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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The Tickle

Tickle #82
Monthly magazine for contemporary digital art and creative writing.
The literary feature this week is “Still Moving” from Sasha Stiles ( @sashastiles ) & Nathaniel Stern ( @nathanielstern ).
Issue #82 features conversations with the artists Auriea Harvey ( @auriea ) and Eko33 ( @Eko3316 ). Our regular column on the history of computer art (from researcher and author Catherine Mason) focuses this month on a social commentary piece from SIGGRAPH ’94 ( @cathcomputerarthistory ). Our featured fx(hash) artist is Ijeamaka Anyene ( @ijeamaka_a ) with objkt.com presenting their curated pick of Lewis Osborne ( @lewis_osb ). Finally, we continue serialising the famous ‘Joan Anderson Letter’ written by Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac, courtesy of the Cassady family, via Black Spring Press. This month we reach part 3 of this ongoing series.

— The Tickle is created and edited by Johnny Dean Mann ( @guyswily ) & Jess Britton ( @heyghostshoes ). Supported by objkt.com, fx(hash) and the Tezos Foundation.
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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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WORT fm
The 8’oclock Buzz: Quarantine Connections Revives The Pen Pal
Quarantine Connections seeks to bring people together — safely — during the lockdown by fostering a retro method — pen pals, using real pen and paper. We’ll talk with artists Nathaniel Stern and Chris Butzen.

Instant messaging, video conferences, social media are all good ways of staying in touch with family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances while you’re in social isolation. But they’re all… sort of … cold. Something’s missing. Wouldn’t it be nice, to receive an actual, handwritten letter? That’s the premise of a new collaborative project called Quarantine Connections (site no longer online). Sign up — yes, online — and you agree to send an envelope, through the mail, with a postage stamp on it, and you get one in return from someone, somewhere out there, who you’ve never met before, but with whom you might share a connection. The project is the brainchild of three primary collaborators, two of whom join us by phone now. U-W Milwaukee professor of art and mechanical engineering Nathaniel Stern is a familiar voice to longtime Buzz listeners. We also have Chris Butzen, a Milwaukee native web developer currently living and working in Toronto.
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Bad at Sports
Bad at Sports Episode 662: Nathaniel Stern
This week, Ryan and Dana are pleased to welcome Milwaukee-ite Nathaniel Stern back to the show. We discuss his latest art historical publication, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics. Stern gives our hosts some insight into what he considers Ecological Aesthetics with examples and artists ranging from South African artist Doung Anwar Jahangeer, to the Overpass Light Brigade. Dana gets to say the word marginalia as she tries to discover Ryan’s Term Up the Volume. All this and clearly lots more on this episode of Bad at Sports.
More on Ecological Aesthetics
listen to or download interview on B@S
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Ecological Aesthetics
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics is a plea for us to continuously think- and act-with the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; to orient ourselves in ways that we might find and express what our environments, and what they are made of, want; and then to decisively help and continue those thoughts, wants, and actions toward novel aims and adventures.
With this poetic and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, Nathaniel Stern argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently entwined, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. An ecological approach, says Stern, takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And aesthetics are a style of, and orientation toward, thought—and thus action.
Download the Ecological Aesthetics introduction (20 page PDF, 1MB).
Stern has also made a free, Creative Commons-licensed recording of the introduction to the book for streaming or download. It is a preview, released mid-April 2018 and available now. This audiobook version is read by the author, with background music by João Orecchia. Stream via Soundcloud above, or, for listening with the player of your choice:
Download the MP3 (1 hour).
Including dozens of color images, the print book narrativizes artists and artworks—ranging from print to installation, bio art to community activism—contextualizing and amplifying our experiences and practices of complex systems and forces, our experiences and practices of thought. Stern, an artist himself, writes with an eco-aesthetic that continually unfurls artful tactics that can also be used in everyday existence.
