Il(Lumina)ting Marfa
Artist and writer Nathaniel Stern meditates on Jason Ting’s Lumina against the backdrop of Marfa’s art-rich history and natural wonders. Originally published on Le Random.
Six glowing, slowly gradating tubes—each approximately the size of a yoga mat—are arranged on the ground like an art–tech campfire in the corner of the Saint George Hall in Marfa, Texas. Try imagining a bed of soft, cylindrical body-sized pillows, each engulfed by a new color about once per second. But between each focused re-encapsulation, there is a gradient animation, a soft push of hue, saturation and value, which somehow manages to pull us in to an intensity of moving light, color and shadow.
It is like the gentle caress of a rainbow, a real one—delicate and translucent, rainy and blurry; not that bullshit we see in cartoons—reaching out to us, inviting us for a prolonged moment of felt and amplified sensation.
And Lumina is not a solo experience. There are seats on either side of Jason Ting’s mesmerizing sculpture, where pairs of viewers warm their aesthetic insides, occasionally smiling, no, marveling at one another while their shared reflection induces more and more wonder.
For years, Ting has worked on screen-based generative art and digital drawings. As part of this physical instantiation, he explains that “every minute, a randomized combination of 15 different generative animations and 10 color palettes creates scenes that range from vibrant rainbow portals to rolling blue-gold waves.” Each tube’s low-resolution image (only 48 pixels per row) is smoothed by diffusing sheets of plastic and a color interpolation algorithm, turning six, 3-dimensional animated hue circles into a public and paired meditation.
Many of the onlookers in Marfa cited Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance piece, The Artist Is Present, where simply sitting in the gaze of another—here, in the light of Ting’s kinetic sculpture—was intensely felt in its public/private paradox. But Ting’s Lumina is more than a singular partnership; it adds another person, sure, but also technology, light, plastic and other materials into its mix. This does not even include the frenetic connotations and mythos surrounding Art Blocks, Marfa and more. Lumina is more than a light in a dark corner amidst the carnivalesque atmosphere of Marfa to practice meditation; it is more than an oasis of digitally-analogous beauty in a sea of people more oriented towards pixels. It is a celebration yet inversion of Ting’s many predecessors, some of whom are inherently connected to both Marfa and Texas.
Long before Marfa gained 50% of its core population with the Art Blocks weekend, it was already known as a space for art and culture, albeit a small and remote one. Its legacy is staggering and includes the early filming of James Dean’s Giant as well as natural phenomenon like the Marfa Lights (like Northern, but Texan) and the anti-light pollution street lamps they inspired. It also includes Prada Marfa, a permanent sculpture that mimics a real storefront, complete with donated merch from the brand. Most critically, it includes Chinati, Donald Judd’s military base turned permanent museum of (mostly) minimalist sculpture from a range of artists.
It is precisely against the backdrop of this rich history, these natural and man-made occurrences and alongside the on-chain generative art movement, that make Jason Ting’s Lumina so powerful.
My first thought, upon gazing on Ting’s physical version of his light-based work, was of James Turrell, specifically his Skyspaces. I had recently spent a fair amount of time with one, Meeting, at MoMA’s PS 1 in New York. The other, The Color Inside, is relatively nearby at the University of Texas at Austin. I remember first sitting in Turrell’s tiny “theater” of sorts, gazing up at what seemed to be a screen with the most subtle and beautiful hues of blue and white I had ever seen portrayed. Of course, it was not a screen; it was the sky itself, viewed through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Turrell’s genius, in part, is that he merely provides an unobstructed view of the sky as a work of art.
In this, he also defines the very nature of art: to frame and amplify what is, so as to ask what could be.
His media—light and space—are arguably the same media for all forms of art, for all of perception and, thus, action. Bluntly, to experience it is perception-altering. Beyond the prolonged moment of active observation, every time you look at the sky and continue to marvel at what is there to experience, you give yourself over to it.
Worthy of mention again are the Marfa Lights. These are seemingly sourceless colors and values that dance, split, merge, disappear and reappear on the horizon at night. Whether your explanations are scientific or paranormal (I lean heavily toward the former), it is still a form of magic.
Ting takes both the Marfa Lights and Turrell’s sculptures but flips our relationship to them. Rather than staring off into the sky, pondering our connections to nature and beauty, our small size and our insignificance, we look down at human-made tubes and electronics. We wonder at the communities and partnerships that led to our engagements with electrons and silicon to co-produce another kind of beauty. We—a collective “we”—in a shared experience and practice with others, with nature, with matter and concepts and things, with light and electricity and more, made this possible, made it happen. We peer down into the light, the screen, the fire, the network; we look at each other and our human and non-human interconnectedness and…
It, too, is wondrous.
