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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Creative Mornings talk
This is the CreativeMornings Milwaukee talk in January 2020. It’s 20 minutes with 15 mins of Q&A.
Nathaniel Stern gives a dynamic artist talk about his experimental and beautiful work between art and science. By artificially aging phones, growing non-human life inside of media devices, and turning electronics into other tools, he inspires us to change our relationships with various technologies. Stern tells us more about where our computers come from, where e-waste winds up, and what we can do to improve our future.
Free events like this one are hosted every month in dozens of cities. Discover hundreds of talks from the world’s creative community at https://creativemornings.com/talks
CreativeMornings Manifesto
Everyone is creative.
A creative life requires bravery and action, honesty and hard work. We are here to support you, celebrate with you, and encourage you to make the things you love.
We believe in the power of community. We believe in giving a damn. We believe in face-to-face connections, in learning from others, in hugs and high fives.
We bring together people who are driven by passion and purpose, confident that they will inspire one another, and inspire change in neighborhoods and cities around the world.
Everyone is welcome.
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New City Art
Time Versus Technology: A Review of Nathaniel Stern at MOWA | DTN
By Rafael Francisco Salas
What will my laptop, phone or tablet look like in a million years? How might we imaginatively repurpose our e-waste? Where might electronics lead our environmental and economic politics? Can we plan and act for a sustainable future? These questions are the core of Nathaniel Stern’s exhibition “The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures,” currently on view at MOWA|DTN.
Stern’s proposal is grand. He has cooked, smashed, melted, stacked and carved out phones, desktops and other e-waste and transformed them into an imaginary future in geologic time.
Stern is following the thread of Alan Weisman’s 2007 book, “The World Without Us.” In it, Weisman imagines how the natural world would reclaim our mechanized detritus in the absence of humans. Stern has created a visual document of this process. “The Wall After Us” is a network of screens, desktop computers, phones and cassette tape interwoven with ferns, potting soil and other greenery. The effect is of the damp, drippy understory of a forest that emerged from someone’s former office space.
Other sculptures in the exhibition show expand on themes of degradation and rebirth. A pile of remote controls, receivers, fans and a pirated CD of David Bowie’s “Blackstar” are partly submerged in a terrarium filled with water. A dismal tube eternally dribbles water over this mass. As I leaned in I could smell the plastic and metal interacting with the water. It was vaguely noxious, the splashing water wafting decomposition into the air.
Elsewhere cellphones have been pressed and heated into a vestige of ash and carbon. These sculptures were powerful. Seeing what happens to objects we are so intimately connected to reduced to literal rubble had the effect of looking at a corpse.
In addition to describing the result of time on our technological devices, Stern also remarks on possibilities for repurposing them. Carapaces from Apple computers have been formed into a hammer, a wrench. The aspirational concept of beating swords into ploughshares is poetic, though undercut by Stern’s cheeky title: “Applecations.”
Interestingly, the strongest work here emerges in photography and film. Stern has a designer’s eye behind the camera, and at times his photos of plant life growing from our old gadgets has a greater impact than the objects themselves. The color and light in the photos give them an atmospheric romanticism and a greater visual impact. The artist also includes a documentary where he eloquently presents his proposal. There is an irony in this, however, as the film is of course projected from a sleek, sexy flat screen.
At times the exhibition felt overly familiar, reminiscent of other art and literature describing the world emerging from the tide of mechanical reproduction, though ultimately it remains an important message. Our crisis of electronic consumption is happening now. Stern tells us there are ten billion phones produced per year, more than there are people to use them. Art can, and should, be a vehicle to expose this crisis to ourselves. (Rafael Francisco Salas)
“The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures” is on view at MOWA|DTN in the St. Kate Arts Hotel, 139 East Kilbourn, Milwaukee, through March 25.
See original review on Newcity Art
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Cornell Chronicle
Lehmann, alum artificially age tech waste for new exhibit
By Daniel Aloi
Millions of years from now, long after mankind ceases to exist, what will the technology we use every day look like? What happens to all the devices and digital media we leave behind? Are there ways we can plan for and enable a different future?
Artist Nathaniel Stern ’99 is posing these questions in dramatic ways with “The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures,” an exhibition through March 29 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in Milwaukee.
It includes installations, sculptures, prints and photographs featuring plant life growing from electronic waste, and various media and devices – such as books and floppy disks, cellphones, laptops, keyboards, punch cards, audiotape, and Ethernet and USB cables – altered to resemble fossils.
“You’re taught early on that data is bottomless, just ones and zeros,” Stern said. “And it’s gone if that information is lost, but the logical fallacy is that it is divorced from some material form. That is problematic in many ways. We’re constantly talking about sustainability and green environments, and we don’t take into account the matter around us.”
