Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer, Fulbright and NSF grantee and professor, interventionist and public citizen. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from ecological, participatory, and online interventions, interactive, immersive, and mixed reality environments, to prints, sculptures, videos, performances. and hybrid forms. His first book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Gylphi 2013), takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth 2018) is a creative and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, which argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently interconnected, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. Stern's ongoing work with startups and industry, on the other hand, has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products, and ideas. He has been featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Daily News, BBC's Today show, WIRED, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, PetaPixel, M Magazine, Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, Rhizome, Furtherfield, Turbulence, and more. According to Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast, Stern has “the most varied and strange bio of maybe anyone ever on the show,” and South Africa’s Live Out Loud magazine calls him a “prolific scholar” as well as artist, whose work is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around.” “Technological, thought-provoking and unexpected” (NPR) he’s been dubbed one of Milwaukee's "avant-garde" (Journal Sentinel), called ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (Artthrob.co.za) behind many “multimedia experiments” (Time.com), “accessible and abstract simultaneously” (Art and Electronic Media web site), someone “with starry, starry eyes” (Wired.com) who “makes an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways” (Bad at Sports) - both “bizarre and beautiful” (Gizmodo). According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, Stern makes "beautiful, glitched out art-images," and Caleb A. Scharf at Scientific American says Stern's art is "tremendous fun," and "fascinating" in how it is "investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art."
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Select Books by Nathaniel Stern
Ecological Aesthetics is a plea for us to continuously think- and act-with the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; to orient ourselves in ways that we might find and express what our environments, and what they are made of, want; and then to decisively help and continue those thoughts, wants, and actions toward novel aims and adventures.
Free introductory chapter included here. Full book at <https://amzn.to/2MJPDNG>
This book argues that interactive art frames moving-thinking-feeling as embodiment; the body is addressed as it is formed, and in relation. Interactive installations amplify how the body's inscriptions, meanings, and matters unfold out, while the world's sensations, concepts, and matters enfold in. Interactive artwork creates situations that enhance, disrupt, and alter experience and action in ways that call attention to our varied relationships with and as both structure and matter.
Nathaniel Stern's inspirational book, Interactive Art and Embodiment, outlines how new media has the ability to intervene in, and challenge, not only the construction of bodies and identities, but also the ongoing and emergent processes of embodiment, as they happen. It includes immersive descriptions of a significant number of interactive artworks and over 40 colour images.
The theorists, artists, practitioners and curators discussed in this text include Brian Massumi, Christiane Paul, Sarah Cook, Beryl Graham, Kelli Fuery, Theodore Watson, William Kentridge, Char Davies, Stelarc, Janet Cardiff, Carlo Zanni, Tero Saarinen, Karen Barad, Daniel Rozin, Richard Schechner, Nicole Ridgway, Rebecca Schneider, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, VALIE EXPORT, The Guerrilla Girls, Tegan Bristow, Brian Knep, Anna Munster, Zach Lieberman, Golan Levin, Simon Penny, Camille Utterback, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Millefiore Effect, Nick Crossley, Mathieu Briand, Scott Snibbe, David Rokeby, José Gil, Erin Manning, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Norah Zuniga Shaw, and others
An/other form of case study, this chapter explores the understanding of interactive art through embodiment, and vice versa, within the production of media art itself. Here, my own continuous process of making interactive and digital work becomes a somewhat fictionalized but rigorous story about performance and relationality – (mostly) from the original perspective of a producing artist doing a humanities-based PhD in an engineering department, rather than a professor writing a book on the topic several years out. I spend the first half of the chapter arguing for arts production as research, and an experimental form of narrative inquiry as the best way to examine the implicit (and explicit) connections that are made in the studio. The second half uses affirmative methods of creative and scholarly writing to implicate the processes that led to the book’s core ideas, and continue to inform, perform, and transform their articulations as texts and works of art.
“In Production” is freely available as part Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) (2009-), in a collaborative publication between Gylphi, Arts Future Book, and Turbulence.org. You can view it in any browser, or download it as a Creative Commons-Licensed and DRM-free PDF for your computer, printer, e-reader, or mobile device. The web site that houses this chapter also accepts new contributions. I invite practicing artists, curators, and scholars to make their own additions – whether as artist writings / narrative inquiries, curatorial or critical case studies, or broad theoretical texts – to continue to expand and explore, in reference to the book’s title, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance.
It is our contention that those interactive works that fall within the broad rubric of “body art,” albeit with a new twist, perform a doubled gesture: they both force us to rethink the extant relationship in the in-between of body and technology, and invite us to experiment with the of of the relation of body and technology.
If “explicit body” performance explicated bodies in social relation to unfold layers of signification, then “implicit body” art allows us to experience the enfolding field out of which bodies come to sense, but as something unaccomplished, as the limit and expression of meaning.
Here interaction encompasses a taking place that inaugurates rather than enacts an a priori script. While new media has displayed a tendency to take interaction literally as “doing” something, this approach argues that interaction is incipient action, in which an implicit body emerges alongside an unfinished art work; and being bodily materializes in the in-between of interaction.