Chinati, which I also visited for the first time while in Marfa in the fall of 2023, was one of the most profound art experiences of my life. Donald Judd made large minimalist sculptures on trails more than three-quarters of a mile long. It takes several buildings to show off one hundred aluminum variations of a cuboid (a rectangular “cube”), each weighing a ton. Judd also gave over scores of structures for other artists to explore the mantra, “Art in Context.” That phrase was meaningless to me until I stood in front of his many similar-but-different squares upon squares (the cuboids, the tile floors, the windows and panes, the light and shadow, the ceiling and beams and columns). I suddenly felt my own awareness—and yes, that is an intended doubling of phrases—of every single thing around me. It was a heightened attention—a tension—to every crack and fissure, every bug, every body and what they might mean, be or do.
Roni Horn’s Things That Happen Again—two identical copper truncated cones, 35 inches long, tapering from a diameter of 17 inches to 12 inches—baffled and excited me even more. Appearing as floating circles as you enter the room, they then stretch and morph on approach, reflecting cracks, critters and bending light. They made me all too aware of myself, my physicality and others in the space.
I had to contrapuntally ask, “Do our bodies go missing in front of our screens? Does the world disappear when I gaze at and through the window of my laptop?” No, of course not, as Ting reminds us. Ting’s “Art in Context” is precisely at the nerd-fest nexus of us phone and laptop junkies, re-membering (that is, embodying again) for us, ourselves and each other, face to face, at his digital 🔥.
But it is Dan Flavin’s untitled, a multi-building Marfa project at Chinati that brings Ting’s Lumina into sharp focus. Each of Flavin’s large-scale works, in colored fluorescent light across six spaces, calls attention to… oh, so much. We begin by seeing tilted lights that shed complementary colors across separate corridors, creating caves of purple, yellow and green. The inverse is just on the other side. We can see each other and the inverted-light spaces through cage-like bars, the never-blending lights across their electronic barriers. We, again, become all too aware of ourselves. With the lights at human-scale, we are neither too small nor too large. We are our own size for a change.
Seriously playful and playfully serious, Flavin makes us all too aware of how much can be done with light, space, everyday objects and each other. It is a moving experience that literally moves us—across corridors, into and around objects, up and down paths, into and out of sight, vision, perception, affect and more. I do not say this idly: My feelings at Chinati, while nameless (more a saturation of that which is felt, than a specific emotion), were as vibrant as the colors Flavin presented.
Ting inverts Flavin’s work as well. With Flavin, we walk the corridors of discovery, look at the walls and halls and how the lights impact everything around them. Ting thought pulls us into a smaller space, sitting down, facing the floor and each other.
Instead of asking us to move, Lumina does the moving for us with its animations, yet it moves us all the same.
And in this smaller frame, it is more of an intimate pairing. We are aware of Lumina and each other, more so than our surroundings. This is not (just) a sculpture, or a space or a broadcast pretending to be a conversation (like Twitter or Facebook). It is a microcosm of interconnectedness, a mini dialogue between and with peers, within a greater network that this crowd is of course all too aware of.
Ting directly cites shared experiences like “in a car on a long road trip, a socially-distanced walk in the park, huddling around a fireplace,” and calls Lumina’s light “a proxy for connection.” But more than a proxy, it can be a connection itself. It in fact works to amplify all the connections; it brings forth the very category of “connectivity.”
Lumina succeeds in folding us in, rolling us out and having us look, listen, feel, touch and sense our very togetherness. It is a meditation on, and reflection of, the smaller and more care-full moments in IRL-digital life.
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Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer who has been producing, exhibiting, teaching and writing about art + technology for more than 25 years. His work was included in Christiane Paul’s A Companion to Digital Art. His project, STILL MOVING, with Sasha Stiles is on Art Blocks.
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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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NPR / WUWM
‘Ecological Aesthetics’ Encourages Thinking Differently With The World Around Us
with MADELINE ANDRÉ on Lake Effect
How do you think about the objects around you? What do they do for you? What do they want? Are they art? These are some of the ways that local artist and author Nathaniel Stern wants us to think about our surroundings, our planet and the art within it.
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M Magazine
Scanning the World
MILWAUKEE-BASED ARTIST CHALLENGES HOW HUMANS RESPOND TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT
BY ROCHELLE MELANDER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT HAAS
To call Nathaniel Stern a Renaissance man might be an understatement. An associate professor of art and design in the Peck School of the Arts at UW-Milwaukee, Stern is a Fulbright grantee, published author and TED Talk speaker; his artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and he’s on the forefront of using scanner imaging photography. Stern is also the co-founder and core team member of the UWM Student Startup Challenge and the Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship, along with Dr. Ilya Avdeev, UWM assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Brian Thompson, president of the UWM Research Foundation.
