Nathaniel Stern (United States) has been producing, exhibiting, teaching, and writing about art + technology for more than 25 years. He is an artist and writer, NEA, 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. According to NPR, Stern’s work is “technological, thought-provoking and unexpected,” to Forbes, it is “powerful… weird, intriguing, and sometimes beautiful.” He is a “pensive yet hands-on philosopher, question[ing] what truly holds power in our world” (79Au), a “daring poet” and artist (the Verse Verse), whose work is “tremendous fun” and also “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art” (Scientific American). WIRED explains that our “future is confronted [with] power and ingenuity” in Stern’s many “multimedia experiments” (time.com), making him one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel). Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast has said Stern produces “an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways.” His “beautiful, glitched out art-images” (Boing Boing) make him ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (artthrob.co.za), with art that is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around” (Live Out Loud magazine).
Apple Grass, 2021, staged photograph of temporary sculpture, GIF, 1920x1280 px (view artwork)
THE WORD AFTER US: Libretto for an AI poetry unreading, 2022, Animated broadside, MP4, 3 minutes 30 seconds (view artwork)
Focus on
Windows 2020 Staged photograph of temporary sculpture, JPG, 3000 × 3750 px view artwork
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? The World After Us exhibition and later NFT collection combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration. These photographs of temporary sculptures take the forms of: digital detritus, reclaimed by plant life; fossilized and reconfigured phones and laptops; and reimagined and re-formed digital tools. — Nathaniel Stern