Body Language (2000 – 2013) is a suite of four interactive works that has us encounter some of the complex relationships between materiality and text. Each piece stages the experience and practice of bodies and language in a different way, enabling in-depth explorations of how they are always implicated across one another.  elicit invites viewers to perform the continuity between text and the body; enter effectively asks its participants to investigate how words and activity are inherently entwined; stuttering provokes its performers into exploring the labor and intimacy of embodied listening and communication; and scripted asks us to remember how the activities of writing, the shape and sound of language, are forever a part of the physical world.

For elicit, a poem in the computer’s memory is birthed, character by character, from every small or sweeping gesture participants make in front of a projection screen. It elicits fluidly animated text on screen as continuously shifting animations, which change in size, shape, direction and speed, in turn eliciting fluid performances from the work’s participants.

With enter, performers use their bodies to grab animated words that constantly run away from them on a large projection screen. Touch any one, and it stops, turns red, and recites spoken word in the space. The piece is inspired by JL Austin’s explanation of performative utterances, where statements such ‘I do’ (at a wedding), ‘I declare’ (as in war) or ‘I knight thee,’ make a change in the real world. Here participants literally use their bodies to chase after words, turn on a phrase, or reach (for) the end of a sentence. Their rapid and jerky styles amplify how saying and doing, affection and reflection, are often one and the same.

stuttering provokes its viewers into exploring the labor and intimacy of embodied communication, compelling them to stutter with their bodies. Here an invisible and asymmetrical projection grid is saturated with trigger points, each activating animated text and spoken word as our bodies cross its path. The saturation of these ‘virtual buttons’ creates an inverse relationship: move quickly, and the piece will itself stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage; move carefully, even cautiously – stutter with your body – and both meaning and bodies emerge.

And scripted uses 3D-tracking data to follow participants’ moving heads – forward and backward, right and left, in exaggerated and fully embodied gestures – and draws slowly fading, charcoal-like lines of these actions on screen. If and when any of the shapes we create resemble a character from the English alphabet (using the Palm Pilot “graffiti“ gestures), that letter will be temporarily overlaid in the projection in the standard Time font, accompanied by a John Cage-like oral recitation (“Aaaaah,” “Buh,” “Kkkkk,” and so on). Some letters are much more difficult to scribe than others, and many of the more complex characters contain echoes of simpler ones, in how we must move. The piece is less about accomplishing specific gestures, and more about encountering and rehearsing textual moving-thinking-feeling at large.

Body Language, as a collection of works, invites us to explore the reaches and limits of bodies and language, together, in order to better understand how they are formed, together. It poses a challenge to how bodies are mediated and re-mediated in contemporary culture by putting embodiment and signification on the same plane of existence. And finally, it implicitly asks what is at stake in how we perform our bodies and our media. It is so easy to forget the body – as continuously embodied – in our theorizations of ‘the body.’ Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that all language and writing require, first and foremost, bodies to produce them. And bodies, in turn, “take place neither in discourse nor matter” alone (Corpus, p 18).  Each of the four electronic installations in the Body Language exhibition uses the moving-thinking-feeling body as an interface with language and technology. They give us a number of different ways to investigate and perform precisely what bodies, as “an expression of meaning” (Sorial, p 224), can be.

video coming soon

scripted is one of four interactive installations in the Body Language suite. Here a Kinect uses 3D-tracking data to follow participants’ moving heads as if from above – forward and backward, right and left, in exaggerated and fully embodied activities – and draws unbroken and slowly fading, charcoal-like lines of these movements in a projection in front of them. If and when any of the shapes we create resemble a character from the English alphabet, that letter will be temporarily overlaid on the screen in the standard Times font, and is accompanied by a John Cage-like oral recitation (“Aaaaah,” “Buh,” “Kkkk,” and so on). Some letters are much more difficult to scribe than others, and many of the more complex characters contain echoes of simpler ones, in how we must move. The piece is less about accomplishing specific gestures, and more about encountering and rehearsing textual moving-thinking-feeling at large.

scripted asks participants to investigate Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of exscription, how the activities of writing and embodiment require one another. Nancy says that while we may not be able to produce any successful language or discourse that is ‘embodied’ as bodies are, we also fail to produce any discourse without the body already in it. Both inscription and exscription, language and bodies, are implicit in every-thing, every constitution, every action, every communication, every meaning and every text. Here writing becomes more than an abstraction, created by a hand and an eye. Writing is the site of the active body, and the body as a whole writes its own discourse.

According to Professor and catalog essayist Charlie Gere, the “strange word ‘exscription’ used here by Stern, and hinted at in the title of his piece, was coined by Nancy for his particular understanding of language, and means more than simply writing in the normally understood sense. It is the point of contact between impenetrable matter and bodily sense, and between bodily sense and linguistic signification. Here we might think of the process by which those who encounter Stern’s artworks interact with them, making them make sense sensorily. Participants accidentally write (letters), or often pursue and fail to write (letters or otherwise), with and as bodies, which are also written. Their movements and writings leave marks that both continue and fade away. They shuffle their feet, lean from the head and waist and neck, to scribble lines and texts and bodies, both readable and unreadable. They feel the sound and shape and texture of scripting as they interact.”

video coming soon

‘Surfacing’ at Lynden Sculpture Garden
This article by Diane Bacha appeared in both the online and print editions of the MJS

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern, colleagues at the Peck School of the Arts, took their kids on a trip to the Milwaukee County Zoo one day and came back with an idea for a collaboration. That was three collaborations ago, and they don’t plan to stop.

