recorded the poems in his voice and digital artist Anne Spalter created sound and images to illustrate the readings, some of which are accompanied by HD video. Spalter pioneered digital fine arts courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in the ’90s and her work often incorporates a futuristic aesthetic.
“I love the sense of working with a mysterious partner in AI and running with concepts that emerge from the text-to-image process,” Spalter said in a joint interview with Stern for Expanded Art, which “turns Web3 inside out and expands the notion of a gallery and an online marketplace by being both.” Earlier this year, it presented an exhibition called Recollection: AI and Memory that included the 12 poems in “Future Mythologies, 2023.”
AI-assisted art, of course, raises complex questions. Some artists are excited about the creative possibilities afforded by rapidly advancing generative AI tools, while others fear their work is getting scraped from the internet to train AI datasets without permission, compensation or credit. Many creatives hold both views simultaneously. Like Stern, Spalter stresses the iterative nature of partnering with AI, saying it’s not as simple as typing in prompts and getting back perfectly crafted works.
“You prompt, consider the results, adjust and repeat, in my case using multiple AI platforms and hand-tweaking images in Photoshop,” Spalter said in an interview. “It doesn’t take any less time or effort than other media or processes.”
ANNE SPALTER
Stern created the poems at the request of TheVerseVerse, a digital gallery for writers. The team behind the platform asked Stern to write a series of poems for their GenText project, which explores the craft and creativity of generative AI by inviting poets to create language-based NFTs.
One of Stern’s upcoming projects, “Mother Computer: Thinking With Natural and Artificial Intelligences,” aims to deepen conversations around AI and art through both digital art and a large-scale physical exhibition.
Stern often explores how people experience and engage with the world—and technology. For past projects, he’s burned and smashed consumer electronics to imagine what they might look like a million years from now. And he’s given Earth-bound social media addicts the chance to tweet to aliens.
Now we have some new poems to tweet to our extraterrestrial friends. “The moon is a trick,” reads the Persephone poem. Wonder what ET would have to say about that.
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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.
Related artworks:
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Culture3
Nathaniel Stern on creating a cyber-natural future on the blockchain
by Ola Kalejaye
For Nathaniel Stern, life extends far further than the human experience. Connecting the dots between human feeling, nature, and technology, he explores the endless bounds of sensibility through his art. He speaks to Ola Kalejaye about The World After Us, and using art to ensure that world is good.
When Nathaniel Stern speaks about his work, his passion for the subject matter enlivens the conversation, steering it down tangential alleyways that enlighten his process with glorious context, while also bringing a cascade of new and interesting insights.
Such are the makings of the eclectic mind of a natural polymath and interdisciplinary artist. Nathaniel holds a joint appointment at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, teaching both Art & Design and Mechanical Engineering. It certainly scans for someone who embodies the mind of both artist and academic through the way they approach, well, everything.
Nathaniel expressed interest in a variety of creative media from a young age. The son of two English teachers, he first explored his creativity through music while attending an engineering high school. He went on to study fashion design at university, and it was there that Nathaniel faced the first major turning point of his artistic journey, and quite by chance.
One of Nathaniel’s undergraduate professors sent him a link to New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), which he interpreted as a suggestion that he apply. In reality, as Nathaniel learned a decade later, his professor had sent the link as a reference for what she wanted to hire Nathaniel to do with her own website, but the decision had already been made.
Founded in 1979, the NYU ITP explores communications technologies, and how they can serve as vessels to spread art. The programme is also well known for its contributions to interactive art, which has been one of Nathaniel’s primary vehicles for expression.
During his time at NYU, Nathaniel explored the notion of performativity, “how text and activity intertwine.” A major guiding inspiration came from his teacher, Professor Dan O’Sullivan, who noted Nathaniel’s particularly animated style of speaking, prompting him to explore the relationship between speech and the body. “That’s where my two loves kind of came together,” reflects Nathaniel. “It wound up completely changing my life. That’s where I became an artist.”
“What might that cyber-natural future look like?”