In viewing Stern’s vast expertise and interests, a common theme emerges: interaction. He wants people who view his art and the entrepreneurs he coaches to think about who they are, who they can be, and how they relate to the world and one another. As he said at the conclusion of his TED Talk, “Think about the kinds of relationships and environments we’d have, if we thought more about the relationships and environments we have.”
Stern did just that when he created his stunning visual images, playing with how our interaction with technology and the world produces beauty. He strapped a desktop scanner, laptop and cus- tom-made battery pack to his body, and then wiggled and jumped, capturing images as he moved. The image you see in the gallery might be a result of his breathing, or cracks in the glass, or a fly attracted to the light of the scanner beam. Then, as Stern says, “The dynamism between the three — my body, technology and the landscape — is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival prints.” Stern’s visual images were displayed most recently at the Tory Folliard Gallery this past summer during Gallery Night and Day. (Tory Folliard represents Stern’s artwork in the Midwest.)
Perhaps the best way to understand Stern’s work is to participate in his interactive art. Stern has hacked full-bodied gaming control- lers so that viewers trigger animation, spoken words and more by moving their bodies. In a sense, the interaction between the viewer and the technology creates the art. For example, in “Stuttering,” the viewer’s movement produces words on a screen. Move slowly, and a few words appear, spouting zen-like wisdom: “Take a deep breath.” “Read.” “Consciousness.” Move quickly, and the screen stutters, lighting up with a cacophony of phrases. But as with everything Stern makes, the art is more than just art. “I like to think that ‘Stuttering’ helps us practice listening and performing in the world with a little more care,” he says.
Stern witnessed this firsthand when all four of his interactive works were displayed, alongside the work of Tegan Bristow, in a show called “Meaning Motion” at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. He watched people move from one interactive exhibit to another, sometimes stopping to teach a friend or stranger how to interact with the art. At “Elicit,” a piece in which every movement evokes a sea of text, he watched viewers silently invite each other to dance. “Their relationships to each other and themselves and the art shift, and they leave that space thinking, moving and interacting differently,” Stern says.
Milwaukee residents can interact with these works when “Body Language” is shown this November and December at the INOVA gallery at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts.
Download this article as a jpg or PDF, or see on the M Magazine site.
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Critical Arts
Ecological aesthetics: thinking trees and Goods for Me
by Nathaniel Stern
Published July 2016 in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies
Abstract:
People and peoples are always in process with the world around us; we are only a small part of intricate, complicated and ongoing systems; we are always more than the boundaries of what we know, or feel, or make. ‘Ecological aesthetics: thinking trees and Goods for Me’ argues that an ‘ecological aesthetics’ is surfacing in contemporary art, which makes such linkages felt. The best of this work amplifies who and how we are, together with all of matter, and more importantly how we could be. This work can and should be experienced, practised and studied through the ecologies at play in and around that work, be they material, conceptual, environmental, personal, social, economic and/or otherwise. The article more specifically thinks with some of the work of South African artist Sean Slemon, which manifests a politics of movement, potential and composition outside standard human perception. It narrativises, through one artwork, our experience and practice of complex systems and forces. Here every-thing is continuously emergent with its conceptual-material environments, is part of continuously moving and changing assemblages. Ultimately, an ecological aesthetics calls for rethinking human and non-human relations as always mattering, always affecting, always political – together.
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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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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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Furtherfield
The Performance of Infrastructure: Review of Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance by Nathaniel Stern
Book review by Robert Jackson
Excerpt:
… Nathaniel Stern’s Interactive Art and Embodiment establishes two first events: not only Stern’s debut publication but also the first of a new series from Gylphi entitled “Arts Future Book” edited by Charlotte Frost, which began in 2013. All quotations are from this text unless otherwise stated.
Stern’s vision in brief: in order to rescue what is philosophically significant about interactive art, he justifies its worth through the primary acknowledgement of embodiment, relational situation, performance and sensation. In return, the usual dominant definitions of interactive art which focus on technological objects, or immaterial cultural representations thereof are secondary to the materiality of bodily movement. Comprehending digital interactive art purely as ‘art + technology’ is a secondary move and a “flawed priority” (6), which is instead underscored by a much deeper engagement, or framing, for how one becomes embodied in the work, as work. “I pose that we forget technology and remember the body” (6) Stern retorts, which is a “situational framework for the experience and practice of being and becoming.” (7). The concepts that are needed to disclose these insights are also identified as emergent.
“Sensible concepts are not only emerging, but emerging emergences: continuously constructed and constituted, re-constructed and re-constituted, through relationships with each other, the body, materiality, and more.” (205)
Interactive Art and Embodiment then, is the critical framework that engages, enriches and captivates the viewer with Stern’s vision, delineating the importance of digital interactive art together with its constitutive philosophy.