I can only imagine the conversation that day at the zoo. I am picturing a continuous loop of ideas and theory interrupted by chatter with the kids and pauses to watch the polar bear play. They would have been two families walking at various paces, passing groups moving in other directions, everyone having different conversations about different things while the animals moved in their enclosures. In the background the sky and clouds had their own rhythm. It’s a familiar scene at one glance, but there’s a lot happening on closer inspection. And that’s the way this collaborative work feels: a layering of experiences, moments, ideas, and intersections that teeter between mundane and complex.

Stern is a video and installation artist and Meuninck-Ganger is a printmaker. Although any description of what they do requires asterisks – their work doesn’t exist in silos – their collaboration draws on those specific disciplines, then veers.

“Surfacing” is their latest installation together, and it’s at the Lynden Sculpture Garden until March 24. In it, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger continue their fascinating exercise in layering printmaking and video one atop the other. Each of the six pieces in the small Lynden gallery is a framed, rear-projected video over which has been laid a translucent editioned print or, in one case, a drawing. The viewer sees a static black picture in the foreground and moving, color images in the background. The static image on the skin is taken from a moment or multiple moments occurring in the video beneath.

“Pantograph” uses transportation to convey the idea of layered moments. It’s four minutes in the life of a city intersection where rail, automotive, bicycle and foot traffic converge. The static image is a collection of moments from the traffic – an electric railroad car entering the frame at right, a woman guiding some children at left, a row of automobiles cutting through the middle. As you watch, moving images interact in conflict or harmony with the still image. “Midst” is seemingly less complex: the video depicts a man doing tai-chi exercises on a waterfront, his movements barely visible beneath a woodcut. In this case, a dragon’s form on the static woodcut introduces an element outside the literal. 3-D interpretations of the original woodcut hang on each side of the framed piece. Still more layers.

Other pieces depict a bowling ball striking pins, the Allen-Bradley clock tower, another street scene, and two seated subway-car passengers with their backs to each other. The video loops range in time from 15 seconds to 5 minutes.

Where Stern’s video ends and Meuninck-Ganger’s printmaking begins is fuzzy, since the two have traded off roles depending on the piece. They want to blur the lines between individual contributions and also between the two media. The image applied to the video gives the video a new meaning, and vice-versa. Each is a singular experience – neither video nor print but a distinct hybrid.

Someone viewing this work for the first time might not see it that way. You find yourself fascinated by the technique, so you’re aware of it and you’re trying to figure out its trick – when will the images line up with each other? Is there something I’m supposed to see when it does? Are there other sleights-of-art to watch for? And why was this particular moment chosen as the static image?

Then there is the blending of old media and new and all that’s implied with that. There is the idea of time stopped (perhaps a memory) and time looped (perhaps an obsession). One thinks of the “key block / color block” elements of traditional printmaking. And of the endless possibilities of a particular moment in time, and how few of those possibilities we usually perceive.

What are we to make of these images as a whole? Is it a fable about patience? About being watchful for the beauty in mundane moments? Each piece is different enough in tone, context and even technique that the overall experience doesn’t feel cohesive.

Ultimately, what I found most rewarding with “Surface” was the meditative experience it offered when I let my questions go. It was akin to finding a park bench to watch the world go by. Like most times I’ve spent on a park bench, it takes a while for me to empty my mind and just observe. The rewards come throughout the process, not just at one moment.

Adjacent to the exhibition space, in a porch whose windows overlook the snow-covered sculpture garden, there’s a lovely echo of this experience. The artists have created an installation here by using the windows as a membrane covering the landscape outside. Images drawn on the windows repeat static elements of the landscape in the same way they do on the framed pieces. This time, the movement comes from whatever happens outside randomly, but also from the viewer who changes position to discover visual alignments and misalignments. In a nice interactive touch, the artists have invited visitors to add their own images to the glass.

Meuninck-Ganger and Stern offer up a beautiful opportunity to shift our way of seeing. It is a more conscious way of seeing, to be sure. How often does that happen in the Age of Attention Deficit? The possibilities are exciting.

read the entire article online
print edition scan coming soon

Scanning the Artscape
Five artists on the rise in the cream city
by Tory Folliard with Christine Anderson; portraits by Dan Bishop

Milwaukee’s Third Ward has been named one of America’s Top Twelve Art Places 2013, which recognizes neighborhoods in the largest 44 metropolitan areas in the country where the arts are central to the social and economic vibrancy of a neighborhood. Even with a flourishing art scene and a wealth of talented artists — in the Third Ward and beyond — many artists still remain unknown to most Milwaukeeans. Here are five artists to watch chosen by Milwaukee art curators….

“I believe that art can change what we see and do, and are.”
— Nathaniel Stern, Milwaukee: Interactive, Installation and Video Art | nathanielstern.com

Curator: Graeme Reid, assistant director of the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
“Stern is one of the most creative, articulate, imaginative artists in the state and, frankly, the country. He should be an international art star. Actually, he is! I can’t think of too many other artists in the state who are building a similar resumé.”