— Nathaniel Stern
As Nathaniel’s interests evolved, he honed in on his corporeal relationship to the environment, through the lens of affect. “Affect is the body’s response to the environment that doesn’t have a name yet,” he explains. “It’s an emotion without a qualification.”
One of his early explorations of this phenomenon was through a series of what he labels Compressionist images. Nathaniel would make custom imaging rigs by attaching battery packs to desktop scanners, rigging them to his body and moving through different landscapes.
Nathaniel’s experimental and ingenious project spanned over a decade, taking him and his imaging rigs scanning over hedges, through parks and streams, and wading through lakes and waterfalls.
He even spent three months learning to scuba dive with his equipment, to take his compressionist observations underwater. He and his team built five different sub-aqueous systems, and Nathaniel dived with three of them at three different sites.
Thanks to Nathaniel’s uniquely unusual method of capturing these “melty, slit-scan images,” the thoughts and questions they stimulated were beyond what Nathaniel could have ever planned. He was viewing the interrelationship between his body, technology, and the world around him in a wholly new way. He had found a way to visually represent affect.
Nathaniel began to wonder, what if the landscapes that he had been surveying had their own, unprocessed responses. Could there be some kind of nonhuman affect? And if there was, how might it express itself in an environment increasingly tampered with by human activity? This exploration manifested itself in what is perhaps Nathaniel’s signature work thus far, and the centre of his NFT collection launching on Quantum Art, The World After Us.
“We need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
— Nathaniel Stern
The title of the series is inspired by the book The World Without Us, which explores the progress of planet Earth if humanity were to go extinct. In The World After Us, he explores how biological life and the waste that humanity produces would intertwine in our absence.
“If matter can move and think and feel,” Nathaniel asks, “what if it’s not just the plants that retake the planet? What if the digital materials themselves started to incubate and fester and spread?”
The World After Us is Nathaniel’s representation of what such a future would look like. For him, that future is neither blindly optimistic, nor some post-apocalyptic dystopia. “I wanted to imagine a space that is full of garbage, but life finds a way, because it always does,” he explains. “What might that cyber-natural future look like?”
The collection falls into three categories: old appliances reclaimed by plant life, fossilised phones and laptops, and devices repurposed into tools. Contemplating the future of our tech-driven society, Nathaniel’s images recontextualise our relationship to these quotidian items.
“How can I change my relationship to this thing?,” he muses, asking both of himself and the viewer, “How do I understand it, no longer as this object of beauty and utility, but also as garbage.”
Art is just one platform through which Nathaniel pursues these aims. A self-professed “Jack-of-All-Trades”, Nathaniel co-founded the climate action startup, Eco Labs, and sits on the Board of a battery company seeking to replace the lithium ion with the much more plentiful sodium ion in the battery-making process.
However, for Nathaniel, art provides the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to inducing systematic changes to our attitudes on waste. Nathaniel quotes his friend and collaborator, the soil scientist Johannes Lehmann: “I can tell you how to solve climate change, but we need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
“What the blockchain has afforded me is that I get to live in both worlds at once.”
— Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel’s appreciation that much of that will could be inspired by the blockchain required a 180-degree change in perspective, from contempt to admiration. Indeed, he intended to make a “critical and negative work” about the blockchain with longtime collaborator Scott Kildall.
However, when Nathaniel and Scott began their research, their opinions swiftly changed. “We came to it and we were like, oh shit, there’s something there,” he explains. “Yeah, there are crypto bros, but there are also really earnest people who want to leverage its power.”
Nathaniel recalls finding the work of artists and writers in the blockchain space, such as Simon de la Rouviere, and future collaborators Rhea Myers and the AI-collaborative poet Sasha Stiles. Their opinions on the blockchain firmly changed Nathaniel and Scott’s perspectives, who decided to instead create a work celebrating the blockchain, starting Nathaniel’s web3 journey in earnest.
“We need artists to make everyone have the will to make that difference.”
