[-empyre-] Viractualism with Joseph Nechvatal November 1-15

["Joseph Nechvatal" <joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com>]

Greetings empyralists. Over the next two weeks I want to try to talk with 
you about what I am calling viractualism. Typically, I will send out some of 
my thoughts on the subject of viractualism, which I hope will encourage an 
open forum exchange based on your comments and examples. So here we go:



Viractualism

A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged in art and 
established a seemingly unrestricted area of prodigality which I identify as 
viractuality. With the increased augmentation of the self via 
micro-electronics feasible today, the real co-exists with the virtual and 
the organic fuses with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested 
in a new interlaced sense of artistic viractuality which couples the 
biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As 
such, viractualism strives for an understanding and depiction of an 
anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for no privileged logos. 
Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic viral disturbances they 
cannot contain. Here thought detaches itself from the order and authority of 
the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.

The concept of viractualism is concerned with the matter of visualizing 
aesthetic sensations linked to techno-sexual concepts. It is essentially a 
visual prosthetic then for both the viral machinic and the viral corporal 
dominion - virulent circumstances which are not historically conditioned 
yet.

Very essentially, the foundation of viractualism is that computer technology 
has become a significant means to making and understanding contemporary art. 
Consequently, I hope that we will investigate here art (in its many forms - 
including sculpture, performance, painting, video, architecture, literature, 
net art, and more) which addresses the merging of the computed (the virtual) 
with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merging is what I call the 
?viractual?. Hence the term "viractualism".

This 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.

This space can be further inscribed as the "viractual span of liminality" - 
which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (based on his 
anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the condition of 
being on a threshold between spaces. (*2) I wish to suggest that the term 
(concept) "viractual" (and "viractuality") may be a concordant conception 
helpful in defining this third fused inter-spatial place of the emerging 
viractual arts which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the 
actual.

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.

The keystone 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 here.  In "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." (*5) Consequently, 
the viractual has begun articulating a new techno-digital sense of life and 
art for me. Indeed, my work's visual flamboyant excess attempts to give to 
us an expansive metaphor for our current virulent/viractual condition.


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 was exemplified again recently in the new 
digitalia work which I showed under the title of "vOluptuary :  an 
algOrithic hermaphornology" last May at Universal Concepts Unlimited in New 
York City. (*6) The viractual was 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" was 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.




(*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) Gennep, A. van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of 
Chicago

(*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) Ascott, R. 1994. "The Architecture of Cyberception" In Leonardo 
Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, No. 8, MIT Press Journals, August 1994

(*6) Universal Concepts Unlimited
507 West 24th Street @ 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
http://www.U-C-U.com



Thank you.


Best Regards
Joseph Nechvatal

home page: http://www.nechvatal.net



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