Back Story: The former New Yorker has an impressive resumé of exhibitions and awards from all over the world. (He recently exhibited in January in Johannesburg, South Africa.)

Stern’s interactive art often centers on bodily performances. In his current “Compression” series of prints he straps a laptop and desktop scanner to his body and performs “images into existence.”

Moving his body while he scans the landscape around him, Stern creates images that are later made into prints. He is an associate professor of art and design at the Peck School of the Arts at UW-Milwaukee. His work is on exhibit locally at Lynden Sculpture Garden in a collaborative piece with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger.

Download full / print article (PDF, 1.5mbs)

The 8′oclock Buzz: Interactive Artist, Nathaniel Stern, Is On The Web And Out In Space

Interactive artist, Nathaniel Stern, joined the 8 O’Clock Buzz on Monday, February 25, 2013, to talk with host, Brian Standing, about some of his collaborative web art.

This past year Nathaniel Stern and collaborator, Scott Kildall, took to the stars with a galactic proportioned project, Tweets In Space. Using a high powered satellite they beamed Twitter discussions from all over the world to GJ667Cc – A planet 22 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life.

Stern also got the chance to talk about Wikipedia Art. An online intervention on the Wikipedia website that challenged the way Wikipedia determines what is useful information. Posted by the artists (Stern and collaborator Kildall), the page stated, “Wikipedia Art is a conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia, and is thus art that anyone can edit.”

What the artists didn’t expect was Wikipedia to sue them over copyright infringement and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to publically call the artists “trolls,” later apologizing over facebook to Stern after the lawsuit brought negative attention towards Wikipedia.

Download this interview (mp3, 10mbs) or listen below:

Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s unique distill life artworks consist of two-dimensional prints and drawings overlaid on continuously looping videos, creating “moving images on paper.” Surfacing, their solo exhibition at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, displays six pieces from the series, as well as a participatory and dynamic print installation of the same name. Here the duo places translucent fabric across the windows of the Lynden’s front porch, and invites viewers to both draw what they see, and engage in different and ever-shifting perspectives as they move. Says Peggy Sue Dunigan on expressmilwaukee.com, “Interior and exterior images are juxtaposed when the viewer looks through the semi-transparent artworks to the modern sculptures in the park beyond.”

Where the video matrix and printed image align and mis-align in the artists’ looping video works, with Surfacing the landscape and drawn image cohere differently as any viewer traverses its space, and thus moves the relation between them. This installation continues Stern and Meuninck-Ganger’s experimental work that lives between prints, drawings, time-based and participatory media. The editioned distill life works first premiered, alongside several others, as part of Dynamic Stasis.

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern continue their unique prints and drawings mounted to video screens, creating ‘moving images on paper.’ This ongoing series explores matter, media, materials, and their entanglements with the arts and sciences, as forces that continuously transform and mobilize one another. Here new and traditional techniques and technologies mediate their own and others’ forms and meanings, together. With Dynamic Stasis, our now-familiar hybrid style of working finds greater depth, through the relation of multiple surfaces. This exhibition, from 26 January – 16 February 2013, premieres 14 new pieces that culminated from an online residency with GALLERY AOP, and features a catalog with essay by renowned media theorist Richard Grusin.

Video Documentation

All photos by Jessica Kaminski and video documentation shot and edited by Brian James McGuire.

Exhibition Catalogue and Videos

Title: Dynamic Stasis / Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Essay: Richard Grusin
Design: Andrew McConville and Jeff Ganger
Photos: Jessica Kaminski
Documentation Videos: Brian James McGuire
Publisher: Gallery AOP, Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Date of Publication: 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-620-55064-2
Download Dynamic Stasis as PDF (6 mb)
Available from Gallery AOP, Johannesburg

Tweets in Space event blasts off without a hitch
by Kris Holt, October 2012

During an event held at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall captured all tweets using the #tweetsinspace hashtag over a half-hour period. In  a few short weeks, the duo will beam the hundreds of messages they received to GJ667Cc, a planet some 22 light years away that has the capacity to support life.

Around 1,500 tweets (approximately one per second) were sent during the performance period, and the “vibe was intense, inviting, and provocative all at once,” Stern and Kildall told the Daily Dot.

The team behind the project considered the event a big success, with the tweets ranging from simple greetings to aliens and asking for photos of “triple-star sunsets,” to worries about the destruction of Earth and questioning extraterrestrial social and economic systems.

“All those voices together existentially express an inordinate amount of wonder and fear, curiosity and happiness, hope and cynicism, and more,” Stern and Kildall wrote in an email. “They perform several dozens snapshots, many threads of thought and conversation and potential, in all of our humanity. We’ve very humbled by the experience.”

Stern and Kildall had indicated they would not include any tweets that used hate speech in the transmission, which is set to take place within the next view weeks at a Florida facility as GJ667Cc comes into clearer view. While they’re still trawling through all the tweets, they have not yet found any that will be excluded.

Some analysis run on the tweets sent by the community during the performance period revealed that outside of the terms “tweet,” “space,” and articles like “the” and “an,” the two most commonly used words were “please” and “love.”

“Hello,” “here,” “help,” and “peace” were among the other most popular words used, suggesting a deep yearning to make contact with aliens and understand more about their cultures.

