[-empyre-] telematic/immersivity

<bweaver@vfs.com> · Tue Nov 5 10:35:02 2002

Would like to hear more about telematic/immersivity .
If anyone has to links to this subject or if they could elaborate on it,
some more.

>
> 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
>
> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*:-
>
>
> 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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> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*:-.,*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_
> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*:-.,*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_
>
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> ~~end~~
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