Stern combined scientific experimentation with artistic exploration to create the traveling exhibition.
“I’ve worked with a botanist and horticulturists to figure out how to grow the plants inside the electronics,” he said. “My first thought was, ‘Were the electronics going to impact the plants?’ In time I found out the inverse is true; the plants would filter out the toxins.”
He also collaborated with Johannes Lehmann, professor of soil and crop sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ School of Integrative Plant Science. They worked together on campus last summer to apply experimental pyrolysis techniques to burn and artificially age the items.
“He started sending me things early in 2019, anything that he could find, intrigued to see what it would look like if we artificially aged it,” Lehmann said. “Apart from the fact we do it in 20 minutes rather than 5 million years, we wanted to see what a book, or a cellphone, would look like in millions of years.”
He wouldn’t normally think of the longevity of materials put in soil “past more than a few thousand years,” Lehmann said. “I don’t think in iPhones; I think in plants and leaves. This idea is so intriguing. Our nose gets poked into questions that we didn’t ask before.”
Stern reached out to scientists working with fossil fuels and aging, and most didn’t write back, he said. His classmate and friend Julie Goddard ’99, Ph.D. ’08, associate professor of food science, told Stern about Lehmann’s work with biochar, superheated organic material used to enrich soil.
“Literally within hours of phoning Johannes, he said, ‘Let’s meet today,’” Stern said. “I was amazed how similar his lab tests and my studio tests are, how we label things … We work in much the same way.”
The artist worked with a forge and foundry to work out how to convert aluminum iMacs into tools; and [with Lehmann and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger of the University of Wisconsin] to turn phones into inks and make prints.
Stern has an experimental art background and began work on the project in 2016. Applying for a fellowship studying theory in the eschaton – the end of days – “gave me the idea for the fossils, and the degradation over geologic time of technological material,” Stern said. “I didn’t get the fellowship; however, the director of the center [political theorist Kennan Ferguson] reached out and said it was a great idea. He wound up becoming one of the catalog essayists on the show.”
Stern said he’s been playing around with technology for more than 20 years. “At Cornell, we were the only fashion program around that was doing things like 3D scanning and pattern grading,” he said. “It’s where I learned that you could be creative with technology. My interactive art comes from that basis in fashion.”
After graduating from the College of Human Ecology, he returned to Cornell in 2002 as an artist-in-residence at Risley Residential College, and earned graduate degrees in art from New York University and electrical engineering from Trinity College in Dublin. Stern now holds a joint appointment as professor of art and design and of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Stern wants to explore the potential for change in recycling practices and the regulation of waste, beginning with how we perceive the products we throw away by the millions.
“Many people understand the problem of waste and of toxicity,” he said. “There’s this intimate relationship we have with our technology; can we keep that relationship just one year longer? … Can we make biodegradable or compostable phones?”
“Artists are starting to imagine these things,” Lehmann said. “They ask the uncomfortable questions about our future and our society.”
See original article on the Cornell Web site.
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Shepherd Express
Nathaniel Stern’s Mad Science at MOWA Downtown
by Shane McAdams
If I were to mention that I viewed an art exhibition of computer-based artwork that flirted with the spectacular, I think the assumption would be that the spectacle involved moving images, light and other sensational magic tricks associated with the productive potential of new media. In the case of Nathaniel Stern’s exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art Downtown (MOWA | DTN), “The World After Us” (a name modified from Alan Weisman’s fascinating account of human ephemerality), the impact of his computer-generated art is based on computers and other technology itself—like the actual machines and hardware witnessed in various stages of degradation and reclamation.
It was a gut check to walk into the gallery on my cell phone, vaguely considering the refrain that I, like many of us, are “slaves” to our devices, and then witnessing the chaotic tangle of computers, motherboards and cellphones all bent to the Frankensteinian will of Stern, professor, artist and semi-mad scientist. As I stood in front of a blender filled with ravaged old Androids and RAZRs, a toaster holding a charred smartphone and what looked like a rotating cellphone torture rack, I might have put my thumb over the camera of my iPhone to prevent it from seeing the slaughter. But my phone should rest assured that these strange medieval-looking experiments with technology are all made with salvaged hardware procured through a program at UW-Milwaukee; no phones were hurt in the making of this exhibition.
What might look like a graveyard or torture dungeon for spent hardware is actually a more redemptive setting. Stern’s no sado-technologist; rather, he’s an esthetic researcher hoping to reorient our relationship to computer waste by forcing us to look at it in new ways. Standing before a wall of degraded laptops and cables in the main gallery, appropriately titled “The Wall After Us,” I was reminded of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of accumulated technological waste. It occurred to me that he and Stern are both grappling with an inversion of that quote by Joseph Stalin that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. One personal device connects you with the world and reflects your individuality, while thousands of them in a pile is a tragic reminder of human limitations.
