Nathaniel Stern

File:Nathaniel Stern scanning lilies in 2006.jpg

Nathaniel Stern scanning lilies in Johannesburg, 2006

Nathaniel Stern is an American-born (1977) interdisciplinary artist who works in a variety of media, including interactive art, public art interventions, installation, video art, printmaking and physical theatre.

Stern graduated with a degree in Textiles and Apparel Design from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1999, and went on to study at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, graduating in 2001. He later taught digital art at the University of the Witwatersrand, while also practicing as an artist, in Johannesburg, South Africa from 2001 - 2006. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Stern's early study of fashion design, slam poetry and music lead to his interest in the relationships between the body and text, and eventually to that of broadly interpreted notions of performance and performativity, especially in relation to embodiment. He claims to treat "the body and art as cooperative sites of potential resistance," seeing them as mutable entities that "per-form" themselves in relation to their environments, rather than being extant and "pre-formed."

His art

Stern's interactive work is centered around bodily provocations, often asking his viewers to "perform" - whether publicly or privately. His pieces attempt to "get people to move in ways they normally wouldn't," and accent said movements in relation to their surroundings. His installation, enter:hektor, for example, asks participants to chase projected words with their arms and bodies in order to trigger spoken word in the space, and his subsequent piece, stuttering, floods the interaction area with too many trigger points, pushing its viewers "not to interact."

His prints, conversely, ask Stern himself to move in ways he normally wouldn't. Playfully titled Compressionism, these images are made through performances with scanners, Stern often tying or rigging a flat-bed to his own body, then traversing the landscape - avowedly referencing Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. These are colored in PhotoShop, then printed on metallic paper and/or transformed into hand-made prints, using more traditional techniques.

Stern's video art tends to be in a performative writing style, where he often plays out characters he has created, or uses found footage from pirated films, to explore the fragility of language. His collaborative multimedia performances explore similar issues, usually with more explicit political messages, such as challenging the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Stern and Creative Commons

Stern is an advocate of Creative Commons (CC), with his blog, and many of his pieces, under CC or GPL. He has been a contributing member of iCommons since its inception, and was an artist in residence with them in 2006 and 2007, the second year of which he ran the program.

His research

Stern's PhD dissertation is titled "The Implicit Body as Performance," and builds on Brian Massumi's ideas around affect and embodiment, and ties them to Performance studies, in order to implement new critiquing and production models for interactive art. This research ties directly into his own practice.

Quotes

• "Staged via various media, Nathaniel Stern's work enacts the interstices of body, language and technology. It seeks to force us to look again at the relationships between the three, and invites us to experiment with their relation. His body of work can, perhaps, be described as an exploration of the interstitial itself - revisiting between technology and text the dangerous spaces of enfleshment, incipience, and process." - Nicole Ridgway, NY Arts Magazine, 2006

• Compressionism's "result is a series of zones that make up each image: bands that discern between adjacent times and successive views. At first the works seem abstract, but in moving closer the viewer is able to discern, in each band, elements of Stern's subject matter – ripples of water, flower petals, bricks, plastic bags, the sky – each rendered in a sequence that is both cubist and impressionistic. And within each band, and within the series of bands that make up each image, is an incredible and almost overwhelming sense of beauty; that almost religious feeling you get when you view an awesome artwork." -- Brenton Maart, Art South Africa Magazine, Vol 5 Issue 1, Spring 2006.

• "Stern's performative interests expand to include 'performing' a relationship to history, a quietly anarchic deconstruction of the creative person's position in relation to history... [it] reveals that Stern's is a position of productive paradox, of signalling his debt to the historical archive of creativity yet resisting the impulse to politely replicate its terms." -- Michael Smith, ArtThrob.co.za, March 2007

• "More remarkable work from Nathaniel Stern as he reworks, in the most curious of ways, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Interesting that although the working method here seems almost diametrically opposed to the hands on, performative approach found in 'the odys series' ([Stern's feature on] dvblog 01/05/06) here too is that same sense of the fragility & vulnerability of human beings and their bodies & psyches & of the unreliability of the language we use to try & make what we want to happen & to relate or lie about what did." - Michael Szpakowski on "at interval" and "the odys series," video artworks on DVblog, January 2006

• "Nathaniel Stern, new media artist, and tireless blogger of the media art scene in Johannesburg, has created a hauntingly poetic digital backdrop - a combination of sombre, abstract textures and live video feed which enacts a disjointed dialogue with the dancers. Reminiscent in its brooding shadowy forms of Kentridge's parade of coal black despair, Stern's work is a new media expression of South Africa’s new sorrow." - Lizzie Muller in "The Future Makers" on a work with PJ Sabbagha, RealTime Magazine #70 (Australia)

• "Akin to John Cage's reading of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Stern's results are unique and aesthetically sound. The narrative cores of the works are not easily detectable, giving the audience licence to navigate. Benjamin writes of the danger of interpretation, commenting that the "chaste compactness of a story which precludes psychological analysis" is powerful enough to arouse "astonishment and thoughtfulness", forever. Further, he comments on the ability of a story to make the reader lose him/herself. This is one of Stern’s central promises." - Robyn Sassen on "the storytellers," a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Museum: Art South Africa Magazine, February 2005.

External links

• Nathaniel Stern's web site
• Ridgway, Nicole. NYArts Magazine: "Between Text and Flesh" (bio on Stern's work, 2006)
• Johnson, Paddy. iCommons: Art Intercom, featuring artist Nathaniel Stern (interview, 2007). Part I, Part II
• Borland, Ralph. A R T T H R O B _ A R T B I O: Nathaniel Stern (South African feature, 2006)
• Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery for Innovative Contemporary Artists (Ireland)
• Art on Paper Gallery (Johannsburg, South Africa)
• Nathaniel Stern's blog