Nathaniel Stern is an artist, writer, and educator whose work spans interactive installation, internet-based projects, ecological sculpture, and blockchain performance.,For more than twenty-five years he has produced ecological and participatory works, internet interventions, and immersive interactive installations, prints, sculptures, and performances.,He teaches as a full professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Stern moved from the United States to Johannesburg in 2001, where he helped shape South Africa's early digital-art discourse before returning home.With Scott Kildall he created Wikipedia Art (2009), a multiply authored work placed inside Wikipedia under the site's own editing rules that was deleted soon after, provoking debate about authorship.In Given Time (2010), a Second Life installation referencing Félix González-Torres's Untitled (Perfect Lovers), two avatars hover face to face, locked in a gaze the viewer can enter but never interrupt.,His 2013 book Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance argues that interactive art should be understood through the body's relational, sensory engagement rather than its technology, coining the term implicit body.,
In November 2021 Stern launched NFT Culture Proof with Scott Kildall and others, a 32-day blockchain performance in which participants added to a shared, immutable on-chain text, each contribution minted as its own on-chain SVG NFT.In 2022 he presented generative work through the playrecordmint project alongside Sasha Stiles, Zach Lieberman, and Leander Herzog as part of “DYOR”, a Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition on crypto art curated by Nina Roehrs.That year his traveling solo exhibition “The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures” opened at Binghamton University, combining sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that fuse plant life with electronic waste to question how media production and waste shape ecological futures.Its themes returned in “Down the Silicon Meadow”, a 2025 group exhibition on the coexistence of nature and technology staged online and at OFFICE IMPART in Berlin.
Since 2023 Stern has collaborated with poet Sasha Stiles, pairing her AI-generated verse with his background in interactive and networked art. Their work Still Moving, published on the Art Blocks platform in 2023, is an on-chain interactive poem in which webcam-based motion tracking shapes each collector's personalized edition.The two were paired for “FeralVerse”, a 2023 Feral File exhibition curated by theVERSEverse exploring how words and images intertwine.In April 2025 their exhibition “Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies” opened at the Krasl Art Center, combining large-scale installations, hybrid sculptures, AI-generated poetry, haptic experiences, and artist books around how humans and technology evolve together.
