{"id":1565,"date":"2015-10-01T19:12:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T19:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=1565"},"modified":"2022-11-19T19:12:55","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T19:12:55","slug":"octobre-2015-from-affection-to-reflection-from-listening-to-craftsmanship-conversation-with-nathaniel-stern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/octobre-2015-from-affection-to-reflection-from-listening-to-craftsmanship-conversation-with-nathaniel-stern\/","title":{"rendered":"Octobre 2015 – From affection to reflection, from listening to craftsmanship – Conversation with Nathaniel Stern"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nathaniel Stern. Artist statement\u00a0: \u00ab\u00a0I combine new and traditional media in installations and objects, prints, videos and public works,\u00a0that suspend and amplify our relationships to each other, and our environments. My work highlights taken for granted categories \u2013 such as body, language, vision or power \u2013 and works to remember each as a dynamic encounter. Here we engage with and\u00a0feel<\/em>\u00a0the world around us. We experience and practice how concepts and matter cooperatively emerge.\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Giverny Series, 2011
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The Giverny Series, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Giverny Series, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Giverny Series, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Attunement \/ listening and craftsmanship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

L. B. : To start this conversation1<\/sup>, as an artist of interactive and immersive art, what role does affect and\/or emotion play in your works of art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

N. S. : Twofold: first, I do my best to listen to my body, and the world around me \u2013 to attune myself to the unconscious responses and activities that I am<\/em> during the production of a given work. What the piece does<\/em>, is what it means<\/em>, and vice versa. Secondly, I believe in the studio critique model, and so I listen to (and watch!) others\u2019 responses to my work, and that feeds back into any changes I might make. Sometimes what a viewer says and what their embodied response is to a given work might differ \u2013 so I do my best to pay attention to both. A combination of attunement \/ listening and craftsmanship are the most vital components to my art’s production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This very concise twofold statement sets the tone. It also opens further development. When you say that you \u2018attune\u2019 yourself with unconscious responses that you \u2018are\u2019, does it have to do with seeing, listening or feeling in a specific manner or is it more the impulse of going on or stopping and going elsewhere as attraction to matters or images or sounds, maybe as a movement calling you further. I try to imagine you unfolding the materiality and the technology involved in the crafting of your creative process. Also, what current or force does the \u2018studio critique model\u2019 have in your work? At what phase of the process do you invite feedback, does it come from your collaborators, close friends, family members? And as a Fulbright specialist, do you use also the \u2018studio critique model\u2019 with other artists\u2019 work as well? Your statement seems to introduce a very complex creative process inflected by whatever affects emerge in the foreground. Also knowing that your images are constructed through a scanner, I suppose that the final product has a non-negligible importance. Could you elaborate in a more concrete manner about these things?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suppose that for me, the studio critique model attempts to encounter affection and reflection in equal measure. Interestingly, this comes from my background in (believe it or not) fashion design, which I think was great at leading into digital arts production. With fashion, we sketch and play and move, then scientifically make a pattern and craft a piece, then we \u201cput it on\u201d, look at it, see and ask how it \u201cfeels,\u201d pay attention to sensation as much as representation, and repeat. There\u2019s an odd tension in the critique model, in that we must avoid symbolic and simple translation from affect to meaning, but must also, once we think-feel with\/in a piece, articulate what it is, how it works, and the stakes of that encounter, so we can amplify that work further in any given piece. This is the \u201ccurrent\u201d you ask for in critique. Trying too hard to see what something \u201cmeans\u201d, and we lose view of what it \u201cdoes\u201d. Allow it only<\/em> to work in the non-representational realm, and we can\u2019t make it better \u2013 as we never articulate what it does, or how it does, and how to increase its effectiveness through our craft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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static, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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static, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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static, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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static, 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And honestly, I take whatever is available to me in the form of criticism. I will ask my students or assistants, people in the hall, play myself for a time, my wife, my parents, my daughter. Even if they are not my intended audience, I can always learn something. Once at that stage, the trick is to divorce intention from action. The two signs of a great artist-researcher, for me, are\u00a0: 1. Experimentation and the allowance to fail; 2. Pivoting when the work does something other than what you intended, and following that new path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rippling Images, 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Rippling Images, 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Re : the final \u201cproducts\u201d. I am not a process artist or conceptual artist. In my practice, experience of the viewer is of utmost importance \u2013 whether their experience is of an object, an interactive software, a situation, or, as in most cases, several of these things among others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding the scanner-based prints, the images themselves fold in the time and space of their performance. They are multidimensional, always more than what we see (and in that, they tell us about vision itself, which is also always more than what we see). Here I\u2019d refer to Massumi\u2019s ideas surrounding \u201csuspending potentials\u201d through art and images, in his V2 interview in Semblance and Event<\/em> (also summarized in Chapter 2 of my own book) as a good place to get at what I mean here, and also how it pertains to interactive art, beyond the object. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manifestation trough performance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Do you plan to produce specific affects or emotions during you work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, but I have found that the most productive way for me to think about each work or series, in practice, is as framing and amplifying various (yet specific) conceptual-material formations. How does, for example, our ongoing embodiment relate to signification and vice versa, when speaking and listening? How can space and our relation to it, change what we want, and how we long for it? Massumi might call this a \u2018sensible concept\u2019: in short, the manifestation of an idea, through performance. I\u2019m interested in the styles of being and becoming that we activate, engage and encounter in our ongoing formations, and how we might shift them, or become otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the benefit of our readers, Massumi develops the \u2018sensible concept\u2019 at least in his book entitled\u00a0Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation\u00a0(2002, 90-136). When referring to Stelarc\u2019s art, he proposes the following definitions\u00a0: \u201cHis medium is a body as a\u00a0sensible concept\u00a0(p. 90) [\u2026] the sensible concept is a materialized idea embodied not so much in the perceiving or the perceived considered separately as in their between, in their felt conjunction (p. 95)\u201d. It seems that for you, if I understand well, the \u2018sensible concept\u2019 emerges in the incipient project, during its conceiving and while crafting it. Would you say that it\u2019s a general concept or accumulation of associated sensible concepts emerging in a push and pull movement? If you could elaborate, maybe exemplify, it would be to understand.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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