Once a month throughout the 2025-26 academic year, Slow Digest will feature an episode of C21’s 6.5 Minutes With…C21 podcast series, produced by C21 Graduate Fellows Jamee N. Pritchard and Yuchen Zhao.
In this episode of 6.5 Minutes with C21, graduate fellow Jamee Pritchard speaks with artist and professor Nathaniel Stern about art, technology, and the practice of slowing down. Moving across historical and emerging technologies, from photography and print to artificial intelligence, Stern reflects on how creative tools shape, and are shaped by, human experience over time.
Stern also gives listeners a preview of the collaborative exhibition with artist-poet Sasha Stiles, titled Generation to Generation: Conversing with Generative Technologies, which approaches AI not as a rupture, but as part of a long lineage of media experimentation. Through intergenerational storytelling, poetry, and interactive installations, the exhibition invites viewers to engage with technology with curiosity rather than fear and to see today’s debates about AI as part of an ongoing historical conversation.
Stern describes the exhibition as an invitation to understand technology as an evolving continuum rather than a sudden disruption. As he explains:
“Technology begins with fire and goes through the spoken word, the written word, the broadcast word, computers, artificial intelligence, machine learning, which is a subset of what we call artificial intelligence, and mostly what we call artificial intelligence today and more, and in many ways, we’re trying to nuance and complexify the conversations around AI with the show in part by placing it along that trajectory of historical technologies with which we’ve always had both crippling fear and blind optimism, and recognizing that the way we talk about AI in the art world is no different than the way we talked about photography or the phonograph at the turn of the last century.”
The views, information, and opinions expressed on 6.5 Minutes with C21 are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System.
Notes:
Guest: Nathaniel Stern, C21 Story Fellow, an award-winning artist, writer, and professor at UW-Milwaukee
Host: Jamee Pritchard, Graduate Fellow, Center for 21st Century Studies (C21)
Upcoming Events:
Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies (Opening Day) on February 12 at Kenilworth Square East Gallery, 2155 N Prospect Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202
| Opening Day Events | |
|---|---|
| Workshop (registration required) | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM |
| Gallery Walkthrough | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM |
| Panel Discussion (registration requested) | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM |
| Opening Reception | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM |