ANNE SPALTER & NATHANIEL STERN: AT THE FOREFRONT OF AI
ALGORITHMIC POETRY
conversations – Interview with Anika Meier – 4 April, 2023
This interview coincided with RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY at @ EXPANDED.ART x The NFT Gallery, 11 April – 13 May, New York | London, where we showed and released Icarus and Ariadne, both part of our Future Mythologies series.
When exploring new territories, it is often helpful to not walk alone. That’s probably why we see more and more artists collaborating on projects in the NFT space. Experiences can be shared and expertise combined. When Anne Spalter and Nathaniel Stern met, they both knew it was meant to be. Their encounter influenced their artistic practice and impacted their work with AI. Spalter and Stern have been collaborating ever since, exploring video, poetry, and AI.
In conversation with Anika Meier, the artists discuss their practice, working together, and the present and future of AI. And, of course, the conversation was also about Spalter Digital, one of the world’s largest private collections of early computer art, comprising over 1000 works from the second half of the twentieth century.
read the entire interview with images on expanded.art. Text only is below
–
Anika Meier: Anne Spalter and Nathaniel Stern, FUTURE MYTHOLOGIES is your first collaboration. When and how have you met?
Nathaniel Stern: I had known about and been following Anne’s work for years, but I don’t think we met in person until she had an exhibition in Milwaukee, WI, at the St. Kate Arts Hotel. I’ve been in MKE for nearly 15 years, and that’s one of my favorite spots in town. At least four different people told me I had to go see her talk (brilliant!), and we also wound up sharing a meal thereafter with mutual friends. Not only did I absolutely love the work, but it’s what inspired me to finally get involved in AI and Web3. I began experimenting with both that very night.
Anne Spalter: Yes! Multiple people that day told me they had invited someone named Nathaniel Stern, whom I really needed to meet. So I guess it was meant to be. I loved creating a solo show for the St. Kate’s art hotel in Milwaukee and used AI in most aspects, from GAN-based videos to large-scale inflatables based on AI-generated compositions. Nathaniel and I had productive conversations about AI right from the beginning, and I also learned that somehow he teaches full-time and has a family with five children in addition to his art practice. So I was incredibly impressed all around and a little jealous of his energy level.
AM: When did you decide you would like to work on a project together?
NS: Most of my early net.art in the 90s and 2000s was video poetry, and the majority of my work is text, textures, contextual… so I had already been working with theVERSEverse. When they asked me to do a series of AI poems for GenText, I wanted to do a new twist on some of that early work, where I had turned Greek mythological characters into slam poets—first in NYC venues like CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, then in streaming videos. In that early work, I had used a core story of my own as their new histories; this time, I wanted to mess with AI by doing things like making the AI stutter or overuse parenthetical thoughts, flipping known myths sideways, or putting the characters in faraway places. Ana Maria Caballero and I were brainstorming at NFT.NYC last year about who to ask to partner with me as the visual artist—since the whole series works in partnership—and we both jumped up and down when we thought to put our heroes in space and court Anne Spalter to be part of it.
AS: Ever since reading classic poems by Yeats and T.S. Eliot in high school, I’ve been a fan of poetry. I think that, just like playing the violin well, it’s a skill that’s quite rare. Somehow in my adult life, however, I had stopped reading as much poetry—until I started seeing language-based NFTs created by members of a group called theVERSEverse. I immediately felt this was a revolutionary undertaking—bringing poetry to the blockchain, increasing its audience among a younger group of readers, and also, perhaps for the first time in history, creating a way for poets to make a living from their art. Most famous painters make a living from their work, but Wallace Stevens was an insurance salesman, and TS Eliot worked in a bank.
As a curator for one of the PlayboyxSeven shows, I had recommended an amazing poem that turned out to be by one of theVERSEverse members,Ana Caballero (the reviewing was blind), but I didn’t really know much about the origins or structure of the group. I was thrilled when Nathaniel reached out and suggested this collaboration, since I had never dreamed that I could be part of a group that wrote poetry.