Stern noted that he wasn’t sure of his favorite tweets to emerge from the event, but noted some “gems” recorded in the first few moments:

“Also, do you guys do mind-altering things?  My favorite is a delicious form of ethanol made from wheat; a species of plant. #tweetsinspace.” —@cvburkett

“Attention, alien scum. I declare Space War. Please meet me in the car park at the Yorkshire Grey branch of McDonald’s. #tweetsinspace” —@cjjc

“#TweetsInSpace DEATH TO EARTH. ERADICATE THE PLANET. ALIENS, USE THE EARTH’S REMAINS AS AN APHRODISIAC.” —@JackedCunning

Photos via Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

On The Daily Dot

Tweets in Space, a collaboration with Scott Kildall, beams Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life. We originally performed this work on September 21st 2012, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico (ISEA2012).

During the 30-minute performance, we collected all tweets with our custom #tweetsinspace tag. More than 50 press articles – including the NY Daily News, BBC, Time, Wired and Scientific American – led to worldwide participation, where we gathered over 1500 texts, about 1 tweet per second.

These messages ranged from simple greetings to aliens, to worries about the destruction of Earth, to questions of extraterrestrial social and economic systems. Together and as a people, we asked questions, requested photos, and begged forgiveness for humanity’s flaws. In the various threads of ongoing conversation, the most commonly used words (other than articles like ‘the’) were please and love, followed by hello, here, help, and peace. All these voices together express existential feelings of wonder and fear, curiosity and happiness, hope and cynicism, and more.

Tweets in Space creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts to everywhere and nowhere. This wasn’t just a public performance; here, we performed a public.

On November 28th, 2012, all Tweets in Space messages were transmitted via both analog and digital signals towards our target planet, using a high amplitude, high frequency radio telescope. These “twitters” are stretched across all time and space as a reflection on the contemporary phenomenon of the “status” updates we broadcast, both literal and metaphoric. Our stellar discussion will outlive all its original participants, endlessly reverberating themes of connectivity, humility, and optimism for the future.

For more information and a complete press list, visit tweetsinspace.org

Romantic or Reckless? The Plan to Message Aliens with Twitter
By Jason Kehe

If you’ve ever pondered what you would say to an alien, you may get that chance between 7:30 and 8 p.m. PT tonight.

That’s the goal of Tweets in Space, a project — sorry, “performance art piece” — by two guys with starry, starry eyes. As part of this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern will spend 30 minutes capturing every tweet with the hashtag #tweetsinspace for later transmission into the (much) wider Twitterverse.

Using a radio transmitter in Florida, they plan to beam our messages to GJ667Cc, an exoplanet that might, just maybe, possibly, have the required attributes that would allow it to theoretically support life (as we know it). Four to six weeks after Friday’s event, the planet will move into alignment (just barely) with the transmitter. And that’s when Kildall and Stern, a multimedia artist and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will hit send.

“It all goes,” says Kildall, the new media exhibit developer for the Exploratorium. “Even political positions I don’t agree with: ‘Vote for Romney,’ ‘Vote for Obama.’” (All except hate speech, he added. We might not want to betray our baser nature to the ETs.)

But it’s a long shot in more ways than one. The target is 22 light-years away. That means 44 years minimum before we know if they’ve succeeded.

If there’s even a chance. Reality check, say radio astronomers: There isn’t. “We have absolutely no hope of actually being heard,” said James Benford, founder of Microwave Sciences and longtime skeptic of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He did the math for Wired. With the Deep Space Communications Network’s Florida dish, which is small and low-power by industry standards, the signal might be detectable up to seven times the distance to Pluto, assuming the aliens have the same technology we do.

“That’s nowhere,” Benford said. “That’s not getting anywhere near interstellar distances.”

But Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, says it’s theoretically possible that the theoretical aliens on the target planet could pick up the signal from Florida. “If they have a receiver the size of Nebraska, then they can pick this up,” he said. “You have to hope the aliens have spent more money on their antennas than we have on ours.” (Incidentally, a receiver the size of Nebraska would cost in the hundreds of billions. In U.S. dollars, that is. “What’s your currency/exchange rate, aliens? #tweetsinspace”)

What’s more, most astronomers put the estimate for nearest ETI at no fewer than hundreds of light years away, and it’s probably closer to thousands. Twenty-two would be miraculous. We’d have far better odds of floating a message in a bottle from San Francisco to China.

But even if their project’s more stunt than sound science, Kildall and Stern are (unintentionally) participating in an ongoing, still-controversial debate: whether or not we should be actively messaging aliens in the first place. Could it endanger Earth and the fate of mankind? That’s not such a kooky, far-out question. People like Benford, along with sci-fi author David Brin, UCLA professor and best-selling author Jared Diamond, and Stephen Hawking, have argued for years that we should be sitting silently in our cosmic corner, biding our time and weighing risk factors before we go flamboyantly yoo-hooing to the entire universe.

If the aliens are sufficiently advanced to receive and translate our messages, shouldn’t we be afraid they’d also have the technology to warp to our location, eat our children, and blow up this precious planet?

The other camp, which includes the SETI Institute and the historically optimistic, pro-METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Russians, argues that we’ve already given away our position a thousand times over, thanks to decades of signal leakage. As Shostak put it, “If they’re looking our way, they will already know.” So we might as well continue. Heck, we might as well start sending them everything. Encyclopedias! Beatles songs! The Google server!

