Hello, Mirror!
Nathaniel Stern here: artist, writer, teacher, dad of 5. I make eco, generative, and interactive art, video poetry, glitch, and networked performance (among other things). I’ve been a digital artist for 20+ years, and have lived online at nathanielstern.com for longer than that (lots of art and press over there…). In crypto world, I am probably best known for Custodianship, Copyright, and Provenance: on the non-monetary value of NFTs, an article I wrote on my own web site last year, and the NFT Culture Proof blockchain performance in late 2021, with collaborator Scott Kildall. (I’ve got various other NFTs and more on my version of a linktree.)
With this first Mirror post, I’m writing around “sustainable art, about sustainability.” First, I’ll briefly share a bit about my IRL museum exhibition, The World After Us, which invites viewers to personally, systemically, and creatively invest in greener technological futures. Second, I’ll write about my new venture, Eco Labs - with co-founders Samantha Tan and Sev Nightingale - including our brief history and vision. Third, I’ll tie these together in discussing our first drops and actions! And finally, as a kind of “below the fold,” I’ll share the video of my ~20-minute (plus 15 minutes of Q&A) Creative Mornings talk - which goes into more depth with The World After Us - to open discussion around ecological practices, both on- and off-chain.
I hope some of you will consider joining the Eco Labs discord and/or supporting our work in the coming months. As they say, LFG.
Per the 7-minute documentary above, The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures is a traveling solo exhibition of sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration. They take the forms of: a wall-hung jungle of computer detritus and biological reclamation; fossilized and reconfigured phones and laptops; and reimagined and re-formed electronics.
The show asks:
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 premiered at the Museum of Wisconsin Art | Downtown in the St Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from January - March 2020, and is now traveling to the Binghamton University Art Museum from January - March 2022. It transforms what we discard so as to rethink conversations, thoughts, and actions around media production, use, and waste.
In 2018 alone, more than one and a half billion mobile phones were sold worldwide. That’s more than four million sold per day, and doesn’t include the produced but unsold phones that will eventually also become waste. Add chargers, watches, and tablets, laptops and desktops, and more: it’s terrifying. And the waste we make when we dig up raw materials and produce these gadgets is even worse.
The World Without Us most fundamentally asks: What will happen to our electronics over time? What are the implications of those happenings? And the show opens several avenues of aesthetic and ethical possibility in response. It resituates, speculates, wonders, and proposes in and beyond this cultural and technological moment.
For example, the exhibited Phossils are, more or less, fossilized phones. These are mobile and other devices subjected to heat and pressure, extreme cold or high speed blending, and/or pyrolysis (as part of a collaboration with geothermal scientist, Professor Johannes Lehmann at Cornell University) to create a kind of artificial, geological time. Cook, freeze, burn, smash, blend, and more… and put the results on exhibit as sculptures and photographs, in beakers and tubes, on pedestals and stands, as staged archaeological finds and/or as large-scale installations on walls and towers. This work is not post-apocalyptic; rather, it imagines potential futures while asking viewers to be mindful of their media in the present.
Server Farms take up the core proposition in Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us (which inspired the name of the show): nonhuman life retaking the planet. Here repurposed computers and other technological equipment function as planters: an Apple watch grows moss and mushrooms; in a gutted iMac, moss replaces the screen and motherboard; an old telephone sprouts shrubbery through earpieces and keys; spider plants dangle from computer fans atop water-filled glass jars. Each flowers, flourishes, incubates, and spreads. What life may spur, how might techno-minerals diffuse? Server Farms are also combined with Phossils in installations (The Wall After Us) and photographs (Drivers).
And can we reinvent what digital waste might be and do right now? utilities see e-waste re-thought as a raw material, and transmuted into other (somewhat) usable forms. In Phonēy Prints, for example, mobile phones are ground into a fine powder, and mixed with extender to turn them into ink for fine art prints (of phones), on paper made from my old t-shirts. Applecations see melted aluminum iMacs from the late 2000s cast into a hammer, screwdriver, and wrench. And Circuitous tools are routed circuit boards turned into a saw, axe, and trowel. These ask viewers to be curious and imagine, to test, play, and transform. We should not only ask what digital media will be and do, after us. We must reinvent what digital waste can be and do, in the present.
The World After Us is political, but speaks across political lines. It is completely physical, but asks us to think virtually, about the potentials our futures hold. It is multimedia, networked, and participatory, but not in the ways so often hyped up in and around new technologies.
It asks us to move, think, and feel the enormity of e-waste at a human scale, and to act in three ways: 1. To take personal accountability in what we use, re-purpose, throw out, or recycle; 2. To seek out and move towards systemic change in the rules that govern waste and production; and 3. To think and act creatively in and around potential futures for ourselves, our consumer products, the energy we use and “garbage” we make. (These principles are unpacked in more detail in the Creative Mornings talk at the end of this post.)
It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on its own terms and at its own size, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new possibilities. The World After Us questions how we move, think, feel, and act with the Earth and its inhabitants, both living and otherwise. It suggests alternatives to current modes of life and living, science and sensation, waste and production, perception and action. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
Eco Labs produces, sells, and exhibits sustainable creative projects about creative sustainability - both on the Blockchain, and in the physical world; engages with and mobilizes communities who want to make a more sustainable future; and donates at least ⅓ of all net profits toward sustainably-focused organizations in three categories: carbon sequestering, energy storage, and alternatives to fossil fuels.