AM: FUTURE MYTHOLOGIES consists of a series of 12 poems written in collaboration with text-based AIs and incorporated into videos produced with the help of text-to-image AI. What can we learn from Greek mythology for the future?
NS: These stories are so very rich and can be easily adapted to show us connections we hadn’t thought of. For example, in my piece OEDIPUS for hektor.net (originally put online in 1999, minted last year, and owned by Kevin Abosch), I turn Greek fatalism into the Ameritocracy, where you can’t escape fate any more than you can escape the class you are born into. A lot of the pieces in FUTURE MYTHOLOGIES reveal the patriarchal and rule-bound issues with these old stories. PENELOPE (on SuperRare), for example, stops waiting for Odysseus and takes off into the unknown. PANDORA (not yet released) is proud to have opened up that box of knowledge. ICARUS sends a big “FU to gravity” (and his father). They’re funny in their referentiality but still act as a kind of action and call to action.
AS: One of the fun aspects of working with AI is not knowing what direction it will take you. Although all the visuals are guided by Nathaniel’s text—often using parts of the poems directly as prompt material—the visual outputs are never predetermined for me. I love the sense of working with a mysterious partner in AI and running with concepts that emerge from the text-to-image process. In Icarus, for example, my prompts started generating frames consisting only of feathers. This was 100% unexpected but immediately made sense, and I went with it because the explosive feathering evocatively suggested the rise and fall and stuttering described in the poem.
I’m not sure my visuals carry a specific message for the future but are more about letting people see these classic stories in a new light and enjoy them from a modern visual perspective.
Still from Icarus by Nathaniel Stern and Anne Spalter, 2023.
AM:”I don’t fear the unknown. But I feel it”, does Odysseus say in the piece titled ODYS. Do these poems freeze a moment in time—our time—or how would you best describe them?
NS: I love this question. To me, any great work of art is both frozen and moving (in many senses of that word). A photograph, for example, is a “still”, but what we see in that moment is not only what is in the frame. We all understand there are outside goings-on, a behind to any image, a before and an after, and more, and all of those potentials are caught in the very potent present of the image. An astute viewer also considers the context in which the piece was made: when, by whom, and in relation to what. Any given time is a smudge; any context is a tangling of possibilities. Odys and I feel all those potentials—their beauty and cynicism, their wonder and sadness. I agree with the proclamation, “I don’t fear the unknown. But I feel it”, Odys is not saying he is completely fearless. But what he feels—that intensity, that affect, that timeless yet constrained moment of potent potential—far outweighs (in fact, includes) his fear.
AS: I agree that freezing a moment in time is a goal of much art. “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” right? These new tools we are using are very much of our moment in time, and using them to re-interpret these narratives will definitely situate them for future viewers.
AM: Nathaniel, one of your professors at NYU recommended that you explore the relationship between speech and body. What did you find out?
NS: Would it be cheating to point to 25 years of art practice and two peer-reviewed academic books in answer to this question? I can’t thank Dan O’Sullivan enough for his early provocations in my art-making and writing practices. Moving-thinking-feeling are all part of the same process; the world is always already made of conceptual-material formations. Matter thinks. Words play. Time suspends. Life and non-life are both heartbreakingly beautiful.
AM: What are your thoughts about the relationship between speech and video when it comes to digital art?
NS: It’s vital for me, and something I’ve been doing since dial-up! When I write poetry, I write it for performance and read it aloud as I write… I was a songwriter first, a poet second (like my dad!). When I was doing the slam poetry scene in NYC around 1999 and decided to go digital (this was before YouTube or MP4, so it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and the occasional RealPlayer, none of which exist any more), there was no question that I would perform them in video. Then I played between shots of me reading, custom animation, and harsh digital effects to “replace the body” with other intensities and effects on screen. I didn’t want the clean lines, so popular and easy to make in PhotoShop, etc., at the time; I wanted what I called the “dirty digital” to feel it. I had to play with a lot of compression and wait times, too. Most people could only view these at work, and it was funny to get emails about not warning that much of my poetry was NSFW (not a term I knew yet back then).