Benford disagrees. In a recent paper, he showed that no signal, not now or 50 years ago, could ever be detected by ETI. That doesn’t mean the prospect of METI doesn’t worry him. In a century, we’ll have the technology (and plenty of bored trillionnaires to fund it) to build radio transmitters big and powerful enough to send detectable messages. Just as likely, Benford says, we’ll be sending energy to and from satellites, a practice that could considerably brighten Earth’s position in the cosmos. The thought worries him. He wants us to stay dark and silent. At least until we know better.

The conversation continues. Shostak is publishing a paper now on whether transmissions to space are dangerous. (“No,” in brief.) Benford is similarly engaged from the other side. The two men, though old colleagues, can still be heard gleefully bad-mouthing each other, both privately and in public forums.

Though Kildall and Stern remain optimistic that their Tweets in Space have a chance of succeeding — they believe they have better odds at this than winning the lottery — they also allow for occasional moments of realism. “It’s working with potential and imagination, rather than actuality,” Kildall eventually conceded.

Shostak, for one, has no problem with projects like this, of which there’ve been a few in recent years. He sees it as an introspective exercise. “It’s interesting not for the aliens. It’s interesting for us,” he said. “What do people want to say?”

Find out tonight. Or don’t. The aliens will never know. We think.

On wired.com

Friday night, Twitter destroys the Earth
By Alexandra Petri

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in tweets. (KIMIHIRO HOSHINO – AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Well, humans, it’s been nice knowing you.

If you have not heard, from 10:30 to 11 PM ET Friday night, theTweets in Space project is capturing all tweets with the hashtag “#tweetsinspace” in order to send them, via a Florida transmitter, into the Vast Beyond. Tweets to space? There goes our welcome in the universe.

The transmitter is, admittedly, weak. As Seth Shostak told Wired Science, the aliens on the Potentially Habitable Planet at which they’re aiming the signal would have to have “a radio receiver the size of Nebraska.” It would be just our luck if the aliens are the kind of bizarre radio hobbyists who have decided that this is exactly what they need.

And I hope they aren’t.

Because otherwise, we are not long for this world.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Twitter. It enables me to inflict my quotidian musings on dozens of people I’ve never met!

But imagine the responses of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life on first receiving these messages.

The first few minutes would be joy and excitement. “Intelligent life!” they would mutter to themselves, gathering around the Nebraska-shaped receiver. “Gee, they sure love puns!”

A few minutes later, fatigue would set in. “Gee, they sure love puns,” someone else would say. A hush would ensue.

“That’s more information than I really wanted about that,” someone else would say.

Several tweets consisting only of “RT This if you believe in BIEBER!!!!! #tweetsinspace” “Send One Direction to Exoplanet GJ667Cc!” would come flying through.

“Please don’t,” the extraterrestrials would murmur, summoning a Death Star to our neighborhood.

A few minutes of Twitter are bearable. But half an hour of it, as your first taste of humanity? The mind boggles.

But there’s still time. There is a decent crowd of scientists who maintain that getting in touch with space aliens is not a good idea. Don’t call them, they say. Wait for them to call you. Of course, as Stephen Hawking has noted, any aliens getting into touch with us would probably be a bad sign. Generally, when one group of individuals has massive technological capabilities and the other produces little of interest besides parodies of “Call Me Maybe” and “Gangnam Style,” it goes badly for the second group. Just ask the ancient Mayans, known for their parody video craftsmanship. We can still stop this.

In “War of the Worlds,” the Martians did the most dreadful things that they could think of. They trampled the earth, setting fire to our vegetation. They made hideous noises. They even sank the Thunderchild.

But they had the basic humanity (martianity?) not to subject us to a full half-hour of barely filtered Twitter.

I don’t want our first impression in space to be a bunch of people making limp puns about Mitt Romney’s tax returns. It seems wrong. It is this sort of nagging consideration that makes me unwelcome at parties. I know the intent is to send a message. In this case the message is, “Nope, there isn’t intelligent life in our corner of the universe.”

Right now, Twitter is a mildly irritating terrestrial cross to bear.

But let it slip the surly bonds of Earth and — I shudder to think what will happen. Although the one advantage of this is that the data will take, at best, 22 years to get there, meaning that it will be 44 years from today before we know the extent of the damage. So go out and live your life. And get off Twitter. It may be our only hope.

On washingtonpost.com

At Issue with Ben Merens on Monday, September 10, 2012 at 3:00 PM on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio.

What would you say to an alien that lived on a planet 22 light years away? Could you say it in 140 characters or less? An upcoming performance at the International Symposium on Electronic Art will collect your tweets and then send them to a specific planet far, far away. This hour, we get the details of the project and hear what YOU would tweet into outer space. Keep it short.

Guests: Nathaniel Stern, Assistant Professor of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin-­Milwaukee and Scott Kildall, Independent artist based in San Francisco.

Download 1-hour WPR interview (mp3)

Tweets in Space: An interview with Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern
By Marc Garrett

Marc Garrett: Could you explain to our readers what ‘Tweets In Space’ is?