Confronting these limitations seems so important to Stern precisely because the marketing teams in Silicon Valley exert so much force in the opposite direction. From the consumer side, computers are presented as pure, precious, transportive, liberating and enlightened. Apple Stores are designed to be visions of positivity. Stern notes in the catalog’s introduction that one of his profound revelations in researching this project was learning that waste from mining the raw materials vastly surpasses that of the products themselves, which means that simply engaging in responsible disposal is not enough by itself to arrive at sustainable levels of technological consumption.
For this reason, Stern, who began thinking about the exhibition in terms of our “intimate” relationships with technology, soon started to look at e-waste from different perspectives. He considered the legal and regulatory issues around disposal and ultimately began to wonder about the creative and inspirational possibilities that might result from his visual research. The “Phossils” that arise from these more experimental approaches provide the show some needed optimism and an entry point for those who would naturally begin thinking about solutions.
Stern collaborated with Cornell professor Johannes Lehmann, an expert in the burning material in zero oxygen known as pyrolysis. Collaborations between the two result in some wonderfully strange attempts to denature keyboards, circuit boards and other hardware. It’s alchemy for the 21st century—trying to spin silicone back into carbon. On the brighter side of dystopia are a series of mechanical tools cast from melted down aluminum from MacBooks—a hammer, saw and screwdriver—as well as a number of prints made with carbon-based ink refined from incinerated hardware. These restitutive moments are the sugar that helps one swallow the show’s more bitter realities.
The single most beautiful vision in the show is the large photograph of a mushroom rising from the face of an Apple watch, caught at the moment a single drop of water falls from its cap. “Sporadical” is a fine metaphoric punctuation for “The World After Us.” It encapsulates the ephemerality of our precious devices, their implicit battle with the natural world and all the accidental “third things” that might arise as if by magic from those encounters. Stern confessed to me that, after seeing the show, a young girl decided to reimagine her science project and began researching e-waste. He mentioned that it made all his labor worthwhile. Even though we have no idea to what end her enthusiasm and basic research will lead, it’s hope all the same. Those unpredictable future events are the exhibition’s most precious content, but we’ll all have to wait for them patiently over the coming decades.
The World After Us runs through March 25 at MOWA | DTN in Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn Ave.
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Spectrum News
‘Phossils’ phones and electronics after we stop using them
By Magaly Ayala Milwaukee
MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) — Downtown Milwaukee’s Saint Kate Hotel is hosting a one-of-a-kind exhibit, showing a different perspective on reducing our carbon footprint. The exhibit explores the destiny of electronics and phones once they are discarded.
“I wanted to know what would happen to them after I threw them out, what world are we leaving behind?”, questioned Nathaniel Stern, UW Milwaukee professor, artist, and writer.
Upon asking himself that question, Stern began to work with scientists to artificially age electronics and find out if they would actually ever decompose. “None of them broke down the way that we expected, the way that we hoped for,” said Stern.
The observations and data collected when experimenting led Stern to new ideas for the outdated devices, like creating ink and repurposing parts of the electronics. “The ink itself is made out of crushed phones extended with different kinds of printmaking oils. The utilities that I called circuities tools where you see my hacksaw my ax and a trowel that is made out of old Dell circuit boards,” Stern continued.
He’s hoping to postpone some of the long-term damage this type of waste can create. “A lot of the rare earth minerals in our phones are toxic and are toxic to the soil and they can get into our water supply,” added Stern. The exhibit is gaining attention, raising awareness and sparking curiosity in those who visit it.
“I feel like it just brings a lot of awareness for kind of how our society is going about life and the overlap with nature, you know what’s gonna happen with all these products down the road when we’re putting them in landfills and stuff like that,” said exhibit visitor Justin Dischler.
Allowing people to get up close and personal with Stern’s experiment, where . they might even encounter something they previously owned. Giving people a perspective of just how long they can hold up.
“Maybe we should take a second look at how we’re going about technology and how we’re gonna be sustainable for the future”, finished Dischler. Making people consider postponing that new mobile upgrade or electronic purchase just a little longer.
Nathaniel Stern and scientists who collaborated in the exhibit . will be hosting a free panel discussion on the topic Saturday, February 15th at the St. Kate Hotel.
The World After Us exhibit is open to the public until March 29th 2020 from 6 am to 1 am.