AS: These pieces combine so many factors: written text, spoken words, still and moving visuals, and frequently audio atmospheres as well, so there’s a lot going on. I think it’s a delicate balancing act to create a final piece in which everything works together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
AM: It’s already difficult for an artist to decide when a project is finished. How did you approach this collaboration, and when did you know a piece was finished?
NS: Anne, Sasha Stiles, and Ana Maria Caballero all pushed me in my performances, but I had so much fun writing and recording these poems that I wrapped them up pretty quickly. With the visuals and text, Anne and I go back and forth a fair amount until we are both happy with them, and we usually kick up the pace when we have a deadline.
AS: I have definitely been the bottleneck in this project because Nathaniel finished the poems and voiceovers ages ago. Maybe I should have created some sort of template to produce them all with, but instead, each has been a challenging separate project, often taking several weeks to complete. The AI tools change constantly, and incorporating text and a specific visual illustration goal is new for me and not the way I usually work, so it has been a bit slow. And of course, I’ve been juggling other projects at the same time. I don’t think the problem is knowing when they are done, though. I don’t personally find this aesthetic decision much different when using digital technology than analog media.
NS: Anne’s work is AMAZING and I don’t care how long it takes! I am absolutely thrilled to be working with her and to be able to call her a friend. Also: I can’t help it. I tend to keep my head down and in a project until it’s done because otherwise I’d never finish anything (re: five kids and a full time job… Did I mention I also direct an NEA-funded research lab around art and neurodiverse community building and am a co-founder of an NSF-funded climate action startup?)
AS: Hahahaha. Thank you. And no, you did not mention that. I need whatever drugs you are on, lol. Aren’t you a runner as well? You know, in your free time…
NS: Anne’s being humble. She is one of the most prolific and talented artists I know.
AM: How and when did you start working with AI?
NS: Indirectly, many years ago, through all the computer vision work I do. Directly, the night I met Anne, in early 2021.
AS: In 2020, I saw fellow artist Carla Gannis post about something called playform.io, and I immediately applied for their beta program. Playform still exists and is great for GAN-based work, which tends to be overlooked with the text-to-image craze. It lets you use your own image sets, which appeals to me as an artist who has a lot of photographic and self-created source materials. I still enjoy the aesthetic of GAN imagery and videos and have created a number of works this way.
When I first heard that there was a process that let you type in a few words and get an image based on their description, I was pretty sure it was made up. I remain constantly amazed and delighted by text-to-image AI and am often up at 2 AM trying “just one more thing.” I am now in several beta programs and often use multiple platforms at once to see which will give me the best results for a given prompt theme. In my Rabbit Takeover Drop of 557 Rabbits in a Post-Armageddon World, I also used ChatGPT and Sudowrite to create narratives for my images.
AM: Have your thoughts and concerns about AI changed over the years, as well as your approach to creating art with AI?
NS: They change all the time! My biggest concern at the moment is that so many people have such strong opinions without knowing much about the technologies and data behind most AI, not to mention the politics and revenue streams of each of the largest companies and models. My biggest, current project, – MOTHER COMPUTER: THINKING WITH NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES, a series of drops and then a large-scale IRL exhibition with Sasha Stiles that will open in 2025 and travel thereafter, mostly tries to deepen and nuance conversations around AI (and its inner workings) and involve more non-computer / non-data folks into its fold.