One might summarise Stern’s effort with his repeated demand to reclaim the definition of “interactive”. The term itself was a blatantly over-used badge designed to vaguely discern what made ‘new media’ that much newer, or freer than previous modes of consumption. This was quickly hunted out of discursive chatter when everyone realised the novel qualities it offered meant very little and were politically moribund. For Stern however, interactivity is central to the entire position put forward, but only insofar as it engages how a body acts within such a work. This reinvigorated definition of “interactive” reinforces deeper, differing qualities of sensual embodiment that take place in one’s relational engagement. This is to say, how one literally “inter-acts” through moving-feeling-thinking as a material bodily process, and not a technological informational entity which defines, determines or formalises its actions. A digital work might only be insipidly interactive, offering narrow computational potentials, but this importance is found wanting so long as the technology is foregrounded over ones experience of it. Instead ones relationship with technological construction should melt away through the implicit duration of a body that literally “inter-acts” with it. In Stern’s words:
“…most visually-, technically-, and linguistically-based writing on interactive art explains that a given piece is interactive, and how it is interactive, but not how we inter-act” (91)
Chapter 1 details how aesthetic ‘vision’ is understood through this framework, heavily criticising the pervasive disembodiment Stern laments in technical discussions of digital art and the VR playgrounds from the yesteryear of the 90s. Digital Interactive Art has continually suppressed a latent embodied performance that widens the disembodied aesthetic experience towards – following Ridgway and Thrift – a “non-representational experience.” Such experiences take the body as an open corporal process within a situation, which includes, whilst also encompassing, the corporal materiality of non-human computational processes. This is, clearly, designed to oppose any discourse that treats computation and digital culture as some sort of liberating, inane, immaterial phenomenon: to which Stern is absolutely right. Moreover, all of these material processes move in motion with embodied possibilities, to “create spaces in which we experience and practice this body, its agency, and how they might become.” (40) To add some political heft, Stern contrasts how the abuse of interactivity is often peddled towards consumerist choice, determining possibilities, put against artistic navigation that relinquishes control, allowing limitless possibilities. Quoting Erin Manning, Stern values interactive art’s success when it doesn’t just move in relation to human experience, but when humans move *the* relation in experience (Manning, 2009: 64; Stern, 46).
Stern’s second chapter moves straight into a philosophical discussion denoting what he means by an anti-Cartesian, non-representational, or implicit body. Heavily contexualised by a host of process, emergent materialist thinkers (Massumi, Hayles, Barad), Stern concentrates on the trait of performance as the site of body which encapsulates its relationally, emergence and potential. The body is not merely formed in stasis, (what Stern dubs “pre-formed” (62) but is regularly and always gushingly “per-formed” (61) in its movement. Following Kelli Fuery, the kind of interactivity Stern wants to foreground is always there, not a stop-start prop literate to computer interaction, but an effervescent ensemble of “becoming interactive” (Fuery, 2009: 44; Stern, 65). Interactive art is not born from an effect bestowed by a particular medium of art making, but of “making literal the kinds of assemblages we are always a part of.” (65)
Chapter three sets out Stern’s account for the implicit body framework: detailing out four areas: “artistic inquiry and process; artwork description; inter-activity and relationally.” (91) Chapters four, five and six flesh out this framework with actual practices. Four considers close readings of the aforementioned work of Penny together with Camille Utterback merging the insights gained from the previous chapters. What both artists encapsulate for Stern is that their interventions focus on the embodied activities of material signification: or “the activities of writing with the body” (114) Utterback’s 1999 installation “Textrain” is exemplary to Stern’s argument: notably the act of collecting falling text characters on a screen merges dynamic body movements with poetic disclosure. The productions of these images are always emergent and inscribed within our embodied practices and becomings: that we think with our environment. Five re-contextualises this with insights into works by Scott Scribbes and Mathieu Briand’s interventions in societal norms and environments. Six takes on the role of the body as a dynamic, topological space: most notably as practiced in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Chapter seven I’ll discuss near the conclusion: the last chapter shortly.
Firstly, the good stuff. Interactive Art and Embodiment is probably one of the most sincerest reads I’ve encountered in the field for some time. Partly this is because the book cultivates Stern’s sincerity for his own artistic practice, together with his own philosophical accounts that supplement that vision. His deep understanding of process philosophy is clearly matched by his enthusiastic reassessment of what interactive art purports to achieve and how other artists might have achieved it too. And it’s hard to disagree with Stern’s own position when he cites examples (of his work and others) that clearly delegate the philosophical insights to which he is committed. One highlight is Stern’s take on Scribbes’ Boundary Foundations (1998) and the Screen Series (2002-03) which intervenes and questions the physical and metaphorical boundaries surrounding ourselves and others, by performing its questioning as work. This is a refreshingly earnest text, proving that theory works best not when praxis matches the esoteric fashions of philosophical thinking, but when art provides its own stakes and its own types of thinking-experience which theory sets out to faithfully account and describe. Stern’s theoretical legitimacy is never earned from just digesting, synthesising and applying copious amounts of philosophy, but from the centrality of describing in detail what he thinks the bodily outcomes of interactive art are and what such accounts have to say: even if they significantly question existing philosophical accounts.
