Stern › In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)

Nathaniel Stern › In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 ABSTRACT: “In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art)” is a free, digital companion chapter to Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (2013, an Arts Future Book with Gylphi Press). In the book, I argue that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways in which we experience embodiment as per-formed, relational, and emergent. I provide many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. I offer a critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms. Here bodies, matter, and their matters, are implicated as always unfolding and enfolded to make what is. At stake is the rehearsal of that making, the ways we perform our bodies, media, concepts, and materials.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 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.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 “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.

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0. ¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0
1. Introduction to an Experiment
2. It’s Not Really Autoethnographic, but OK
3. Approaching the Implicit
4. ‘Body-Language’
5. ‘Social-Anatomies’
6. ‘Flesh-Space’
7. Four years later
8. Bibliography

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¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 BIOGRAPHY: Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer, Fulbright 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 book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and his ongoing work in industry has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products and ideas. Stern 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, 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.” Dubbed one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel), Stern has been 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). According to Caleb A. Scharf at Scientific American, Stern’s art is “tremendous fun” but also “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.”