Ecological Aesthetics shows a deepening awareness of the connectivities, relations, events, and the unfolding of reality at different registers and scales. Its impact lies in its consolidation of art communities, putting weight on the significance of local interventions and aesthetic engagement. . . . It reads like a gentle manifesto.
– Amanda Boetzkes, author of The Ethics of Earth Art and Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press at the University Press of New England
Date of Publication: July 2018
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1512602914
ISBN-13: 978-1512602913
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Gathering Ecologies
What might an interactive artwork look like that enabled greater expressive potential for all of the components of the event? How can we radically shift our idea of interactivity towards an ecological conception of the term, emphasising the generation of complex relation over the stability of objects and subjects? Gathering Ecologies explores this ethical and political shift in thinking, examining the creative potential of differential relations through key concepts from the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Michel Serres. Utilising detailed examinations of work by artists such as Lygia Clark, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nathaniel Stern and Joyce Hinterding, the book discusses the creative potential of movement, perception and sensation, interfacing, sound and generative algorithmic design to tune an event towards the conditions of its own ecological emergence.
Author: Andrew Goodman
Publisher: Open Humanities Press in the Immediations series
Date of Publication: March 2018
Language: English
Print ISBN: 978-1-78542-052-8
PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-053-5
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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.
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Art Education
Cover image and feature article on Nathaniel Stern’s work and practice.
“In this month’s Instructional Resource, Christine Woywod presents the interactive artworks of Nathaniel Stern who often blends art and technology to generate participatory installations through which audience members may bodily experience art, performing images into existence.” – James Haywood Rolling Jr.
Woywod, C. (2016). “Nathaniel Stern: Performing images into existence.” Art Education, Volume 69 Issue 4 pp 36-42.
Downloadable PDF of the above article is forthcoming. Firewall version here.
A companion web resource is available here.
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The Minor Gesture
Cover image: detail from Weather Patterns: the smell of red (2014).
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date of Publication: June 2016
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822361213
ISBN-13: 978-0822361213
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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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Incident Magazine
Polaroid Excavations: the Opening of Weather Patterns: The Smell of Red
Angeli Sion for Incident Magazine
Weather Patterns: The Smell of Red, a sensorial and collaborative ecological installation, surfaced to air the proposition of artists Erin Manning and Nathaniel Stern, co-produced with Marcelino Barsi [and curated by Jennifer Johung], to heighten an exchange of the senses in a body that barely registers the arrival of intersensoriality.
Tapping into weather as a medium via architectural and sculptural elements, the installation materialized conditions for bodies to come together in unexpected ways across becoming mercurial fields. The appearance of a tornado becomes contingent on the bodies around it. At a certain alignment of body and object, a dancing of the field occurs.
Coinciding the same evening as the installation were Juliana España Keller’s “Food Gestures“ and Michael Hornblow’s explorations of the infrathin with “OmegaVille”. Keller’s installation of hanging glass terrariums offered food such as almonds, blueberries, dried ginger, and reindeer moss from Quebec in the yard. In its poetic gesture to foraging and the act of reaching and going back to the earth it enacted an exchange of knowledge. Through video and online photo spheres downstairs, Hornblow produced an exchange of perceived space at the interface of insides and outsides, street to gallery, through conflating layers of time.
Although all three installations generated participatory conditions in disparate locations throughout Glasshouse, the long-term art-life-lab project and space of Lital Dotan and Eyal Perry, their undercurrents converged through and across the bodies of those who came the night of the opening, back and forth in loops, transforming the senses.
The following Polaroids mark this dancing of the field between bodies in performing their own mutable states, excisions into inside, outside the image, and material engagement with image-making as one that unfolds over time.
Weather Patterns: The Smell of Red, was a sensorial and collaborative ecological installation, produced by Erin Manning and Nathaniel Stern with Marcelino Barsi, coinciding with installation Food Gestures by Juliana España Keller and OmegaVille by Michael Hornblow the same evening at Glasshouse, June 1, 2014.
See original post in Incident Magazine
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Thought in the Act
Features The Mist, a site-conditioned installation / public intervention from 2011.