AS: I’ve always been a technological optimist. As part of stewarding Spalter Digital since the early 1990s, I’ve had to combat the knee-jerk reaction of many in the art world that the computer somehow usurps artistic agency from human beings. Although AI brings a dramatic new level of power to everyday computer users, I also feel that I’ve seen this movie before. Usually, when a writer makes a blanket claim about AI taking over visual production jobs and being a force of generally unstoppable evil, I can tell that they have never actually tried to make a specific image with any of the current tools. It’s not at all easy. I tend to think of AI as more of a really great sketchpad and idea generator than a stand-alone replacement for artistic creation. (I don’t know enough to comment on the larger issue of whether there will be a GAI and the repercussions of that for society, so this is just in terms of today’s issues in art creation.)
AM: Anne, you are not only known as an artist but also as a collector of digital art. Michael Spalter and you started collecting digital art decades ago, when hardly anyone was interested in its history. You didn’t fear the unknown. What convinced you to trust a feeling and to continue this journey?
AS: I was writing my textbook, THE COMPUTER IN THE VISUAL ARTS, and reached out to the pioneers who had somehow braved punched cards and hard-to-access equipment and made art with computers in the 1960s and 1970s. Michael Spalter, who majored in art history, said, “Wow, these artists are just like the Impressionists. The academy hates them; they can’t show their work, but they all know each other, trained with well known people, and have incredible bodies of work. We should see if we can support them and collect some pieces.” Because there was literally no market, we were able to afford some acquisitions. Being immersed in the history and getting to know the artists and their practices gave us an appreciation for their efforts that was not shared by most curators and critics. The collection continued to grow organically, but the NFT movement really brought digital art to the forefront for many people in a way that we never could have anticipated.
AM: What are the criteria for historically relevant digital art for you? Have these changed over the years?
AS: Michael Spalter and I focus on the 1950s–80s but do collect some more contemporary pieces that relate to works of that time period. In addition to standard metrics such as an artist’s complete body of work, show history, critical writings, and such, personal taste plays a large role. Each piece in the collection is something we chose because, if digital art never took off, we would still want to look at that work and would enjoy it.
NS: Oh, let me jump in on this… I tend to be most inspired by two “historical” moments with the media formerly known as new: 1. The first time a new technology is used towards artistic ends, a platform-specific performativity around what that medium is and does (on blockchain, think Rhea Myers and the McCoys!); and 2. AFTER that, when a new technology hits the mainstream, just after the hype cycle crest, artists who have waited to understand the medium more begin to engage with its public implications. I think we’re still in that latter part with both AI and blockchain.
That said, I am a romantic at heart. I like to move and be moved. A fantastic work of art will accomplish movement no matter when it is made, and its medium will always be an integral part of its conceptual-material formation.
Can I also just shout out Furtherfield here? Ruth and Marc, and their mantra, “Art and technology for eco-social change,” have always balanced the new and meaningful for international tech-nerd audiences and London locals in ways that make me swoon. I have worked with them and will continue to do so whenever the opportunity arises.
AM: How does one develop criteria for art created with new technologies?
NS: This is a harder question, in that there are so many ways a work of art can be contextually relevant. My first book looked more specifically at interactive art, and I argued that dance and movement aesthetics (of the viewer) and how they have us relate to the world outweighed whatever it is we “see” on screen. This is because we always wander around where the sensor is and how it makes us perform. But Blockchain art is both new in its concretization of transactions (something I plan to explore a lot more in the next year) and also in its use of ownership and affection for more “traditional” digital forms. All of this is to say our relationships to the work, both personal and communal, will always determine its value. But that might be monetary, embodied, political, interpersonal, or otherwise—probably many of these in combination.
AS: In general, I use the same criteria for technological work as any other kind: do I feel something when I look at it or engage with it? I’m much more perceptually oriented than conceptually. It’s wonderful if an artwork has a strong idea behind it, but if it could be equally well or better expressed in writing, then it doesn’t succeed for me as a visual artwork.