See story in original online context
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WIRED
Nature Will Triumph—and Reclaim All Our Gadgets
A new art exhibit, “The World After Us,” shows the power and ingenuity of nature to make use of machines in a world without humans.
Arielle Pardes
Most of your electronics—your phone, tablet, smartwatch, desktop computer, laptop, beeper, pager, e-reader, smart television, dumb television, soundbar, speaker system, camera-enabled doorbell—will outlive you. It is a matter of fact, and a fact of matter: Technology consists of stuff estranged from the earth, plastic and metal and silicon, while our soft bodies will one day returneth to dust.
Never mind that the usable life of most gadgets lasts about as long as the average betta fish, fated to swim around a glass bowl for a year or two until it is dumped, unceremoniously, down the toilet. Consumer electronics are both disposable and indestructible. They are designed to be coveted, and counted on, only until manufacturers can develop the next version. Then the old gadgets are turned off and thrown away, rather than reused, repaired, or otherwise reimagined.
Imagine, then, the world beyond the Anthropocene—an era that will be defined by this great amount of electronic refuse. By some estimates, 4 million mobile phones were sold every day in 2018, to say nothing of the unsold phones or the outdated phones they replaced. The human legacy will not be the Pyramids of Giza or the Taj Mahal but this great quantity of refuse, things that once turned on, that once held humanity’s collective attention.
Such a future is confronted in “The World After Us,” an art installation opening today at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in downtown Milwaukee. Walking into the gallery space is like traveling to a time millions of years from now, where humans no longer exist but our devices endure. In this future, Mother Nature has reclaimed the motherboards. Moss and fungi sprout from the remains of an Apple Watch. Vines wind through petrified keyboards and hard drives. Towers of e-waste stand like statues, and a series of fossilized phones greet visitors like rare finds from a futuristic archaeological dig. “I wanted to create a space that was overwhelming,” says Nathaniel Stern, the artist behind the installation, “but also then provoke what it might be, what it might become.”
As an artist, Stern has an obsession with the ways technology and the earth relate. He spent years scuba diving with a desktop scanner to create prints of jellyfish, coral, and the undersides of lily ponds. In 2012, he launched a series of messages into space (no longer than 140 characters each), using a high-amplitude, high-frequency radio telescope. In another installation, he rigged tornado machines to respond to microscopic movements, like gust from a closing gallery door.
Each of these works presents art that is evolving, changing in the gallery, sometimes as a result of the viewers themselves. “The World After Us” is no different. Many of the pieces are alive, sprouting or wilting in real time. One of the artworks, “Server Farms,” features iMacs, laptops, and rotary phones gutted and repurposed as planters. Another, “The Wall After Us,” shows a jungle of wall-mounted laptops, keyboards, headphones, and circuit boards with vines growing through them.
Creating this cybernatural work led Stern to experiment with various methods of destruction to mimic the effects of geological time. One piece, the Ecokinetic Sculpture, features a pile of phones that have been melted in an air fryer. For another, he pulverized phones until they were ground to a fine powder. In one of his more demanding experiments, Stern combined forces with Johannes Lehmann, a biogeochemist at Cornell and an expert in pyrolysis—a thermochemical process in which materials are treated with high heat in the absence of oxygen. When food waste or other materials are “biocharred,” the process can sequester carbon and boost soil fertility when buried. When Lehmann and Stern replicated this process with a series of phones, it artificially aged them into fossils.
Other electronics were destroyed and then repurposed into functional objects. “We melted down those aluminum iMacs and turned them into a hammer, a wrench, and a screwdriver,” Stern says. “There’s also the circuit board cut into a hacksaw and an axe. Of course those are not usable, but it’s a hopeful rethinking.”
The project of “rethinking” may seem underwhelming (like an art novice tilting her head to consider a piece of modern art: “It really makes you think”). But in Stern’s case, this reimagining is meant to provoke political change. In a 200-page catalog that accompanies the artworks, he brings up the possibility of better regulation around manufacturing electronics; the “amount of waste produced just to make our phones and computers in the first place” is considerable, to say nothing of the waste they create when they’re no longer in use. Collectively, the artworks ask viewers to rethink materials: Could phones be compostable? Can a computer be reborn as a hammer?
Of course, Stern is not the first to call up the question of what happens to our stuff when we are gone. In the 2007 book, The World Without Us,Alan Weisman imagines Earth minus all the humans. Cities crumble, sewers clog, and new forms of fungi and flowers bloom around the plastic handles of pots and pans. A year later, the History Channel debuted the television series Life After People, a similar consideration of how the planet will evolve. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has criticized these thought experiments for their guilelessness, calling them fantasies of “witnessing the earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it with our hubris.”