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern: Tweets in Space is an art project — a networked performance event — which beams your Twitter messages to a nearby exoplanet that might support human-like, biological life. Anyone with an Internet connection can Tweet with the hashtag #tweetsinspace during the performance time, and their messages will be included in our shotgun blast to the stars. The performance is on September 21st, 20:30 – 21:00 Mountain Time (3:30 AM BST / London time).

MG: What was the motivation behind your current collaboration?

SK and NS: We found inspiration from various sources. First, in NASA’s Kepler mission, whose purpose is to discover planets in the “habitable” or “Goldilocks” zone. The project has found over 2000 exoplanets thus far, all of which are “not too hot, not too cold, but just right” for life as we know it. Scientists now estimate that there are at least 500 million planets like this in the Milky Way alone. Our conclusion: extraterrestrial life is almost certainly out there.

             The newly discovered planet is depicted in this artist’s conception, showing the host star
                            as part of a triple-star system. Image credit: Carnegie Institution / UCSC. [1]

“The latest discovery is at least 4.5 times bigger in size than Earth. Reportedly, the planet exists 22 lightyears away from Earth and it orbits its star every 28 days. The planet is known to lie, in what is being referred to as the star’s habitable zone. A habitable zone is a place where the existing conditions are just perfect for life sustenance. Astronomers, according to this report also suspect that the GJ667Cc may have been made out of earth-like rock, instead of gas.” [ibid]

Another source of great inspiration is how we use social media here on Earth. This is our second, large-scale, Internet-initiated collaboration. In 2009, we amplified the power structures and personalities on Wikipedia, and questioned how knowledge is formed on the world’s most-often used encyclopedia – and thus the web and world at large. Now, we are turning to the zeitgeist of information and ideas, feelings and facts, news and tidbits, on Twitter. The project focuses on and magnifies the supposed shallowness of 140-character messages, alongside the potential depth of all of them – what we say in online conversation, as a people.

We are directing our gaze, or rather tweets, via a high-powered radio telescope, towards GJ667Cc – one of the top candidates for alien life. It is part of a triple-star system, has a mass that is about 4 times that of Earth, and orbits a dwarf star at close range. GJ667Cc most certainly has liquid water, an essential component for the kind of life found on our own planet.

MG: Right from its early years when Jagadish Chandra Bose [2], pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics – science, technology and art have had strong crossovers. And it might be worth mentioning here that Bose was not only well versed as a physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist, he was also an early writer of science fiction. [3] Which, brings us back to ‘Tweets In Space’, wherein lies themes relating to science fiction, radio broadcasting (commercial, independent and pirate), wireless technology of the everyday via our computers, and ‘of course’ the Internet.

J.C. Bose at the Royal Institution, London, 1897.[3]

But, what I want to pin down here is, where do you feel you fit in historically and artistically with other past and contemporary artists, whose creative art works also involved explorations through electromagnetic waves?

Scot Kildall: The work of JC Bose is incredible and what strikes me is that he eschewed the single-inventor capitalist lifestyle in favor of his own experiments. Isn’t this the narrative that artists (often) take and linked back in many ways to the open-source/sharing movement, rather than the litigious patent-based corporation? And it mirrors in many ways the reception of electromagnetic radiation as well. You can’t really “own” the airwaves. Anyone who is listening can pick up the signal. This comes back, as you point out, to the internet. Twitter is now, one of the vehicles, and, ironically entirely owned by a benevolent* corporation.

Nathaniel Stern: (Agreeing with Scott) and we can’t forget of course Nam June Paik, who played with naturally occurring and non-signal based electromagnetic fields to interfere with analogical signals (as well as the actual hardware) of tube televisions, and more. And of course, there have been other transmission artists, explored in depth by free103point9, among others. I think, like them and others, we are messing with the media, amplifying (figuratively and metaphorically) and intervening, pushing the boundaries of DIY and cultural ethico-aesthetic questions…

                                           1963, Nam June Paik réalise Zen devant la tv.

MG: What is especially interesting is that all the tweets submitted by the public are unfiltered. How important is it to you that people’s own messages are not censored when going into space?

SK and NS: Absolutely. Tweets in Space is by no means the first project to transmit cosmic messages with METI technologies (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Our fellow earthlings have sent songs by the Beatles, photos of ourselves shopping at supermarkets, images of national flags, and even a gold record inscribed with human forms – controversially, where the man has genitals and the woman doesn’t. These slices of hand-picked content exhibit what a select few believe to be important, but ignore, or willfully exclude, our varied and collective modes of thinking and being.

Tweets in Space is “one small step” with alien communications, in that it is open to anyone with an Internet connection. It thus represents millions of voices rather than a self-selected few. More than that, our project is a dialog. There have been, very recently, a small number of projects that similarly “democratize the universe” but none are like ours: uncurated, unmediated thoughts and responses from a cooperative public. We can speak, rebut, and conclude, and nothing is left out. Our transmission will contain the good, the bad, and the provocative, the proclamations, the responses, and the commentary, together, a “giant leap” for all of humankind – as well as our soon-to-be friends.

                               Part of the radio-wave transmission prototype delivery system devised by 
                         engineering students for the Tweets In Space project. (Photo by Nathaniel Stern)

Furthermore, by limiting the event to a small window of only 30 minutes, we are encouraging all our participants to speak then respond, conversing with one another in real-time, through networked space. We are not just sending lone tweets, but beaming a part of the entire dialogical Twitterverse, as it creates and amplifies meaning. Tweets in Space is more than a “public performance” – it “performs a public.”

