[-empyre-] Voluptuous Viractualism
Voluptuous Viractualism
Suzanne Anker : How about a brief statement from you about the Viractual?
Joseph Nechvatal : Gladly. My concept of viractuality - and viractualism -
emerged out of the Ph.D. research I conducted in virtual reality at the
Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, over in the U.K. (*1).
It begins with the realization that every new technology disrupts previous
rhythms of consciousness. It is central to my work as an artist. In fact,
for me, the viractual realm is now the authentic domain of art in light of
the information age. And as you know, I teach a seminar course in it at the
School of Visual Arts in New York. This concept serves a pivotal role in my
MFA Computer Art Department class too; a class which deals in theories of
Virtual Reality.
The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer
technology has become a significant means for making and understanding
contemporary art and that this brings us artists to a place where one finds
the emerging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal
(the actual). This merge ? which tends to contradict some dominant techno
clichés of our time - is what I call the ?viractual?. This blending of
computational virtual space with ordinary viewable space indicates the
subsequent emergence of a new topological cognitive-vision of connection
between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world.
Gilles Deleuze's consideration of Baruch Spinoza - the 17th century
philosopher who merged mind and matter into one substance - was a key
influence. In Deleuze's "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy" (*3) Deleuze
pointed me towards a recognition of my desires' productiveness, as he
indicated how desires propel us to move towards greater or lesser states of
exalted wholeness depending on whether the thing encountered enters into
composition with us, or on the contrary, tends to decompose us. (*4)
Digitization is a key metaphor for viractuality in the sense that it is the
fundamental translating system today. But I think that in every era the
attempt must be made anew to wrest the art tradition away from conformisms
that are about to overpower it. The viractual recognizes and uses the power
of digitization while being culturally aware of the values of monumentality
and permanency ? qualities which can be found in some powerful analog art.
It is a significant concept, I feel, which indicates and initiates
communions of the protoplasmic body to virtual spatial conditions. As Roy
Ascott, in his essay "The Architecture of Cyberception"*, has said, "... to
inhabit both the real and virtual worlds at one and the same time, and to be
both here and potentially everywhere else at the same time is giving us a
new sense of self, new ways of thinking and perceiving which extend what we
have believed to be our natural, genetic capabilities." (*2) Consequently,
the viractual has begun articulating a new techno-digital sense of life and
art for me.
Surely the viractual has proven to be a useful conceptual operative for
constructing a fuller account of my own work to myself, as well as much
other art today. Take the work of Inka Essenhigh, for example. Undoubtedly
the viractual propels my creativity - and has since I started exploring the
viractual image back in 1986 when I started creating ridiculously complex
numeric images which consisted increasingly of a mixture of drawing,
digital-photography, painting, written language, and externalized computer
code - all of which got submitted to computational manipulations (including
viral attacks).
This viractual subject and method will be exemplified again in the new
digitalia work which I will be showing under the title of "vOluptuary : an
algOrithic hermaphornology" this May at Universal Concepts Unlimited. (*5)
The viractual will be exemplified here by mixing my artificial-life virus
project with my continuing project as a post-Warholian painter. This
combination of stasis and a flight manifests in the form of computer-robotic
assisted paintings which depict representations of the intimate body which
are associated with sexuality. But these representations then are
problemitized through hermaphroditic (alchemical) depictions which are
achieved through algorithmic means.
Of crucial interest to "vOluptuary" will be the origin of the hermaphroditic
image. This hybrid viractual image first appears in Ovid?s classic text
?Metamorphoses? - and perhaps this emergence is well worth recounting here.
The hermaphrodite initially occurs in Western culture as a son of Hermes and
Aphrodite named Hermaphroditus. Hermaphroditus was a typical, if
exceptionally handsome, young male with whom the water nympth Salmacis fell
madly in love. When Hermaphroditus rejected her sexual advances, Salmacis
voyeuristicly observed him from afar while desiring him fiercely. Finally,
one spring day Hermaphroditus stripped nude and dove into the pool of water
which was Salmacis?s habitat. Salmacis immediately dove in after him -
embracing him and wrapping her body around his, just as, Ovid says, ivy does
around a tree. She then prayed to the gods that she would never be separated
from him ? a prayer that they answered favorably. Consequently,
Hermaphroditus emerged from the pool both man and woman.
The patriarchal construction of woman as other and the female body as object
is deeply rooted in the supposed duality (opposites) of the (two) sexes.
Most feminist theory questions this patriarchal construction of sex and
gender, suggesting that sex is expressed through a continuum, rather than as
an opposing couplet based on heterosexist male/female polarities.
Accordingly, within my viractual multiverse, containments designed for
womanhood/manhood are subverted by the presentation of ambiguous genitalia -
the mutable image and performance of pan-sexuality. Gender here is viewed as
an act of becoming. Here gender performance fails to sustain sex oppression
by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other.
As such it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of
heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. This
critique of "representation" in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of
"representation" in the political sense (and vice versa). Art here is seen
as political in the sense that it is a site of power struggles which fail to
presuppose a metaphysics which is itself a politics ? a politics which
establishes an order of values which often maintains the dominant order of
meaning and power over break-through ideologies. Need I mention the war in
which we are engaged against Islamic fundamentalism?
As the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests, my work now is about pansexual
eroticism married to virtuality, quixotic transformation, and, of course,
immersive excess. The viractual realm here is a political-spiritual chaosmos
in the sense that new forms of sexual order arise such that any form of
order is only temporary and provisional. But I don't think it is a chaosmos
in the sense of ceaseless flux and chaos. Rather, this sphere is attained
through an emergent viractual operation, and I take abundant pleasure in the
forms of pan-order that arise within its algorithmic processes.