Stern leaves the most earnest part of his book towards the end in his final semi-auto-biographical companion chapter called “In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)”. This is a snippet of a much larger story, available online and subject to collaboration [4]. Here, Stern recounts or modifies the anxiety inducing experience of being a PhD student and artist, rubbing up alongside the trials of academic rigour, dissertation writing and expected standards. Quite simply, Stern is applying his insights of performative processual experience into the everyday, ordinary experiences faced by most PhD students in this field, and using it to justify a certain writing style and a sense of practice. It’s an enjoyable affair – in large part because it outclasses the dry scholarly tone usually associated with writing ‘academically’, elevating imaginative, illuminating redescriptions for how the experiences of interactive art broadly hang together rather than relying on relentless cynical critique. And most of that is down to Stern’s strong literary metaphorical technique for grounding his vision, perhaps even more effectively than the previous chapters.
Yet earnest experiences aside, there are two problems with Stern’s vision which, in my eyes, leave it flawed. That isn’t a bad thing: all visions are flawed of course. That’s why the similarities between art and philosophy feed our heuristic, academic compulsion to come up with them and debate: well, that and sometimes the most flawed can end up being the most influential…
Read the entire review in context (with introduction and conclusion) on Furtherfield
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engadget
This artist waterproofed a scanner to create stunning ocean art
James Trew for Engadget
“In my ongoing series of “Compressionism” prints, I strap a desktop scanner, computing device and custom battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence.” That’s how artist Nathaniel Stern describes his collection of unconventional images captured with a desktop scanner. An extension of this project is “Rippling Images,” a new collection which takes the idea underwater. Stern worked with a team to create a “marine rated” scanner rig, which he took with him as he scuba-dived off the coast of Key Largo, florida. The results in the gallery below show the ocean environment as interpreted through Stern’s scanner and body movements. That explains the rippling part, at least.
See original slideshow and post on Engadget
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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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De Arte
Interactive art and embodiment: The implicit body as performance
Reviewed by Rob Myers for De Arte
Nathaniel Stern. Interactive art and embodiment: The implicit body as performance. 2013. Canterbury: Glyphi Limited. £ 18.99.
This review is copyrighted and available from Sabinet, though some highlights follow:
Abstract
In Interactive art and embodiment, artist and art theorist Nathaniel Stern develops and applies a rigorous set of frameworks for reconsidering the concepts of interactive multimedia, performance, and the creation of bodily meaning and experience. Stern begins by building a lineage for his novel understanding of these ideas. He then develops a framework for the critical evaluation of interactive art based on this understanding, and applies it to some exemplary artworks. Finally he applies the parts of this framework that are relevant for non-interactive multimedia art to some well-known examples of that genre in order to show their further applicability.
“The book as a whole continues this concern both with bodily experience through interactive art and with grounding discourse in examples of art and criticism.”
“By collapsing and making strange what we think we know both intuitively and critically about our bodies as ‘performed and emerging emergence’, Stern lays the concept of the body open to productive re-thinking.”
“Interactive art, Stern argues, can interrupt and intervene in the performance of bodily relationality. ‘Moving- thinking-feeling’ is both limited by and amplified by art, as it is by games or drama.”
“Stern’s use of examples – both familiar and unfamiliar – illustrates the strength of the implicit body framework and makes it useful both to critics and to artists who wish to better understand what makes successful interactive art.”
“The implicit body framework concentrates on artistic enquiry and process rather than the ontology of such a piece, and on the experience of it as interaction and interactivity, beyond merely describing its technological construction or mechanical appearance. Doing so allows interactive art to stand or fall on its merits as interactive art, and highlights the value of a work…”
“Interactive art and embodiment makes a considerable contribution to the state of criticism andtheory of interactive art. It is useful for critics, theorists and artists who wish to further their understanding of interactive art and serves as an introduction to its worth for those unfamiliar with or unconvinced by it.”
Read the entire review in De Arte
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Art Journal
Beyond Technology and Representation: What Can Interactive Art Do?
Nathaniel Stern. Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. Canterbury, UK: Gylphi, 2013. 291 pp., 41 color ills. $29.99 paper
Troy Rhoades, for CAA’s Art Journal, Spring 2014
Download Art Journal’s PDF spread of this article from Taylor and Francis
Forget technology.
Forget representation.
Remember the body.