MG: Now, you will be transmitting real-time tweets toward the exoplanet GJ667Cc, which is 22 light-years away. How long will it all take to get there?

SK and NS: Well, first off, we’re collecting all of the tweets in real time, but only sending them out later in October. The main reason for this is that we have to wait for the planets to align – literally. We want line of sight with GJ667Cc from where our dish is. The added bonus of time, however, is that this will allow us to really flesh out how we send the messages in a bundle. We want to include a kind of Rosetta Stone, where we will not only send binary ASCII codes of text in our signal, but also analog images of the text itself. We additionally intend to choose the most frequently used nouns in all the tweets from our database, then give a kind of “key” for each. If “dog” is common, for example, we can transmit: 1. an analog image of a dog, like a composite signal from a VCR; 2. a text image of the word “dog” in the same format; and 3. the binary ASCII code for the word dog.

In terms of time/distance, when speaking in light years, these are the same thing. A light year is the distance light can travel in one year of Earth time (about 9.4605284 × 10 to the 15 meters). Since radio travels at the speed of light, a big dish on GJ667Cc will pick up the signal in 22 years. We should start listening for a response in 44 – though it may take them a while to get back to us…

MG: Will the code used for the project be open source, and if so, when and where can people expect to use it?

SK and NS: Yes it is! The most useful part of our code is the #collector, which saves real-time tweets to a database, that can then be used for live projections or web sites, or accessed and sorted later via all kinds of info. The problem is that it’s not really user friendly or out of the box – folks need a suped up server (VPN), and to plug into a few other open source wares. The main portion of the backend we used is actually already available at 140dev.com, and then we plugged that into Drupal, among other things. For now, we’re telling interested parties to contact our coder, Chris Butzen, if they want to use our implementation. And we hope to do public distribution on tweetsinspace.org if we are able to package it in a more usable format in the next 6 months.

MG: Are there any messages collected so far, grabbing your attention?

We’ve had thousands of tweets so far – even while just testing the ware in preparation for the performance. We’re anticipating a lot of participation! The tweets we’ve seen have ranged from variations on “hello [other] world” and “don’t eat us,” to political activism and negative commentary, to a whole surreal narrative of about 30 tweets per day over the last 3 months.

Furtherfield’s first Tweet in Space.

go to tweet aliens to add your own words…

Some of our favorite tweets have been those that question how to make our own world better. These speak to both the hope of space age-ike technology, as well as the hope in collective dialog – both of which our project tries to amplify. Such tweeters ask about the alien planet’s renewable energy sources, tax structures, education, art, and more.

We imagine the 30-minute performance will see a much more potent discussion about such things, and hope your readers will participate. The final transmission will be archived permanently on our site once we’ve prepared it for launch.

Notes & References:

How to Take Part.

As part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico (ISEA2012). We will collect your tweets and transmit them into deep space via a high-powered radio messaging system. Our soon-to-be alien friends might receive unmediated thoughts and responses about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between. By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them into the larger Universe, Tweets in Space activates a potent conversation about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding.http://tweetsinspace.org/

AND THEY WILL BE SENT INTO DEEP SPACE!!!
Watch the stream LIVE here - http://tweetsinspace.org

[1] New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby star. Tim Stephens. University of Santa Cruz. February 02, 2012. http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/02/habitable-planet.html

[2] Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Real Inventor of Marconi’s Wireless Receiver Varun Aggarwal, Div. Of Electronics and Comm. Engg. NSIT, Delhi, India. PDF. http://tinyurl.com/8bhjbup

[3] Jagadish Chandra Bose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose

See original interview in context: Tweets in Space: An interview with Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

Your tweets, beamed across the universe
by Shweta Sharma

It was Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sci-fi movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that acquainted most of us with life beyond earth. Closer home, it was Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya (2003). Experimenting on the possibilities of alien existence, NASA scientists have tried to discover planets in the ‘habitable’ zone. Succeeding in finding over 2,000 exoplanets (a planet outside the solar system), all of which are ‘not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life’ — raised possibilities of ET or Jadoo’s existence.

Taking cues from such discoveries and combining it with the proliferation of Twitter on Earth, two performance artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall have conceptualised Tweets in Space, a networked-performance event that beams Twitter messages to a nearby exoplanet that might support human-like, biological life.

“The project beams Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life. Simply add #tweetsinspace to your texts during performance time. We will collect your tweets and transmit them into deep space via a high-powered radio messaging system. Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive unmediated thoughts and responses about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between,” says Stern.

Aimed at activating a conversation about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders, the tweets will be transmitted into space on 22 September between 8-8.30am IST (10:30-11pm EST). The live projections will happen at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico. The duo state that this performance differs from every past alien transmission as “It’s not only a public performance, it is a real-time conversation between hopeful peers sending their thoughts to everywhere and nowhere”.

“Anyone with an Internet connection can Tweet, and their messages will be included in our shotgun blast to the stars. We are directing our gaze, or rather tweets, via a high-powered radio telescope, towards GJ667Cc – one of the top candidates for alien life. It is part of a triple-star system, has a mass that is about four times that of Earth, and orbits a dwarf star at close range. It most certainly has liquid water, an essential component for the kind of life found on our own planet,” explains Kildall.