The point is that within viractual creation all sexual signs are subject to
boundless semiosis - which is to say that they are translatable into other
signs. Here, of course, it is possible to find resonances and affinities
between sexual opposites. Here we can always articulate new sexes within.
Here a new-sprung chameleon-like sexual demeanor is being built from the
virtual abyss.
So the viractual is a new sensibility emerging in art respecting the
integration of certain aspects of science, technology, myth and
consciousness ? a consciousness struggling to attend to the prevailing
current spirit of our age. This viractual zeitgeist I identify as being
precisely an autopoietic desiring machine in which everything, everywhere,
all at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of communication. Therefore,
the viractual is no longer content with the regurgitation of a standardized
analog repertoire of image-tropes. Rather I detect in art a fertile
attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific discovery -
discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical methodology.
Concerning this viractual span of liminality, I am reminded here of two very
different, yet complimentary, concepts: entrainment and égréore.
Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more oscillators
as they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical
terms an égréore (an old form of the word agréger) is a third concept or
phenomenon which is established from conjoining two different elements
together. I suggest that the term (concept) viractual (and viractuality) may
be a concordant entrainment/égréore conception helpful in defining our now
third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the meeting of the virtual
and the actual - a concept close to what the military call augmented
reality, which is the use of transparent displays worn as see-through
glasses on which computer data is projected and layered. A Lacunae world of
incessant transmutation has emerged and established a seemingly unrestricted
area of abundance which I call the viractual.
(*1) The title of the Ph.D. dissertation is "Immersive Ideals / Critical
Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in
Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms". A url introduction to the
thesis, entitled "Frame and Excess", can be read on-line and the entire
thesis downloaded in PDF at:
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm
(*2) Ascott, R. 1994. "The Architecture of Cyberception" In Leonardo
Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, No. 8, MIT Press Journals, August 1994
(*3) Deleuze, G. 1984. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City
Lights
(*4) Deleuze, G. 1984. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City
Lights, p. 21
(*5) Universal Concepts Unlimited
507 West 24th Street @ 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
http://www.U-C-U.com
Tel: 212.727.7575 Fax: 212.727.7676 Email: ucu1@rcn.com
Joseph Nechvatal
home page: http://www.nechvatal.net
email: joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com
Bio Notes:
Dr. Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual
information and computer-robotics since 1986. His computer-robotic assisted
paintings and computer animations are shown regularly in galleries and
museums throughout the world. From 1991-3 he worked as artist-in-resident at
the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's
computer lab in Arbois, France on 'The Computer Virus Project': an
experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. Dr. Nechvatal has
exhibited his work widely in Europe and the United States, both in private
and public venues. He is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum, the
Moderna Musset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Dr.
Nechvatal's work was included in Documenta 8.
Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology
as a Ph.D. doctoral fellow researcher with The Centre for Advanced Inquiry
in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) (see:
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm). He served as Parisian
editor for "RHIZOME INTERNET" (http://www.rhizome.org) between the years
1996-2001 and now writes regularly for "The THING? (http://www.thing.net)
and "NY ARTS Magazine" (http://www.nyartsmagazine.com). Dr. Nechvatal
presently teaches ?Theories of Virtual Reality? and ?Viractualism? at the
School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a founder of the Tellus Audio
Art Project (http://www.harvestworks.org/tellus/tellus.html). And served as
conference coordinator for the 1st International CAiiA Research Conference
entitled "CONSCIOUSNESS REFRAMED: Art and Consciousness in the
Post-Biological Era" (5 & 6 July 1997); an international conference which
looked at new developments in art, science, technology and consciousness
which was held at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts,
University of Wales College, Newport, UK.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Joseph Nechvatal
143 Ludlow Street (#14)
New York, NY 10002 USA
and
114, Rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris FRANCE
home page: http://www.nechvatal.net
email: joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com
Bio Notes:
Dr. Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual
information and computer-robotics since 1986. His computer-robotic assisted
paintings and computer animations are shown regularly in galleries and
museums throughout the world. From 1991-3 he worked as artist-in-resident at
the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's
computer lab in Arbois, France on 'The Computer Virus Project': an
experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. Dr. Nechvatal has
exhibited his work widely in Europe and the United States, both in private
and public venues. He is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum, the
Moderna Musset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Dr.
Nechvatal's work was included in Documenta 8.
Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology
as a Ph.D. doctoral fellow researcher with The Centre for Advanced Inquiry
in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) (see:
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm). He served as Parisian
editor for "RHIZOME INTERNET" (http://www.rhizome.org) between the years
1996-2001 and now writes regularly for "The THING? (http://www.thing.net)
and "NY ARTS Magazine" (http://www.nyartsmagazine.com). Dr. Nechvatal
presently teaches ?Theories of Virtual Reality? and ?Viractualism? at the
School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a founder of the Tellus Audio
Art Project (http://www.harvestworks.org/tellus/tellus.html). And served as
conference coordinator for the 1st International CAiiA Research Conference
entitled "CONSCIOUSNESS REFRAMED: Art and Consciousness in the
Post-Biological Era" (5 & 6 July 1997); an international conference which
looked at new developments in art, science, technology and consciousness
which was held at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts,
University of Wales College, Newport, UK.
?~ñ~?~~ñ~~ñ~~ñ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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