Stern’s version, though, seems to dodge this idealism. His artworks are neither beautiful nor grotesque, neither dire nor reassuring. They function more like science experiments. What happens when you shatter an Apple Watch, plant some moss inside, and leave it to grow under the scintillating studio lights? The Apple Watch doesn’t returneth to dust—it becomes something else entirely.
See the original article on WIRED.
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The World After Us
Traveling exhibition catalog and documentary
Title: The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures
Texts: Edward A. Shanken, Nathaniel Stern, Amanda Boetzkes, Kate Mondloch, Jennifer Johung, Kennan Ferguson, Coe Douglas
Style: Hardcover and bound, 200 pages
Publisher: Nathaniel Stern and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Date of Publication: 2020
Language: English
Download The World After Us as PDF (27.2 mb)
Object list (with prices)
The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures is Nathaniel Stern’s traveling solo exhibition of sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration. They take the forms of: a wall-hung jungle of computer detritus and biological reclamation; fossilized and reconfigured phones and laptops; and reimagined and re-formed electronics.
What will digital media be and do, after us?
What will my laptop, phone, or tablet look like in a million years?
How will our devices weather or grow over time?
What else might our techno-waste be, and how might we sense and feel this?
Where might electronics lead our environmental and economic politics?
Can we plan and act toward new and different futures?
This body of work transforms what we discard so as to rethink conversations, thoughts, and actions around media production, use, and waste. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
The World After Us makes available this 200-page hardcover catalog, a short documentary, and an audio tour. It is generously supported by the UWM Office of Research.
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CNET
Your phone in a million years: When electronics outlive humans
Visit Nathaniel Stern’s “The World After Us,” a strange and provocative place.
Leslie Katz
Nathaniel Stern has spent the last few years torturing consumer electronics. Burning them. Freezing them. Smashing them. He’s not a gadget sadist. He’s an artist and engineer imagining what today’s devices might look far, far down the line.
Like a million years from now.
The gadget torment started when Stern, a professor of both art and designand engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, looked down at his iPhone in its hard, plastic case and found himself pondering the product’s future — not from a design perspective, but from an ecological one. How, exactly, would the phone disintegrate over time? Would that plastic ever decompose?
Those questions led him to expose a series of devices to extreme conditions, like high temperatures and pressure, that mimicked the ravages of time. These “Phossils” (fossilized phones) will be on display as part of The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures, a traveling solo exhibit of sculptures, installations, prints and photographs aimed at provoking a conversation about technology use and waste.
“The World After Us is not post-apocalyptic,” reads a description of the project. “Rather, it imagines potential futures while asking viewers to be mindful of their media in the present.”
The exhibit takes inspiration from Alan Weissman’s book The World Without Us, which asks what the world might look like when humans have been replaced by other forms of biological life. The exhibit premieres Jan. 17 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, which calls it a “timely provocation that will leave viewers contemplating how we might change our ecological trajectory.”
Exhibit visitors will encounter a wall climbing with moldy laptops, keyboards, drives, phones and other degraded e-waste sprouting and tangled in botanicals. The green vines and electrical cords intertwine to form a strange jungle. Also on display are a live water fountain that cracks and peels the glass off a different iPhone over the course of each show, and a flipping hourglass that sands down a phone every [6] minutes.
Viewers will also find examples of gadgets given new life.
“We should not only ask what digital media will be and do, after us,” the artist’s description reads. “We must reinvent what digital waste can be and do, in the present.”
There are fine-art prints of mobile devices drawn from ink made up of phones ground into a fine powder. On closer inspection, the newfangled ink sparkles with bits of embedded metal and shards of glass. Melted aluminum iMacs from the late 2000s have been shaped into a hammer, screwdriver and wrench. Routed circuit boards have been reborn as a saw, ax and trowel.
Stern estimates that the exhibit encompasses about 250 computers, 100 phones and a few dozen keyboards and mice, plus hundreds of feet of audiotape and ethernet and USB cables.
The goods were culled from second-hand electronics stores and local e-waste surplus operations, as well as companies that had heard about the project and donated their discarded electronics. The artist says he and his team will recycle much of the art after the exhibit makes its rounds.
Past projects have involved him hitching a flat-bed desktop scanner, computing device and custom battery pack to his body and swinging over flowers or jumping over bricks to capture images of objects and spaces. He also went underwater with custom DIY photography rigs toggled from custom electronics to image the mysterious deep-sea world. Because Stern wore the devices, his movements helped compose the shots.
Stern says viewers have called this latest project, his most ambitious to date, “intense yet hopeful, sad and beautiful, all-consuming around our consumption.” Some have said it scares them. But, he says, “Everyone agrees on one thing. It is a call to action.”