— Nathaniel Stern
To him, the NFT ecosystem provides a space for experimentation that had been eroding in the face of demands of galleries and museums, and more akin to the Net Art days of the 1990s. “I would just make something, throw it up, get feedback and see what happened,” he reminisces.
By contrast, whilst a gallery would support his work, all experimentation had to happen behind the scenes. In providing Nathaniel the means to sell and distribute his work directly, web3 lets him pursue his true interests.“What the blockchain has afforded me is that I get to live in both worlds at once.”
Top of mind for Nathaniel is a longstanding desire to archive his work, which the blockchain enables for a digital work far better than any gallery. Though he does not fully buy into the concept of the blockchain lasting forever, he does find the concept of permanent immutability on the blockchain to be “a beautiful idea.”
“The blockchain is already a promise we can’t possibly keep,” Nathaniel says, as he ponders what forever looks like, and beyond. “But I think that putting our trust in the trustless and timeless is itself beautiful. And romantic and cynical, and problematic and hopeful all at once.”
by Ola Kalejaye – read full article in context on Culture3
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Waiting to be Signed
Waiting to be Signed is a podcast dedicated to fx(hash), the generative art NFT platform on the Tezos blockchain.
Episode 30 featured The Word After Us (a collaboration with Sasha Stiles), as “a project that caught us both off-guard but we have to mention. This experimental word-driven piece caught on and really took off…the floor’s creeping up…”
Episode 48 describes “Our honorary favorite – 100%. 0ral B1nary: B1nary 0de hits a lot of marks…a weird audio spoken poetry piece over a kind of trip-hop style beat… This is pure performance.”
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Crypto Writer Talks
Crypto Writer Talks is a weekly podcast about crypto writing, organized and hosted by members of the Crypto Writers (CW) Discord. In this podcast, crypto writers talk shop and share their work in panel discussions, one-on-one interviews, dialogues and poetry and short story readings.
On Nov 10, 2021, CW founder Kalen Iwamoto interviewed Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall about their first-of-its-kind Blockchain Performance, NFT Culture Proof.
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Custodianship, Copyright, and Provenance
Custodianship, Copyright, and Provenance: on the non-monetary value of NFTs
nathaniel stern
Abstract
The value of NFTs for creators, collectors, and historians goes far beyond this speculative moment. This brief think-post posits that the custodianship of digital art which NFTs facilitate can be central to producing historically vital living archives. It then builds on other discussions around the Blockchain to differentiate, and show some of the relations between, custodianship, copyright, and provenance in the post-NFT era.
Custodianship
Back in 2004, I sold this interactive installation to the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) for R30,000 – about $2,000US. That is the same amount as the Brett Kebble Art Award I had won for showing the work a few months prior, without having to hand over any rights. But the truth is that I wanted to give rights to the JAG. I wanted to very much.
As an early digital artist – not to mention one living in Africa for the better part of my early career – I’d always lost money on my work overall. I was lucky enough to – quoting Dmitri Cherniak’s interview on Proof – “find refuge in academia” for my income (I love teaching, and am currently a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), but part of why I often lost money here is precisely because when I did make sales – especially to large collections or museums – I was often willing to do so at a loss, because it meant someone was taking care of that art.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) double the potential for long-term care of an artwork.
The analogy we often hear for NFTs is that they are like a deed to a house. They are “certificates of ownership,” for digital assets. These assets can be one-of-kind or editioned, where the image or video (etc) usually lives across several outside servers (like IPFS – though some live directly on-chain), and the Blockchain verifies who owns that work. Instead of a government-backed legal document in the form of a deed, NFTs are backed by a highly secure, digital, networked, and public ledger.
Briefly – as this has been exhaustively rehearsed elsewhere – one of the more tedious debates on the Internet at present goes something like: Own a digital file? But I can copy it! I can download it! I can “right-click” and “save as” – and it’s on my hard drive! Sure, but like money, land, credit, and most things we have, ownership and value are mostly perception- and consensus-based. If enough people agree that someone owns that image (land, credit, etc), and that there is value in that ownership, then – for better or worse – it becomes true for those involved.