Re-member: Embody again (6).
In Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, Nathaniel Stern would like us to remember the body’s potential for moving, thinking, and feeling in relation to digital interactive artworks. He wants this triumvirate of bodily activities – what he defines as embodiment – to be placed in the foreground of thought when we discuss interactive art. It is his contention that technology and representational content have been the focal points of interactive art for too long, and it is time for a paradigm shift. “We must get away from concentrating only on the signs and images on the screen or the interface, away from privileging the technology and what it affords. We must engage with the quality and styles of movement that are rehearsed with interactive art” (15–16). Stern sees the need to stop explaining what interactive art is as a technological object or a generator of signs. He asserts instead that our attention should be placed on what interactive art does as it shapes our potential for embodiment, that is, our ability to move-think-feel with the work. It is important to note that Stern is not completely rejecting technological and representational approaches to interactive art and solely focusing on embodiment. Rather, he wants us to notice that there is a glaring absence of embodiment in many of the present methods used to analyze this type of work. This book is his attempt to address the long-overdue need to reevaluate this field of art. He reveals that we have always been moving-thinking-feeling with interactive art.
Stern begins his reassessment of interactive art by clearly defining his approach to this work. First, he declares that he will not value or define the potential of any individual artwork categorically: “I begin and end with singular works in the gallery space, and am interested in creating a discrete critical framework for encountering interactive art” (5). Stern then defines the interactive artwork as digital and electronic art that uses “various forms of sensors or cameras for input; computers, microcontrollers, simple electronic circuits, or other digital or analogical terminals for processing; and any form of sensory output – audiovisual, tactile, olfactory, mechanical, or otherwise; where all are placed together in a system that responds to the embodied participation of viewers, either in real-time, and/or over lengths of time” (5–6). From here Stern states that his theoretical approach is aligned with process philosophy and affect theory, primarily based on the work of the philosopher Brian Massumi, in order to “explore interactive art’s potential, outside of signification alone” (9).1 By approaching interactive art from an affective and processual approach, Stern associates himself with other contemporary new media thinkers (some of whom he cites) such as Anna Munster, Steve Goodman, and Stamatia [Portanova].2
With his approach and theoretical foundation clearly stated, Stern delineates in the first two chapters how recent research practices in interactive art, which have focused on technology and representation, connect and diverge from his understanding of embodiment as the body’s potential for moving-thinking-feeling. In the first chapter Stern tackles the notion that digital technology is somehow incorporeal, as espoused by thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler and David Rodowick.3 He argues against the notion that data, computational processes, and networks do not have any physical presence or materiality. For Stern all of these technologies and digital processes take on some physical form, on hard drives, computer chips, or fiber-optic cables: “Neither bodies nor information can exist without form and embodiment, and intelligence encompasses far more than informational processing” (33). Stern wants us to be aware not only of the corporeal aspects of digital and electronic technology that interactive art uses but also how we are affected and effected when participating in these technologies. He sees a real challenge in keeping “the participant’s attention on the quality of their own movements, rather than the response of the machine” (45). In Stern’s view, we need to become more attuned to the moving-thinking-feeling experience we have with interactive art, rather than focusing on the technology that drives the work.
In the second chapter Stern challenges recent thought concerning the body and representation in interactive art. He asks that we pay attention to the body as “more than its signs and significations, more than what we see or look at, more than skin, flesh, and bone” (54–55). According to Stern, for a body to be understood as a series of signs or an object, it needs to be static or “pre-formed,” like the many static points of Zeno’s famous arrow. A body becomes “explicit,” lacking any potential to experience embodiment. For a body to move-think-feel, Stern contends, it must be seen as a continuously changing entity that “situates embodiment as always per-formed: emergent and relational” (67). A body that experiences the ongoing activity of embodiment during an encounter with interactive art is, for Stern, an “implicit body” as performance.
After critiquing technological and language-based approaches to interactive art, Stern outlines a potentially paradigm-shifting method for understanding interactive art and embodiment through what he calls the “implicit body framework.” This framework comprises four areas of examination: “artistic inquiry and process; artwork description; inter-activity; and, relationality” (91). The first area looks at the artwork from the artist’s perspective, focusing on his or her approach to the work and the techniques chosen for its production. The second area gives us a detailed description of the artwork: how it looks, sounds, and plays. For Stern, these first two areas of examination are standard in most investigations of interactive art. They also represent the point at which most inquiries stop. As he states, “most visually-, technically-, and linguistically-based writing on interactive art explains that a given piece is interactive, and how it is interactive, but not how we inter-act” (91, emphasis in orig.).