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Fast Company
See what your iPhone will look like in a million years
Our gadgets will outlive us. Artist Nathaniel Stern explores how.
Elizabeth Segran
We’re kissing our plastic straws goodbye. And many of us have started carrying around a trusty reusable bottle to cut down on our need for disposable plastic bottles. But as we work on reducing our plastic consumption, we often lose sight of some of the most obvious forms of plastic we use everyday: the tech devices that keep us tethered to the modern digital world. In 2018, an estimated 4 million mobile phones were sold every day—a figure which does not include phones that were manufactured but unsold. Once you include phone charges, computers, and tablets, the scale of our technology waste is astronomical. And since most of these products are encased in plastic, they’ll take hundreds of years to decompose.
This has been on Nathaniel Stern’s mind for a while now. The Wisconsin-based artist has always been fascinated by technology, ecology, and design, having received a BA from the school of human ecology from Cornell University and a PhD from the department of electronic and electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin. In his most recent exhibition, entitled The World After Us, Stern creates sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that weave together plant life with electronic waste to help us imagine how our devices will live on in the world even after we’ve discarded them for the next device-of-the-moment.
Stern was inspired by a book by journalist Alan Weisman of the same name, which invites readers to imagine how our massive technological infrastructure would crumble and fossilize once humans no longer walk the earth. Stern has given us some visual cues about what would happen to our everyday objects. There are many curious items on display, including a piece cleverly called Photosynthesis that features a small plant growing out of a Panasonic Lumix camera. There’s a large wall covered in plants whose tendrils snake around open laptops, keyboards, cassette tapes, and pieces of a motherboard that have been hung up. There are even pieces of electronic equipment that have long been out of use: An old-fashioned corded phone has leaves growing out of the dial pad.
Everything about the exhibit—including its title—reminds us of our own eventual demise. But it also forces us to consider that while we’re organic creatures that will return to the earth, we have fashioned materials that will long outlive us. And we don’t give enough thought to how these items will live on—and perhaps take on new lives of their own—once plants and animals find a way to live around them.
Countries have developed recycling systems to deal with everyday plastic waste, like plastic bottles and food containers. Consumers don’t recycle these items as stringently as they should, but these waste management systems at least exist. It’s much harder for us to recycle electronic waste since we can’t just chuck them in a bin. Part of the reason they are harder to recycle is that they are made up of many different materials—including aluminum and steel—which are hard to separate and recycle appropriately. And these products also contain toxic or hazardous materials, like lead and mercury, which can harm both humans and the environment.
Until e-waste recycling becomes more widespread, you have several options when it comes to disposing of your technology devices. There are many charities or nonprofits, including eBay for Charity and AmericanCellPhoneDrive.org, that take gadgets, refurbish them, and give them to people who need them. Tech companies including Apple and Amazon have buyback programs for newer electronic products, but will also accept and recycle older products. And finally, you can explore your town or city’s recycling program. Some have special collection days for electronics and will responsibly recycle the items they collect.
Stern’s exhibit reminds us that if we want to take our plastic consumption seriously, we need to be more comprehensive in our approach. Cutting down on straws and bottles is certainly a step in the right direction, but let’s not forget to recycle that keyboard or stereo system once its reached the end of its life.
The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures premieres at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Downtown, January 17 – March 29.
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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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NPR / WUWM
Giverny of the Midwest: A Conversation with Artist Nathaniel Stern
with Bonnie North on Lake Effect
Artist Nathaniel Stern speaks with Lake Effect’s Bonnie North about his use of scanners to create beautiful images.
Nathaniel Stern’s intensity is palpable. The media artist always has multiple bodies of work going on simultaneously, he’s a Fulbright scholar, a professor of art, a parent. Talking with him, you get the impression he never stops thinking about, or exploring, art and life.
Stern’s current exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend is called Giverny of the Midwest. The work has had previous exhibitions in Johannesburg, South Africa and London, but this is its first stop in the United States. The scans are a nod and homage to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet…if Monet were painting his lilies while immersed in the pond rather than sitting on its banks.
Nathaniel Stern, detail, Giverny of the Midwest, Digital print installation, 2011, Lent by the Tory Folliard GalleryCredit: Musem of Wisconsin Art.
The work is technological, thought-provoking and unexpected. And although his work has been compared to photography, Stern would disagree. “It’s probably closer to print making.” He continues that as opposed to the objective distancing you get in photography, “where you’re looking through [a] lens and seeing what you’re capturing, (with this work) it’s more that you’re on top of or a part of your medium,” says Stern.
When he isn’t scanning his environment, Stern is an Associate Professor of Art and Design in Peck School of the Arts at the UW – Milwaukee.