Interesting to me (as a writer, and a visual artist often working with text – but also with regards to the Blockchain), is that contemporary ownership almost always happens with words and code. Performative action: if I “knight thee,” you are Sir Vitalik; with the words, “I do,” Kate Stern has me for a husband (poor thing). With this legal document, that house is mine. Those stocks: in my digitally signed portfolio. That food: I’ve got an e-receipt… If a large enough number of individuals view these performative documents – including the ownership of NFT-images – as legitimate, it is. And – as the argument continues – while you may not be able to live in an NFT the way you live in a house, the former is already provably trade-able, like most forms of credit, money, or physical art.
I’d like to build on the house analogy, branching out to custodianship. As a creator, I prefer the term “custodianship” over “ownership” because it brings to the front that aforementioned thing I think should be talked about more often around digital art: care. If a house goes unsold – whether through foreclosure or market conditions, etc – it not only loses “face” value, but rarely has someone maintaining its condition. That’s dangerous to the owner – whether an individual, a builder, or a bank. A few years ago, for example, I was looking at buying a gorgeous foreclosed house in a great neighborhood near my university, but because no one was living in it and turning on the heat in Winter, the pipes had frozen and burst. I lost interest, as did everyone else. The house never sold, and it is now falling to ruin.
This happens to art as well. Paintings degrade; prints get too much sun; DVDs get scratched; uncollected, they usually wind up in a landfill. Operating systems, plugins, and software languages are similarly discontinued, leaving a lot of digital art on hard drives that go to waste in those same landfills. My first net.art work is no longer viewable because it was built in (now-dead) Adobe Flash in 1999; I have had to re-write my interactive installations from the early 2000s three times – in different programming languages – in the last 20 years to compile them properly for newer computers (and will have to do so again in the near future). The hardware for these has also had to be down-, up-, and cross-graded over the years, along with their drivers and software. Yes, there are some archival attempts at upkeep, like the Rhizome initiated oldweb.today (now run by webrecorder; Rhizome also catalogs metadata, and is working on a Flash viewer) and Cornell University’s Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media, but these also need upkeep, as well as ongoing funding and support (which I hope they continue to get!).
Digital rot is real.
Being in the JAG collection, for me, meant that they take care of upkeep, and maintenance. Someone willing to buy that house, or art work, will do their best to not let it fall to ruin. Museums all have well-maintained collection rooms at the right humidity, with the safest light, etc, for their physical work; and more and more of them also have ways to archive and update digital forms. In this way, custodianship means a given work is less likely to be lost to rot, and far more likely to become a part of history. When I sold the JAG step inside, I gave them the software, the code, the pseudocode, and the rights to not only exhibit the work, but remake it – using my everyday language pseudocode descriptions – in another programming language or digital form in some distant future. They have exhibited the work twice since their purchase, and put it in another catalog each time.
Collectors on the Blockchain, to me, represent a kind of double permanence: the art lives immutably on a public ledger, and it also has a shepherd to walk it into the future.
We are already seeing early digital artists from the first and second net.art waves mint their work (like MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram, remixed above), and NFT archaeologists working to restore and preserve early on-chain art that was thought lost (see Ascribe). And rather than transforming such work into prints, DVDs, or even putting them on USB sticks (like I used to), digital art can remain in its native form, and be archived as such. The cultural value of digital art, now and finally, has the capital investment towards preservation that it always deserved.
NFTs facilitate the potential for living archives of digital art.
Copyright
In 2007 and 2008, I gave a couple of interviews on two now defunct sites, which are thankfully archived and quoted on the Wikipedia page about me. Although both of these were about my work more generally at the time, I was also thinking and talking a lot about copyright (and alternatives to it, like Creative Commons), art ownership, and value – which is to say that the conversations happening now around NFTs have always been on digital (and probably all) artists’ minds.