Stern sees the third and fourth areas of examination – interactivity and relationality – as the missing elements in discussions of interactive art. The two areas focus on the potential for an awareness of embodiment to emerge in the viewer-artwork encounter; they foreground our capacity to move-think-feel our potential for change when we experience interactive art. The third area specifically examines the interaction itself, that is, how viewers and artworks connect at the level of embodiment. It focuses on the emergent affects, feelings, and movements generated in the midst of the viewer-artwork encounter. The final area of examination focuses on the relations that emerge in our encounter with interactive art and how these “relationships intervene in our transformation with the world around us” (97). Stern wants us to become aware of the extensive potential for relations to alter and affect our ability to move, think, and feel with regard to an interactive artwork.
In the next three chapters Stern presents a series of case studies using his implicit body framework, approaching several interactive artworks under three different thematics: body-language, social-anatomies, and flesh-space. For Stern these thematics reveal various emergent relations between embodiment and some other sensible concept, such as “language, society, architecture, other matter, forces, and matters” (97–98). The body-language chapter examines the work of Simon Penny and Camille Utterback and its parallels with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “excription,” looking specifically at body and language as “mutually immanent” (104). The social-anatomies chapter investigates Nick Crossley’s idea of “intercorporeality” – the capacity for the body and society to reciprocally produce each other – through the work of the Millefiore Effect, Mathieu Briand, and Scott Snibbe. The third thematic chapter, on flesh-space, approaches the interactive work of David [Rokeby], Rafael Lezano-Hemmer, and Norah Zuniga Shaw through the thought of José Gil and Erin Manning, investigating the ability of these artworks to make viewers aware of the ways in which “bodies and space are made of their relations” (176). These three chapters demonstrate Stern’s implicit body framework as rigorous yet flexible when applied to the analysis of interactive art.
In the penultimate chapter Stern takes his implicit body framework further, demonstrating that it can be used beyond the limits of interactive art. He investigates a large cross-section of new-media works by artists such as Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, Brandon Labelle, and John F. Simon, Jr., as well as his own work, which he calls “potentialized art.” For Stern all of these works have the capacity to “amplify action, affect, embodiment, performativity, transformation, and/or materiality” (206). Potentialized art enables us to become aware of our ability to move-think-feel with a work in the midst of our mutual encounter. We can experience the potential for embodiment as we perform with these artworks. We can become aware of our ability to move-think-feel.
The most rewarding and riskiest chapter of Stern’s book is saved for the end. “In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)” is a case study of Stern’s own art and writing practices from 2000 to the present. What makes this chapter such a rewarding and refreshing read is that it is written in an unconventional autobiographical style that is also academically rigorous, a style Stern calls an “autoethnographic experiment” (254). This experiment blends conversations, personal narrative, and several analyses of his interactive artworks using his implicit body framework in order to “amplify” and “potentialize” the reading experience (259). Stern consolidates everything he has advocated about the relationship between embodiment and interactive art into a personal story about himself and his work, effectively exposing us to an example of the experience of moving-thinking-feeling that we have been reading about throughout the book.
Stern’s experimental approach to writing is also one of this chapter’s many risks. There is the possibility that more traditional readers of art theory and history may find such a self-referential and unconventionally written account off-putting, even jarring. However, Stern’s storytelling ability is strong and will likely win over even the most curmudgeonly reader. Another risk this chapter takes is the form in which it has been published. The book surprisingly ends by giving us only the introductory section of this concluding chapter. We are invited to go online to view or download the remaining sections (253, 259).4 We are allowed just a taste of this chapter and then must shift our attention from the written page to the written screen. The risk here is that readers may be lost in this transition from the book to the Internet, leaving some of Stern’s best writing unread.
The book is part of the Arts Future Book initiative, a research project and academic book series investigating the future of academic publishing in the arts, led by Charlotte Frost. Placing this final chapter online appears to be part of the series’ mandate to exploit “recent technological advances in publishing” (xxi). Readers who go online and read the complete text of “In Production” will find the possibility to interact with others, in the ability to make comments at every paragraph. This gives readers a platform to share thoughts about some of their favorite (or less agreeable) passages. The ability to comment is an appealing feature, but publishing this chapter online has the potential to take away some of its affective impact. Moreover, it feels like an unnecessary use of digital technology, one that does not appear to follow the spirit of the book, as the online publication breaks a sense of continuity and makes it more difficult to experience moving-thinking-feeling in the work itself. As Stern states, “Embodiment only is through its ongoingness and continuity” (57, emphasis in orig.). If this chapter – which encapsulates everything Stern advocates with regard to interactive and potentialized art – were printed in its entirety at the end of the book, readers would have a better opportunity to experience the embodied potential the book commands. Despite these misgivings, everyone who reads Stern’s book (and those who are interested in reading it) should visit the website and discover the complete text of this wonderful final chapter.