Select Papers by Nathaniel Stern
This catalog essay on Levy's stunning work poetically explores the analog and material nature of digital images and digital imaging processes.
Select Catalogs on Art by Nathaniel Stern
14 print + video objects, January 2013
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern continue their unique prints and drawings mounted to video screens, creating ‘moving images on paper.’ This ongoing series explores matter, media, materials, and their entanglements with the arts and sciences, as forces that continuously transform and mobilize one another. Here new and traditional techniques and technologies mediate their own and others’ forms and meanings, together. With Dynamic Stasis, our now-familiar hybrid style of working finds greater depth, through the relation of multiple surfaces.
Select Authored Book + Exhibition Reviews by Nathaniel Stern
Ecological Aesthetics is a plea for us to continuously think- and act-with the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; to orient ourselves in ways that we might find and express what our environments, and what they are made of, want; and then to decisively help and continue those thoughts, wants, and actions toward novel aims and adventures.
Free introductory chapter included here. Full book at <https://amzn.to/2MJPDNG>
This book argues that interactive art frames moving-thinking-feeling as embodiment; the body is addressed as it is formed, and in relation. Interactive installations amplify how the body's inscriptions, meanings, and matters unfold out, while the world's sensations, concepts, and matters enfold in. Interactive artwork creates situations that enhance, disrupt, and alter experience and action in ways that call attention to our varied relationships with and as both structure and matter.
Nathaniel Stern's inspirational book, Interactive Art and Embodiment, outlines how new media has the ability to intervene in, and challenge, not only the construction of bodies and identities, but also the ongoing and emergent processes of embodiment, as they happen. It includes immersive descriptions of a significant number of interactive artworks and over 40 colour images.
The theorists, artists, practitioners and curators discussed in this text include Brian Massumi, Christiane Paul, Sarah Cook, Beryl Graham, Kelli Fuery, Theodore Watson, William Kentridge, Char Davies, Stelarc, Janet Cardiff, Carlo Zanni, Tero Saarinen, Karen Barad, Daniel Rozin, Richard Schechner, Nicole Ridgway, Rebecca Schneider, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, VALIE EXPORT, The Guerrilla Girls, Tegan Bristow, Brian Knep, Anna Munster, Zach Lieberman, Golan Levin, Simon Penny, Camille Utterback, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Millefiore Effect, Nick Crossley, Mathieu Briand, Scott Snibbe, David Rokeby, José Gil, Erin Manning, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Norah Zuniga Shaw, and others
An/other form of case study, this chapter explores the understanding of interactive art through embodiment, and vice versa, within the production of media art itself. Here, my own continuous process of making interactive and digital work becomes a somewhat fictionalized but rigorous story about performance and relationality – (mostly) from the original perspective of a producing artist doing a humanities-based PhD in an engineering department, rather than a professor writing a book on the topic several years out. I spend the first half of the chapter arguing for arts production as research, and an experimental form of narrative inquiry as the best way to examine the implicit (and explicit) connections that are made in the studio. The second half uses affirmative methods of creative and scholarly writing to implicate the processes that led to the book’s core ideas, and continue to inform, perform, and transform their articulations as texts and works of art.
“In Production” is freely available as part Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) (2009-), in a collaborative publication between Gylphi, Arts Future Book, and Turbulence.org. You can view it in any browser, or download it as a Creative Commons-Licensed and DRM-free PDF for your computer, printer, e-reader, or mobile device. The web site that houses this chapter also accepts new contributions. I invite practicing artists, curators, and scholars to make their own additions – whether as artist writings / narrative inquiries, curatorial or critical case studies, or broad theoretical texts – to continue to expand and explore, in reference to the book’s title, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance.
It is our contention that those interactive works that fall within the broad rubric of “body art,” albeit with a new twist, perform a doubled gesture: they both force us to rethink the extant relationship in the in-between of body and technology, and invite us to experiment with the of of the relation of body and technology.
If “explicit body” performance explicated bodies in social relation to unfold layers of signification, then “implicit body” art allows us to experience the enfolding field out of which bodies come to sense, but as something unaccomplished, as the limit and expression of meaning.
Here interaction encompasses a taking place that inaugurates rather than enacts an a priori script. While new media has displayed a tendency to take interaction literally as “doing” something, this approach argues that interaction is incipient action, in which an implicit body emerges alongside an unfinished art work; and being bodily materializes in the in-between of interaction.
This catalog essay on Levy's stunning work poetically explores the analog and material nature of digital images and digital imaging processes.
14 print + video objects, January 2013
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern continue their unique prints and drawings mounted to video screens, creating ‘moving images on paper.’ This ongoing series explores matter, media, materials, and their entanglements with the arts and sciences, as forces that continuously transform and mobilize one another. Here new and traditional techniques and technologies mediate their own and others’ forms and meanings, together. With Dynamic Stasis, our now-familiar hybrid style of working finds greater depth, through the relation of multiple surfaces.