From the Wiki:
Stern is an advocate of Creative Commons (CC), with his blog, and many of his pieces, under CC or GPL. He has been a contributing member of iCommons since its inception, and was an artist in residence with them in 2006 and 2007, the second year of which he ran the program.[Johnson] He believes that “as many people as possible need to see art and talk about it” because it “always brings… value” to “the cultural sphere”; he uses CC as a “tactic for the most effective art work, and with the recognition that this will only bring more value — both culturally and monetarily — to [his] work more generally, whether it’s for sale or not.”[MyArtSpace]
Nathaniel Stern Wikipedia page, citing interviews with Paddy Johnson (archived: 1, 2) and MyArtSpace (archived).
The day I started to write a Blockchain update to the above quote was also the day I got to listen to Trent McConaghy’s interview on Interdependence (as of this writing, the interview is only accessible on their Patreon), and I hope he’ll forgive my paraphrasing, while also plugging his forward-thinking project, Ocean Protocol (see “NFTs & IP 1: Practical Connections of ERC721 with Intellectual Property“). Ocean directly addresses the fact that:
Ownership and Copyright are not the same thing.
When I sold step inside to the JAG, I gave them the rights to exhibit it, to resell it, to display it, to use it in promotional materials in and around any of those actions, and even to remake it, as technologically necessary, at some future time. But I did not give them the right to allow others to reproduce its likeness. I still own the copyrights – quite literally, the rights to copy it. If an ad firm wanted to use an image of step inside, they would need to buy a license from me. If an extremist political party tried to use my images, I would have recourse to deal with them.
The analogy Trent used was that just because I own stock in Amazon, and get some benefits from that partial ownership, that doesn’t give me the right stalk their halls, change and use their logos, or sell my personal wares as “Amazon products.”
NFTs are assets or securities, whereas intellectual property (IP) and copyright are utilities. The former is ownership, the latter is a limited contract for a likeness.
Some NFTs do come with IP rights. Most do not. Ocean protocol actually divvies these up, selling the NFT as a non-fungible token, or a security that cannot be copied (known as an ERC-721 contract on the Blockchain), and IP rights as fungible tokens (ERC-20), meaning they are transferable, timed, and offer other rights – just like image and music licensing already work in the ad industry, and elsewhere.
In this way, it is not at all at odds to have my work under a Creative Commons (CC) license and to also sell the original images as NFTs, per my quote above (but back then, I sold physical prints, DVDs… and USB sticks).
All this being said, there are a few different kinds of CC, and artists would do well to choose wisely. Some of my work is under CC-BY (“BY” attribution), which means I need only be attributed as the originator – and so no one actually needs to purchase a license, and anyone could profit from, and even sell, that work. I more commonly use CC-NC (Non-Commercial), meaning someone wishing to make a profit from my work, whether in ads, re-sales, or the like, would still have to get licensing permission from – and more often work out a partnership with – me. At the time, I did this to facilitate other artists playing with my work, while preventing ad firms or political parties from using my images without permission or giving me a cut. With the birth of NFTs… I’m even happier I have mostly always done so. To be clear: I want my images to circulate and spread. And I also want to be compensated for my work, and to have my art collected, and cared for, with pride.
Provenance
To the second half of the above citation: the more that indviduals freely circulate any given image, the more value the original is likely to have. Thousands of posters, stickers, postcards, and more of the Mona Lisa have made the original priceless to collectors and museums – both monetarily and culturally. The same is absolutely true of digital files. The more we share and distribute, the more provenance a given NFT will have. The example of the Nyan Cat meme by Chris Torres was given as a prime example in Kayvon Tehranian’s very recently shared TED talk. Torres, its original creator, saw little revenue from this world-famous animated GIF in 2011… until its sale for more than a half million dollars a decade later. The inverse is also true: when collectors buy works by lesser known artists, the buzz gives more cultural value to their oeuvre, and to the NFT space more generally.
Monetary and cultural value feed into one another, creating stories that bind and make works everlasting, in multiple ways.