“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act
Title: Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience
Author: Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
Publisher: University Of Minnesota Press
Date of Publication: May 2014
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0816679673
ISBN-13: 978-0816679676
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Law and Disciplinarity
‘Wikipedia Art: At the Borders of (Wiki) Law, Lawyering, Lobbying and Power’
a chapter by Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall
Book Title: Law and Disciplinarity: Thinking beyond Borders
Editor: Robert J. Beck
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Date of Publication: December 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 1137034440
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WORT fm
The 8’oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More
Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on “Tweets in Space”.
In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O’Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.
In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his “paintings” are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box – at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.
According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.
Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:
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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)
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WORT fm
The 8’oclock Buzz: Interactive Artist, Nathaniel Stern, Is On The Web And Out In Space
Interactive artist, Nathaniel Stern, joined the 8 O’Clock Buzz on Monday, February 25, 2013, to talk with host, Brian Standing, about some of his collaborative web art.
This past year Nathaniel Stern and collaborator, Scott Kildall, took to the stars with a galactic proportioned project, Tweets In Space. Using a high powered satellite they beamed Twitter discussions from all over the world to GJ667Cc – A planet 22 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life.
Stern also got the chance to talk about Wikipedia Art. An online intervention on the Wikipedia website that challenged the way Wikipedia determines what is useful information. Posted by the artists (Stern and collaborator Kildall), the page stated, “Wikipedia Art is a conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia, and is thus art that anyone can edit.”
What the artists didn’t expect was Wikipedia to sue them over copyright infringement and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to publically call the artists “trolls,” later apologizing over facebook to Stern after the lawsuit brought negative attention towards Wikipedia.
Download this interview (mp3, 10mbs) or listen below:
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The Daily Dot
Tweets in Space event blasts off without a hitch
by Kris Holt, October 2012
During an event held at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall captured all tweets using the #tweetsinspace hashtag over a half-hour period. In a few short weeks, the duo will beam the hundreds of messages they received to GJ667Cc, a planet some 22 light years away that has the capacity to support life.
Around 1,500 tweets (approximately one per second) were sent during the performance period, and the “vibe was intense, inviting, and provocative all at once,” Stern and Kildall told the Daily Dot.
The team behind the project considered the event a big success, with the tweets ranging from simple greetings to aliens and asking for photos of “triple-star sunsets,” to worries about the destruction of Earth and questioning extraterrestrial social and economic systems.
“All those voices together existentially express an inordinate amount of wonder and fear, curiosity and happiness, hope and cynicism, and more,” Stern and Kildall wrote in an email. “They perform several dozens snapshots, many threads of thought and conversation and potential, in all of our humanity. We’ve very humbled by the experience.”
Stern and Kildall had indicated they would not include any tweets that used hate speech in the transmission, which is set to take place within the next view weeks at a Florida facility as GJ667Cc comes into clearer view. While they’re still trawling through all the tweets, they have not yet found any that will be excluded.
Some analysis run on the tweets sent by the community during the performance period revealed that outside of the terms “tweet,” “space,” and articles like “the” and “an,” the two most commonly used words were “please” and “love.”
“Hello,” “here,” “help,” and “peace” were among the other most popular words used, suggesting a deep yearning to make contact with aliens and understand more about their cultures.
Stern noted that he wasn’t sure of his favorite tweets to emerge from the event, but noted some “gems” recorded in the first few moments:
“Also, do you guys do mind-altering things? My favorite is a delicious form of ethanol made from wheat; a species of plant. #tweetsinspace.” —@cvburkett
“Attention, alien scum. I declare Space War. Please meet me in the car park at the Yorkshire Grey branch of McDonald’s. #tweetsinspace” —@cjjc
“#TweetsInSpace DEATH TO EARTH. ERADICATE THE PLANET. ALIENS, USE THE EARTH’S REMAINS AS AN APHRODISIAC.” —@JackedCunning
Photos via Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern
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