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WIRED
‘Beyond the Interface’ deconstructs the human-machine matrix (Wired UK)
Daniel Culpin
The relentless assault of technology on the rest of our lives is the subject of a new exhibition and series of events, Beyond the Interface — London, opening at the Furtherfield Gallery on 25 April.
The show is a “remixed” extension of an exhibition shown at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2014 (ISMAR) in Munich. Curated by Furtherfield and mixed reality media artist Julian Stadon, it brings together a number of leading contemporary artists to explore how technology disrupts, enhances and alters the way we live.
On the approach to the gallery, in the McKenzie Pavilion in the heart of Finsbury Park, you’re immediately immersed by the transformation of the walls into lush, teeming images of water lilies; a hacked Monet for the 21st century. Giverny Remediated, by US-based artist Nathaniel Stern, is part of his Compressionism series. Defined by shifting, interactive prints, and inspired by classic Impressionism, the images were captured with uniquely twenty-first century methods — Stern strapped a scanner to his body to capture the blooms.
“I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond,” Stern writes on his website. “The dynamism between my body, technology and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival art objects.”
Water and fluidity as a metaphor for data is a central theme of Stern’s work. As part of Beyond the Interface — London, Stern has also been commissioned to create a brand new installation, Rippling Images of Finsbury Park, a public artwork based in the park’s boating lake. Visitors will be able to download the artworks by public USB installed in the gallery’s walls, using anonymous file-sharing network Dead Drops.
Also in the show, Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Suite is an uncanny, disturbing protest against the dehumanising effects of biometric facial technology. The New York-based artist creates “collective masks” from facial data collected by participants in community workshops. These masks — distorted, amorphous blobs, almost resembling chewing gum — erase the recognisable features of the human face, ensuring wearers are unable to be detected by biometric facial scanners. Fusing a cry against government over-surveillance with a sympathy for those frequently pushed to the social margins, Blas’ work is provocative and politically charged.
Also on show is Jennifer Chan’s Grey Matter. The Hong Kong-raised, Chicago-based artist employs videos, gifs and webpages to cast a wry, quizzical look at representations of gender and in modern media culture. In the five-minute video, Chan adopts the persona of a teenage internet user creating her own confessional online diary, using social media — sharing, posting, following — to confront issues of privacy, voyeurism and online identity.
Beyond the Interface — London runs at the Furtherfield Gallery until 21 June, 2015
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Other Frames
Title: Other Frames: Malcolm Levy and Sensing Images
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Transfer Gallery
Date of Publication: February 2015
Language: English
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MKE Journal Sentinel
Nathaniel Stern scans artwork into being
Mary Louise Schumacher for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
It’s a quirk of human nature to want to see the world through facsimiles of it. That instinct — to look at pictures — is as old as humankind. It defines us, really.
So what happens when the world itself seems to be a terrain of copies, when our days are filled with more images of people and places than actual ones, for instance.
This is the territory of Milwaukee artist Nathaniel Stern, who just had a solo show at the Tory Folliard Gallery, some of which remains on view. Stern creates work he calls Compressionism, images made by strapping a desktop scanner to his body and scanning various landscapes in steady long lines, sweeping motions, quick pogo stick-like hops or while scuba diving underwater. These scans are then turned into artworks using photographic or inkjet printing processes.
In “Soft,” for instance, we see what looks like scrubby, organic matter undulating in water and pressed up against glass, presumably the face of the scanner. It’s akin to what we might expect from a work of art, a pictorial depiction beneath glass. But we also see the gravity of it, the sensation of these wheat-colored plants with a faint purple tinge brushing against the surface.
Distorting waves, not unlike those of an analog TV screen with the horizontal hold out of whack, are a visual hint that we’re looking at manipulated media. Throughout the series, mysterious digital hiccups, skips, drags and scratches are further pictorial pointers. In them, oscillations of time and movement are inferred. Some works have an inherent quickness, while others are more unhurried and stretch out a moment in time.
Barely detectable inside this expression of narrative is the artist himself, and the sense of performance he brings physically to the work. He says he “performs images into existence.” I like that. I like that the primary artistic act of this work, fundamentally about the mediation of imagery, isn’t made with a computer but with a body out in the world doing things.
It is intriguing to consider our changing visual literacy, by the way. Much of Stern’s iconography would be unintelligible to our 19th-century counterparts.
The best works in the “Rippling Images” series, for me, were those where realism, simulation and abstraction combined in playful and surprising ways, when the digital ripples and the watery ones that are Stern’s subject become inseparable, when reality and its copies dance.