And Value
I got into NFTs relatively late – in the last few months – at least considering I’ve been a producing digital artist talking about these things for 20+ years. I’m honestly still testing the waters, and learning a lot. But my late entry is not because of some distaste for them more generally, or a disbelief in the model, or the overblown numbers around supposed energy use. (To the latter point: 1. It is questionable math and far less problematic than most naysayers argue; 2. It is less energy than spent in how we produce, store, and ship most comparable physical goods; and 3. While I worry little about 1/1s, and don’t judge others for their minting choices, I plan to do my own larger drops on proof-of-stake chains – which are 99.9% more energy efficient than their proof-of-work predecessors). It is because, in the case of crypto-currency, I’ve never had any disposable income to invest; and in the more focused case of NFTs… well, I’ve had three children in the last four years (and already two before that), so I’ve been a little busy.
When I first entered the space, I vowed to take it seriously, but was prepared to be critical. My intention was initially and only to make an interventionist piece in the vein of my previous networked performances with my collaborator Scott Kildall – Wikipedia Art (2009) and Tweets in Space (2012) – which meant participating, understanding, and empathizing as much as having a hard look at where power was focused, and how, and why, and what we might do to shed light on it. As predicted, there are a lot of people around NFTs who are there to speculate and make money; and of course some work that doesn’t sell is far superior to art that flips quickly and exponentially increases in value.
But what I mostly found was large pockets of earnest and sincere artists and collectors supporting each other, building communities, and having pride in the new creative economy they felt privileged to be a part of. I have found that many artists who got in early and made a fair amount of money tend to collect and support other artists. And I’ve seen that artists who have broken through more recently tend to do the same. Many collectors, too, want to collect more, and want as many as possible to join their club. Inspired by this, when I made my first small sale – despite (again) having lost money overall, through trial, error, and minting costs – the first thing I did was go out and buy two less expensive works from other artists. The ongoing valuation of art and artists is amazingly infectious. And the work Scott and I will wind up doing is more celebratory of participatory on-chain creativity than it is critical of anything in that space (see NFT Culture Proof).
The value we are seeing now in the NFT space – by coupling both sharing and compensation; by offering custodianship and provenance – expresses my values more than in any other space or at any other time in my artistic career.
You might ask:
- Is it a bubble?
- Will some (even most) people lose money as part of their investments?
- Aren’t there still platform-based and individual gatekeepers?
- Doesn’t this promote two economies?
Well…
- Maybe. To some extent (like Web 1 and Web 2 were… and weren’t).
- Probably. If you think of them as investments. (I follow Kevin Rose here, and advise people only to buy art if they would still be glad they own it were the price to go to 0 tomorrow.)
- Of course. But many of them use Blockchain to facilitate direct involvement from their communities.
- And sometimes. Not all NFTs are expensive, and, for example, you don’t have to be wealthy to collect comic books or baseball cards, nor do you have to collect them to enjoy Marvel movies or go see a Brewers game.
These are good and fair questions that should be asked, and then debated, and worked on.
Even so, the current value is real; the current values are real.
The creative economy is booming, and this is finally not just lip service to artists (I’m looking at you “The MFA is the new MBA.” How many MFAs did you hire that year?). I want to be part of this.
So what’s next?
That’s up to us. That’s a cliche I know, but rather than fight what is and will essentially be web3, we should all build it. And why stop with art? Might we use newer and less expensive Blockchain technologies to get rid of paywalls, and pay a nickel or a quarter to journalists every time we read their work? Music, fiction, etc. This way all kinds of creators make money, instead of Facebook and other advertisers.
People are working on this.
Could we use the ledger to both literally and figuratively invest in communities and custodianship more generally? Yes. This is in fact one of the core principles behind DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), and some DAOs are already mind-blowingly effective.
As Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (of Interdependence) often say, the Internet is already hyper-financialized. Blockchain is obviously not “the answer” to extreme capitalism and all its problems. After all, it was first conceived of for monetary transactions (of Bitcoin), and with mostly libertarian principles. But even from the most cynical, it cannot be denied that Blockchain has the potential to put some power in the hands of some creatives, and continue building from there. It gives all digital creators a greater opportunity to be compensated for their work, and be collected, cared for, and a part of history.
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