It will be interesting to see how those behind the Arts Future Book series continue to explore the potential that digital and online media offers to expand the form of the book. Interactive Art and Embodiment is the first from this series, making it the first to experiment with the hybrid approach to publishing. I hope the editors will embrace Stern’s notion of embodiment and ensure that digital incarnations of future titles emerge from the potential activated within the texts themselves.
By asking us to engage with interactive art at the level of potential for movement, thinking, and feeling, Stern alters the idea of what inquiry can be, changing it from an analysis of something static into a dynamic event. The act of examination becomes as much a performance as the interactive art it investigates. Through the use of Stern’s implicit body framework, artworks become more than mere descriptions placed within a historical context. Through his writing, artworks become alive in the reading, giving us a sense of how the embodied interactions and emergent relations feel as they are encountered.
1. Throughout the book, Stern focuses on three of Massumi’s texts: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: An Interview with Brian Massumi,” in Interact or Die: There Is Drama in the Network, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2 Pub./NAi, 2007), 70–91; and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)
2. See Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
3. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and David N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. The concluding chapter in its entirety is at http://stern.networkedbook.org, as of February 11, 2014.
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Boing Boing
Artistic scanner-photos taken on a coral-reef
Cory Doctorow for Boing Boing
Nathaniel Stern straps modified document scanners to his body and then walks around, producing beautiful, glitched out art-images. Now he’s taken his scanners to the bottom of the ocean.
For the last decade or so, I’ve been making fine art prints by strapping a desktop scanner, custom battery pack, and computing devices to my body, then traversing the landscape to produce abstract but detailed slit scan imagery… The reasons are threefold: very high resolution; proximity – I’m a part of the landscape I’m capturing, rather than distanced from it (no added lens); and the potency of multiple adjacent times and spaces viewed on a 2D plane.
For the latest in the series, I produced several marine-rated, scuba scanning rigs – metal, plastic and/or polycarbonate, with various forms of gaskets, vacuum seals, and hall effect (magnetically-triggered) buttons to create the scans.
The complete body of work, 18 prints, premiere at the Turbine Art Fair in Johannesburg next week (July 17 – 20). The show comes to Milwaukee WI, where I now live, in October.
See it on Boing Boing
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PetaPixel
Experimental Underwater Scanner Makes for Beautiful Happy Accidents
Gannon Burgett for PetaPixel
If you enjoy strange and experimental photography, Nathaniel Stern‘s work should delight you.
For the past ten years, Stern has been creating experimental image-capturing devices using a conglomeration of hacked-together desktop scanners, battery packs and other various computer components. Once created, he straps these machines to his body and takes them from location to location capturing images unlike any other camera out there.
In his latest series, Rippling Images, Stern decided to take his images one step further by venturing to take these experimental camera creations underwater. It didn’t come easy though.
Stern spent months getting certified for a number of open-water diving licenses. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was helping his team piece together what would eventually become the five final models of the device he would be taking underwater.
Made out of everything from welded metal to magnetically-triggered buttons, the devices didn’t actually capture what Stern was hoping for at all. But what they capture, Stern still found beautiful… if not more beautiful than his usual work.
The scratched surfaces of the plastic showed up, unplanned reflections made several appearances, and the images were just overall more experimental than he could’ve ever expected:
Experiment might as well be Stern’s middle name though, so he took everything in stride and used it as a learning experience, sharing his thoughts in a video that we’ve embedded at the top.
It comes in just shy of three minutes, so give it a quick watch to see Stern and his unusual devices at work, and then head over to his website to see more of his work.
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Neural Magazine
Nathaniel Stern – Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance
AURELIO CIANCIOTTA
GYLPHI LIMITED, ISBN-13: 978-1780240091, ENGLISH, 304 PAGES, 2013, USA
Man/machine interfaces have involved the body in progressively more sophisticated ways, from the mechanical finger pressure on a keyboard to the intellectual challenge of voice-recognition-based software assistants. Media art has interpreted interfaces dynamically, abstracting the interaction and playing with its modalities, symbols and meanings. Stern analyses almost forty different artworks to augment his theory: “interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways we experience embodiment – as per-formed, relational, and emergent”. The text investigates “how we interact” and the role of the body in the interaction process is here exploded and carefully delineated. Many of the connotations that the body assumes in artworks – being perceived as a structure, a tool, a territory or an imagined space – are analysed as performative and symbolic instances. One of the qualities of this book is that it provides extensive references on the topic, while remaining very focused. The artworks are carefully described in their mechanisms and their performative dimensions are acknowledged separately, representing an annotated anthology in itself. There’s also a “digital companion” chapter (called “In Production”, partially printed and freely available online, meant to be updated and expanded at will), which has been aggregated to the book as its dynamic (in a way even performative) extension. This book is very helpful for understanding our physical relationship with the digital and how to properly relate to interactive art.
See the review on Neural.it
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