Nathaniel Stern
His current project, The World After Us, is a series and exhibition of media sculptures, prints, and installations that materially speculate on what our devices – phones, tablets, batteries, LCDs, etc – might become, whether over decades, or thousands or millions of years. It consists of three parts, which include:
- subjecting phones to heat and pressure, extreme cold or high speed blending (for example), as a kind of artificial geological time – exhibited as ”Phossils;”
- growing “Server Farms” inside computers and other technological devices; and
- producing “Phonēy Prints” and “Circuitous Tools,” where dead electronics become raw materials for manufactured utilitarian goods;
all exhibited together in sculptures, installations, prints, texts, and photographs. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
Nathaniel Stern is an artist and teacher, and author of Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Gylphi 2013) and Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth 2018). He holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Art and Mechanical Engineering University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and is a Research Associate at the Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.