Samantha Tan was the Stern Studio project and studio manager before and during the premiere of The World After Us in Milwaukee (she’s in the documentary, above!); and Sev Nightingale walked me through my first real encounters with cryptocurrency and NFTs. Over time, we also found a common interest in leveraging web3 towards sustainably focused creative projects and solutions, and have been developing a lab - and moving towards a DAO - ever since. Our first project and drop will build on The World After Us, and we will continue with new projects - growing from my back catalog, new ideas exclusive to Eco Labs, and/or via proposals from others - then work on larger-scale collaborations with other artists and organizations, towards shared ecological goals with a community of like-minded individuals.
Who we are: A community of creatives working at the cross-section of sustainability, art, and technology. We collaborate across media, platforms, and spaces, towards meaningful dialogue and real-world impact. We are dedicated to making a difference with any- every-thing we produce.
What we do: Eco Labs produces, sells, and exhibits sustainable creative projects about creative sustainability - both on the Blockchain, and in the physical world; engages with and mobilizes communities who want to make a more sustainable future; and donates at least ⅓ of all net profits toward sustainably-focused organizations in three categories: carbon sequestering, alternatives to fossil fuels, and energy storage.
Why we do it: Our vision is to help build a future where: creatives can both sustain themselves, and help build a sustainable planet; energy is plentiful, safe, efficient, available, and carbon neutral or negative; and trans-local communities work and play together in and around how to accomplish these ends, as well as develop new goals we hope to accomplish, together.
Where we’re going: Eco Labs is working towards a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) with both utility (fungible) and collectible (non-fungible) tokens, where each will equal both treasury-based money towards the above goals - carbon sequestering, energy storage, and alternatives to fossil fuels - as well as rights and privileges for token-holders around making and voting on new proposals and projects - both artistic and environmentally-based.
How we take action: Carbon sequestering is the most easily quantified contribution our organization can make to a sustainable future. When donating to this cause, we will work with Nori and Toucan to show the differences we make, together.
Alternatives to fossil fuels make for a more sustainable future. We hope to support research and production in and around solar, wave, hydro, nuclear, and other forms of clean, safe, and powerful energy.
Energy storage is an often overlooked necessity when it comes to more sustainable energy. Lithium Ion has a long way to go, and alternatives like Sodium Ion are safer, cleaner, easier to produce locally and transport, and more equitable. We want to support their research and growth in the market.
PHONEY PLANTS. Beginning on January 28th, and every two weeks while The World After Us is on exhibition in Binghamton, Eco Labs will drop 64 unique and hand-drawn Phoney Plants (based on Nathaniel’s work). These are not generated via layers and code; all are painstakingly digitally crafted by our team. The drops will be cross-chain, clean NFTs (all on green, Earth-friendly / proof of stake Blockchains): 64 on each of Cardano, Tezos, Solana, and Polygon, making for a total of 256 unique NFTs. With each drop, 60 will be sold at a set price, 2 will be giveaways on Twitter or Discord, and 2 will be auctioned.
With any purchase of a Phoney Plant, collectors get:
the NFT itself, in their wallet
one validated metric ton of sequestered carbon associated with their wallet address
their wallet address added to a raffle. When a given chain sells out all 64 Phoney Plants, one lucky token-holder will receive a 1/1 photograph, similar to Double Ring (the photo at the top of this post)
future membership to the Eco Labs DAO
Pre-sales on each chain will be available, limited to 5 NFTs in advance. Join our Discord to find out more.
WORLD AFTER US CATALOGS. I produced a beautiful, high quality, 200-page 10x10” hardcover catalog for The World After Us, with texts by me, Edward A. Shanken, Amanda Boetzkes, Kate Mondloch, Jennifer Johung, Kennan Ferguson, and Coe Douglas. As of this writing, the first edition book is nearly sold out, and there may or may not be a second edition. But Eco Labs has made available an edition of 50 PDF NFT books on Tezos, for 10 tez each. Here, 20% of each sale will go to the Eco Labs treasury, towards future projects.
OBKJT 1/1s. Related, for all of 2022, I am dropping daily, affordable 1/1s on the Tezos chain. I have a huge back-catalog of work, and I want to get into collectors’ hands more than anything else. Most of these come from my Compressionism series of images, where I strap a desktop scanner, computing device, and custom battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism between my body, technology, and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings. The video above is from Rippling Images, a show within that series - and those are part of the drop. These are currently only 9 tez each, so snatch them up!
Ethereum 1/1s. I will also drop a few 1/1 NFTs from The World After Us as more exclusive works of art. These will be on either my OpenSea or Foundation. Any proof of work sales on this chain will be offset so as to be carbon negative, meaning I will doubly sequester the energy used for minting, transfers, and storage.
Above is the aforementioned Creative Mornings talk I gave during the premiere of The World After Us in Milwaukee, WI. It asks us to:
Change our intimate relationships with technology and waste. Change the systems of care around them. And, seek out questions, scientific experiments, aesthetic explorations, and political figurings, together - since they are always already entangled.
We must rethink our geological futures through the ethical communion of media and nature. We must tend to, and care for, a world both for and after us. There are many ways to design and build a more sustainable future.
I hope you will join me.