NS: I’m in the latter camp of the question I answered above, honestly. I like to wait, research, and play just when a new technology is being talked about in the mainstream (especially if it’s only naively and with fear), and then turn it around, nuance it, fuck with it, make it emotional, create deeper connections, show its relation to history and other art forms… To my painter colleagues, I am “cutting edge” with my work, but to many of my digital peers—and how I think of myself—I am more of a synthesizer and researcher than someone who is “first” most of the time. I love being an artist working with new technologies, but my experimentation can take some time, and I usually don’t mind that. I’ve been making interactive art for more than 20 years, and yet I still learn from everything I make; it often feels new again. My scanner art felt very new in its use of scanners in the 90s and now feels quaint but still relevant. My last big IRL show and solo NFT drop – THE WORLD AFTER US – was about what happens when we throw out our used tech, so it was often nostalgic in its materials but still felt fresh.
AM: Is it helpful to be the first and to be early? Is this something you have in mind as artists and collectors?
NS: It is definitely helpful! And especially now that there are digital collectors interested in what is thought to be groundbreaking work. That said, I don’t often have it in mind any more. I think I was one of the first to do digital video poetry with hektor.net (no longer working!), epic online narratives, large-scale interactive poetry in the US and Africa… and it didn’t matter much because, at the time, there weren’t many collectors of this kind of work, and provenance was very difficult (I wrote a piece about this here, and there’s an upcoming NFT Now story I was interviewed for around this topic). I mostly showed in galleries and museums, precisely so I could be part of larger art world discussions, and occasionally in private collections. I like to think that an ongoing inquiry and a significant body of work will interest collectors and collections now. But I’m only just starting to break through to NFT collectors, so I’ll have to let you know how that goes in the next year or three!
Being respected and talked about by other artists—for me, because of that history—seems to help. I’m most excited to bring some of my longer inquiries around gifting and time, interactivity and performance, on-chain in the next year, and I think a lot of the work I’m planning is both new in this space and decidedly blockchain-specific, while also being old hat for me. I’m hoping that will speak to a large audience. I’ve got some exciting plans!
All this being said, being collected is relatively new to me, other than the occasional museum or university, and some prints are for more casual collectors. I had given up making much money with my art decades ago and decided to spend more time as a researcher, teacher, and academic, trying to have an impact. And I like to think I have. So making a bit of money and, more importantly, being collected and thus archived are like major bonuses in my middle age.
AS: I’m a bit of a techno-addict, so I tend to play with everything as soon as I can get my hands on it. Some tools end up being competitors in my practice, like digital video and video effects, and others, like 3D modeling, don’t mesh that well with my working process. I do think it can help to create work early with a new tool because people are interested in which artists might be using something new, and new tools can help extend one’s practice in unexpected ways. Being known for experimenting with NFTs was certainly a factor in leading Tina Rivers Ryan to curate me into her Feral File show, PEER TO PEER, which led to my work being acquired by the Buffalo AKG Museum of Art.
As a collector, there is no doubt that collecting in this field early was a huge advantage. We had galleries literally sell us things to free up storage and for less than the cost of the work’s frame. When you look at the price of NFTs now, especially generative art NFTs compared with the physical works of digital art pioneers, I think there are still many bargains out there.
Karyk by Anne Spalter, a metaversal inflatable AI avatar, shown at Lume Studios, 2023.
AM: Anne, you have seen many new technologies dismissed. Why do you think history still repeats itself? By now, one might think that it is clear that a technology is there to stay and impact culture and society, despite being harshly said to be of no relevance.
AS: It certainly is a narrative that repeats itself! A common theme is fear of the machine taking away creative agency from humans. This was the case with reactions to photography, to the use of the computer to make generative drawings, and now to AI in image creation. Of course there are other factors as well, such as specific genres a technology might interrupt (portrait painting and the camera, for instance), as well as surrounding political issues (such as the use of computers by the military), but I think the primary one is this misunderstanding of artmaking and the role of the artist. Art is fundamentally something the artist does for themselves—you just see the byproducts of this process. It doesn’t really matter if an artist uses a paintbrush or a computer to pursue this inner journey.