The result is something quite transporting, works reminiscent of the primordial and the pliability of human perception in the 21st century. My only quibble is the somewhat informal presentation of the works, which are set loosely into the frames so that ripples in the paper are visible. I’m told this is intentional, that the artist wants us to see these prints as objects with a surface. I’m just not sure this works.
Stern is represented by the Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee St., which is currently showing some of his works. He also has related work up at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, 273 E. Erie St., through Saturday, Dec. 6. He will also have a show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave., West Bend, opening April 11. For more information: nathanielstern.com
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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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WIRED
This Guy Takes Awesome Underwater Photos With a Desktop Scanner
Jason Kehe
Nathaniel Stern is diving off the coast of Florida, scanning the gorgeous seascape before him—literally. He’s got a desktop scanner strapped to his back, uploading images to an on-board Windows tablet. A few jellyfish, a bit of coral, the expanse of blue—he scans it all. He isn’t capturing these images for science or study, but for gallery walls.
Stern is a digital artist, and for the past 10 years, this has been his medium. His latest show, Rippling Images, opens today at the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee (it premiered at South Africa’s Turbine Art Fair in July). Its 18 “underwater performative prints” are distorted swashes of vibrant color—what you’d expect if you scanned, say, a school of fish—but beautiful just the same.
“For me,” Stern says, “the way time and space are folded into each image—as vertical slashes or angled swooshes of movement and stasis—are like potent mappings of land and sea, body and technology, together.”
The series, which the artist calls “Compressionism,” began in 2005 in South Africa, where Stern was living at the time. He’d been experimenting with various kinds of interactive art, and galleries started seeking his work. He had no idea what to do, so he simply showed up at a gallery with his “mobile studio”: laptop, video camera, scanner, and hard drive. Then he scanned every object he could find, from windows and walls to doors and benches. He hung each print alongside to its subject—a scan of a window next to the window, for example—and hoped people would get it.
“I thought this would be an intervention in how we understand space and tech,” he says. “People went gaga for it.”
One of Stern’s favorite artists, William Kentridge, attended the show, and said Stern’s prints reminded him of Japanese woodcuts like Hokusai’s classic The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. “You should go out and scan the landscape,” Kentridge told the artist.
For the next decade, he did just that.
Making His Own Water Lilies
His favorite work—prior to Rippling Images, of course—was Giverny of the Midwest, his techy homage to Monet’s Water Lilies. (Stern is a self-described fan of the impressionist.) To create it, Stern brought a laptop, five scanners and battery packs, and two student assistants to South Bend, Indiana, to spend three days scanning a lily pond. The water claimed two scanners and his phone, but they wound up with 130 scans that Stern then spent two years editing into an installation composed of 93 prints. Laid out in a Mondrian-like arrangement, the piece covers more than 250 square feet and is nearly identical in size to Monet’s masterpiece. Giverny of the Midwest was shown in South Africa in 2011, but Stern’s continued to work on it since, and it will have a US debut at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in April next year.
After he’d waded through water for Giverny, Stern decided it was time to go under it. His brother-in-law Emyano Mazzola, an Italian scuba instructor (and Stern’s occasional photographer), suggested scanning a coral reef. He sought a grant from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he teaches. It loved the idea, so he became a certified diver and went to the Florida Keys.
Though he’s been using rigs of various sorts over the years, going underwater posed a particular challenge. He designed 10 rigs, built five, and brought three. One consisted of a FlipPal portable scanner and a DryCase for the tablet. But the “most fun” rig, Stern says, was made entirely of Plexiglas. Vacuum-sealed with a bike valve, it kept his Windows tablet dry.
To a point. The rig started leaking at 30 feet (it was supposed to go to 60), and some of the images included scratches and bubbles. “I love this,” Stern says. “The work is meant to frame and amplify the forces of land and sea, show how they affect movements and actions and performances. None of this technology ever did precisely what I wanted or intended, and you can see that in every image. It’s beautiful.”
Scanning On
That’s one reason Stern wants to keep creating this kind of art—an unusual move in an era when digital artists are expected to constantly grow, adapt, iterate, change. “To stick with one image-making process for 10 years—and it’s easily going to be another 20—is not something most digital artists do,” says Stern, who’s planning an ice dive for his project. “The process and what comes out of it are so rich and full of wonder.”
Don’t believe him? If you meet him on the street, Stern might even give you a try: He loves watching people attempt to scan their world for the first time. “They want to move quickly,” Stern says. “But the images don’t capture anything. Then they start to slow down. And instead of just moving, they’re moving with, or moving around. It’s pretty magical to watch people dance with the landscape.”
“You can hear,” he adds, “that I’m a hopeless romantic.”
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