Stephen Nachtigall

With an interdisciplinary approach to art making, from video, sculpture, to 2D work and installation, my practice explores intersections of ecology, technology and culture from a perspective planted in mimesis and simulation. By unhinging our understanding of nonhuman entities as inanimate or contained within human-centric frameworks and paradigms, I seek to place technology in conversation with the nonhuman, avoiding hierarchies and aiming instead for routes towards balance and coexistence.

Lush green vegetation, cascading waterfalls and waving golden wheat fields; UV printed on vinyl adhesive, stuck to an electrical utility box, vending machine or underground subway advertisements. These cultural moments of decoration and distraction through images of plants and wilderness mimic a place you feel you might have seen or been to before, but they also advocate a removed conception of ‘nature’ and our place within it. These mimetic veneers incite my curiosity about mimicry and depictions of an ideal natural environment, as if to instill the illusionary potential in distracting our gaze from the disconcertion and alienation that looking at real ecological predicaments sometimes entails. Global warming and climate change are issues that humanity has a hard time grasping because they are what theorist Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects, something that is massively distributed throughout space-time to the degree that we can be certain we are not the only original cause of global warming, but certainly not able to avoid our intense complicity with it. These issues are distilled in my practice through a convergence of nature and technology.

My work for the 2016 Juried Fuse Factory Exhibition privileges plant-life as an avatar for the hyperobject that we commonly refer to as ‘nature’. This avatar is uprooted and complexified via conjunctures, simulations and meeting points with technicity, the distillation of modernism’s story of divergence from nature via relations to power. My videos employ computer generated 3D models of plants which are then depicted in animated videos. These plants, effected by simulated forces, writhe and dance as if to extend their agency and ability for expression, challenging an anthropocentric notion of what a plant is capable of, allowing it to reach for a deeper interaction. These animated plants unfold their surfaces and forms through gestures of artifice and camouflage, displaying a shifting skin composed of layers of digital video captured amidst the gardens en route between my home and studio. This work inhabits a horizon point where plant-forms, whether simulated or technologically mediated, are perhaps reaching out to us, beckoning us to ecologize as well as modernize.