Anne Spalter is a leading digital artist, creating dystopian landscapes with AI and other technological tools. She established the first digital fine arts courses at Brown University and RISD during the 1990s, and wrote the book THE COMPUTER IN THE VISUAL ARTS. Together with Michael Spalter she oversees Spalter Digital, one of the largest private collections of early computer art.
Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than 25 years. Stern has had international exhibitions and presentations, including Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale. He has been featured in WIRED, Scientific American, JUXTAPOZ, and Rhizome.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.”
See the original article on CNET.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
See the original post on Fast Company.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
MKE Journal Sentinel
Nathaniel Stern’s “Giverny of the Midwest” makes U.S. debut
This article by Rafael Francisco Salas appeared in both online and print editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Claude Monet was in his 80s when he painted his way into eternity with a 42-foot long triptych, “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond,” famously hanging at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and created in the artist’s aquatic gardens in Giverny, France. Many believe that painting as an art form did not catch up with Monet’s water lily works, which numbered in the hundreds, until the Abstract Expressionists came along a generation later.
Artist Nathaniel Stern, who grew up in New York and knows the MoMA triptych intimately, has used Monet’s artistic cataclysm and deconstructed it into a similarly scaled artwork. Exhibited internationally, his “Giverny of the Midwest” is being shown in the U.S. for the first time at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Stern does not try to overtake Monet’s masterpiece but rather makes quotations from it and reinvigorates the debates it spawned. Is realism an image or an emotion? Is an object more important than the light that reflects off of it? When is a painted mark a water lily or simply a daub of painted material?
Stern’s work is not a painting. Rather, it’s a performative series of photographic scans printed on watercolor paper. The artist strapped a high resolution scanner and battery pack to his body and began capturing the elements of a lily pond in Indiana by mucking about in it and scanning plants, water formations, earth and sky. The pieces are hung in an grid formation, further expanding the notion of deconstruction. The images are still, but describe his process of documentation, which was often in motion. We see imagery pulled into swimming tendrils as he moved the scanner through water or over an insect’s body. Abstraction and startling realism combine and allow us to experience objects, color and movement all at once. The warping and pulling of the images is filmic and beautiful.
And it is important to note that this work is indeed beautiful. I admit, the process sounded interesting and fun, but I did not expect the results to move me sensually as well as intellectually. Stern does not forget that his subject matter is eminent, and that nature and how we experience it, through digital processes or in paint, has unfathomable potential to excite us. His work resounds with content about how we view the world and through which lenses, whether it be technology or our physical selves.
In the end, I was seduced beyond content. It was the tensions between realism and abstraction that kept confounding my readings of the work. In all honesty I have never seen anything quite like it.
With that said, it is at times difficult to see. The scale of the work requires a distance from it, and the shallow hall where it is hung doesn’t allow the viewer to take it all in. So, while I was able to appreciate smaller moments, an overall view is hard to get at.
Nathaniel Stern’s “Giverny of the Midwest” is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave., West Bend, through Sept. 6.
Rafael Francisco Salas is a painter, an associate professor of art at Ripon College and a regular Art City contributor.
This article by Rafael Francisco Salas appeared in both online and print editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Engadget
The photos you (probably) won’t find on Instagram
Artist Nathaniel Stern had taken to carrying a desktop scanner, a computing device and a battery pack around to “perform images into existence” for his “Compressionism” series. By jumping, twisting and adjusting distance, he accomplished some interestingly glitchy scanner-based images. Last July, he upgraded to a new “marine rated” setup and took the whole kit diving off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
The result was the “Rippling” series, where he applied the same tactics underwater to create off-the-cuff aquatic imagery. The pictures were affected by nature, human interaction and the inevitable technological quirks that occur when bringing office gear into underwater environments.
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
Other Frames
Title: Other Frames: Malcolm Levy and Sensing Images
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Transfer Gallery
Date of Publication: February 2015
Language: English
Download PDF (6.5 MBs)
Related artworks:
Other related texts:
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
Related artworks:
Other related texts: