[-empyre-] viractualism 3

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

3rd salutation empyralists. Here are some more of my thoughts on the 
emerging of viractual art. I?ll be off-line for the next 3 days - however I 
should answer Gregory Little before that, I hope.

Best Wishes
Joseph Nechvatal

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Immersion's fundamentally spherical, all-over perspective of dynamic 
thresholds cast a fraction of art on its course since the Fin-de-Siècle. 
This marginal tendency has now amply flowered in the emerging viractual arts 
as art practice began shifting VR away from its initial paean to 
illusionistic trompe l'oeil. Moreover, with this immersive vision there is a 
shift to a more conscious peripheral mode of perception which entails a 
deautomatization of the perceptual process (whereby more emphasis is placed 
on what is on the edges of sight and consciousness) thus presumably 
adjusting the immersant up to an expanded and fuller consciousness. This 
emphasis on the peripheral utilizes the Deleuzian broad scan; Deleuze's 
non-linear dynamic conceptual displacement of a view along any axis or 
direction in favor of a sweeping processes in space/time. Hence immersive 
vision may acquire an increasingly computational-like encompassing range 
useful in expanding the customary field of view - which is 160° vertical by 
180° horizontal - outward so as to increase situational awareness.

Similarly, expansive simulation technology (when used in the creation of 
electronic-based art) will promote an indispensable alienation from the 
socially constructed self necessary for the outburst of such ecstatic 
experiences/acts. Inversely, electronic technology will enable the 
contemporary emerging artists to express ecstatic reactions in ways never 
before possible. Thus, this ecstatic counteraction might provide a 
phantasmal defiance aimed against the controlling world's blandness. This 
aesthetic philosophy might provide, then, a fundamental antithesis to the 
authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical 
world.

The emerging viractual arts, when postulated from the previously described 
immersive slant, promote various theories of consciousness which themselves 
have been discussed as being emergent rather than representational. Indeed 
Sigmund Freud identified an artist as one who offers insights into an 
emergent consciousness as consciousness emerges from within the unconscious 
realm.

The terminology consciousness means verbatim with knowingness. But that is 
not all there is to it as applied to art, for consciousness in art seems to 
be ultimately like a web woven in the mind/body of various silken-strands 
spun forth from interlacing states of unconscious desire which 
semi-automatically control the paradigmatic creation and reception of art. 
This definition coincides with R. G. Collingwood's definition of 
consciousness, in paradigmatic art terms, as that which is a "kind of 
thought which stands closest to sensation or mere feeling" as "transformed 
into imagination". Indeed unconscious desires shape the paradigms which 
contour intentional expressions in art through the subtle powers of 
sublimation when the sexual desires of the libido are turned into cultural 
ones via the mediation of the artist's ego. The question of how unconscious 
desires are manifest in conscious cultural production and interpretation 
will be one of the minor themes of the emerging viractual arts. This is a 
non-problematic working assumption in that even those which maintain that 
art is fundamentally a materialistic, social, and conscious product 
acknowledge that the role and function of art is located in its power to 
transformtionally change consciousness.

Certainly it is true that hidden in us and in connected computer space there 
is something so large, so astounding, and so pregnant with the darkness of 
infinite space that it excites and frightens us and thus returns us to the 
experimental and to a state of stimulating desire and perceptual 
restlessness.

> From my point of view, the emerging artists who are or will be working with 
the power of telematic/immersivity are embarking on a new vanguard phase of 
artistic awareness in which total immersive involvement is the primary 
characteristic. This means for art an emergent reconception within which 
philosophic problems of consciousness are forgrounded. This entails a rich 
and diverse practice - for indeed even now the concept of art itself is 
pantheoristic. But in my use of the term emerging art (based on my 
activities as an artist) I understand emerging art to be fundamentally an 
extravagant activity expressing in a symbolic language the desire for joy.

For me, philosophy is a method of understanding and technology a method of 
doing art. I should establish that the pantheoristic definition of emerging 
art which I am upholding here, and which I find requires reiteration as 
artists move increasingly from organic materials to the use of electronic 
and synthetic ones, is basically that supplied by Susanne Langer in her book 
"Feeling and Form" where she determines that "art is the creation of forms 
symbolic of human feeling". Curiously, in answering the question of how art 
feels, Ms. Langer proposed that the symbolic space created in painting was 
not real but virtual.

The emerging artist's work then is the electronically aided creation of 
unfamiliar emotive abstractions of enjoyment. The significant cognizant 
value of abstract artistic symbols is that they may confer flickering ideas 
which exceed the interpretant's former understandings with unaccustomed 
emotive possibilities and scintillating expressive values which may be 
characteristic of even deeper inner pathos and jubilant non-logocentric 
unfamiliarities. And this is as it should be, for the technique of art is to 
make our understanding of both perception and history at first unfamiliar, 
particularly when attempting to increase our comprehension of, and 
neurological feeling for, telematic/immersive data-space and its vast powers 
for handling complex and abstract information.

Thus the central issues of the emerging viractual arts fall necessarily on 
and between ideas concerning consciousness, philosophy, telematic/immersive/ 
viractual space, art, joy, sexuality, myth, cognition, 
information-technology and metaphysical states of placement and quintessence 
in the formation of a theory of viractual connectivity that, I believe, is 
important for artists and theorists today.



Amicable Respects.
Joseph Nechvatal

http://www.nechvatal.net

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For my proposal for an intimate funerary monument commemorating the dead at 
the World Trade Towers site, see: 
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/911/911.html

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