Currently, a one-time event, the duo is excited about initiating conversations with alien life, so that “we can transmit a dialogue between humans to deep space”.

reading in context: Your tweets, beamed across the universe

Artists and National Geographic both race to space
This article by Mary Louise Schumacher appeared in both the online and print editions of the MJS

When I heard the news, a scene from “The Right Stuff” flashed to mind, the one with a young Jeff Goldblum sprinting down the halls of power, bursting into a darkened room of bureaucrats to announce “They’ve got a man up there! It’s Gagarin!”Like the Cold War-era competition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., two independent artists recently found themselves in a rivalry with National Geographic for supremacy in space. This particular space race, though, is about sending the Twitterverse into the universe.

We reported recently that two artists, including one from Milwaukee, planned to dispatch a multitude of tweets to the stars, more specifically to GJ667Cc – the closest Earth-like planet, 20 light years away.

After our initial report, the story was picked up around the globe, by Scientific American, the New York Daily News, Time, Forbes, the Daily Mail, BBC and others. Then, the artists were contacted by NatGeo. They, too, had precisely the same plan, to send tweets spaceward as a way to promote a new television series Chasing UFOs.

I’m not sure who’s Russia in this analogy, but I’m thinking it’s NatGeo, since it is bigger and about to be first, too. The artists, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall, had announced their plans first but their scheduled lift-off was slated for September, during the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, while National Geographic planned its launch for late June.

In the race for space, being first is everything, and the artists felt a little like the Americans caught off guard by Yuri Gagarin’s surprise orbit in ’61. Instead of chilly diplomacy, though, National Geographic and the artists decided to work together to send 140-character bursts of texts into deep space.

National Geographic licensed the artists’ custom Twitter software and made their “Tweets in Space” project a partner. National Geographic will use the software to collect tweets with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs from 8 p.m. to midnight Eastern time the night of the new series premiere, June 29. They will then beam a digital package containing those tweets into deep space.

Then, the artists’ project “Tweets in Space” will go forward as planned, too. Stern and Kildall will gather tweets tagged #tweetsinspace between 8:30 and 9 p.m. Mountain time on Sept. 21 and project them into space during a live performance at the 18th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Albuquerque.

It’s a purposefully short window, they say. The artists are hoping that participants will consider not only what they’d want to say to aliens perhaps inhabiting the exoplanet, one of the closest planets that some say could support biological life, but to engage with each other, too. The idea is to send a conversation to the cosmos.

“Tweets in Space asks us to take a closer look at our spectacular need to connect, perform and network with others,” the artists state on the website for the project. “It creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts to everywhere and nowhere.”

The artists say they see their project and National Geographic’s as benefiting each other. They are “two conceptual frames, two performances, two transmissions, and two different destinations.” With the help of National Geographic, the art project is closer to meeting its fundraising goals, too. They are raising funds at Rockethub until Monday.

Stern is an artist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Kildall is a San Francisco-based cross-disciplinary artist. They were also the initiators of the Wikipedia Art project, a public artwork initially composed on Wikipedia.

[videos created by the artists and National Geographic to explain their projects.]

read the entire article online
see it in the print edition

Exhibition Catalog

Title: 22 Premio Internacional de Gráfica Máximo Ramos 2012
Writer and curator: Anne Heyvaert
Publisher: Centro Torrente Ballester
Date of Publication: 2012
Language: Spanish and English
Download as PDF (3.8mb)
Available from Centro Torrente Ballester

The PACkers is an imagined double homicide between two political opponents – Nathaniel Stern and Calvin Whitehurst - incited by their Super PACs. These physical objects literalize the absurdity of mainstream political discourse in present-day USA. We hope they give us pause in how we consider the accusations of politicians and their media, and what we allow across them.

“This series of objects documents the horror story of American hero Nathaniel Stern’s descent into madness – at the hands of MARN mayoral opponent Calvin Whitehurst, and the egregious lies of his Super PAC. The Stern for The Future, Unlimited (STFU) Foundation has, in a rare collaboration, teamed up with Whitehurst Timely Futures (WTF) to promote a fair and free and civil political discourse. We at STFU are pleased that WTF is finally coming to the table on such matters, and hope their past behaviors can finally be answered for, and put behind us.” – STFU

“This small exhibition represents a failed attempt to partner with the Stern for the Future Unlimited (STFU) Foundation in the creation of an unbiased look at the truly curious and tragic murder of Calvin Whitehurst at the hands of Nathaniel Stern. The Whitehurst Timely Futures (WTF) was intentionally censored by STFU repeatedly during the creation of this display and thus some facts contained within remain skewed and sometimes completely false. The narrative that is presented here does not necessarily represent the views of WTF, Calvin Whitehurst, or the surviving Whitehurst family.” – WTF

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Playing in the background of the installation was sound from the Stern-Whitehurst Riot (mp3):
Mobile phone recording during the famed Stern-Whitehurst riot of 2012. Edward Knoll killed Stern’s cat, Snickers, in front of his human companion. Enraged, Stern broke free and used Knoll’s own Whitehurst Bowie knife to stab both him and Whitehurst. Whitehurst shot Stern in the head before being rushed to the hospital, where he passed away 3 hours later.