Re: [-empyre-] response to Angela and bye bye

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

Angela

Thanks for your questions.

A review of all of the relevant non-dualistic eastern philosophies is beyond 
the scope of viractualism as I have developed it thus far. But, yes I think 
that viractualism is a characteristic product of the Hellenistic 
consciousness influenced by non-binary tendencies of Oriental thought. 
Personally, my guiding avatar into viractualism has been Janus - the 
two-faced Roman God who faces both directions simultaneously. Janus is 
similar to the ancient Egyptian God Aker, a two human-headed deity who 
surveys the western and eastern gates of duat (the underworld). As Janus has 
eyes on both sides of his head, a Janus-like viractual model would be able 
to see on every side. Hence he is the symbol for viractual dehabituation, 
open-mindedness, and for taking an even-handed view, as Janus was able to 
look backward into the past as well as forward into the future. Moreover he 
represents a question that has two sides to it.

The reason that I have chosen Janus as the guiding presence in viractualism 
is that the one-directional explanatory mode of cause and effect does not 
fully pertain to my argument in that I do not put forward arguments which 
purport to explain one phenomenon as the monolithic result of another in a 
one-to-one relationship. Rather with viractuality I put forward discursive 
suggestions, as is the province of culture. Moreover, in janusian thinking 
opposites and antitheses are proposed as being simultaneously valid. This 
appreciation of valid antithetical simultanaities is very useful in reaching 
nonreductive synthetic conclusions concerning the whirr of information 
processing which takes place within the aesthetic viractual body. Viractual 
constructs integrate opposites and antitheses and in this respect differ 
greatly from typical dualistic thinking; the tendency to formulate concepts 
in terms of two exhaustive categories (in viractuality?s case the actual and 
the virtual).

Dualistic causality, bolstered by the seductive powers of linear narration 
(hence appearing clearer in terms of its authoritative explanatory closure) 
appears unsophisticated to me in the realm of viractuality. Indeed, 
particularly in the realm of viractualism, the post hoc ergo propter hoc 
(after this, therefore because of this) logical error of assumed causality 
is notoriously ticklish.

Thus in order to author an explanatory yet non-reified investigation free 
from the deceptive certainties of conjectural cause and effect, and 
instrumentally place the emphasis on viractual capacity, I find it necessary 
to examine viractuality from two directions at once: one direction starting 
with an inquiry into the larger philosophical and technical concepts of 
viractualism (what might be referred to as the metaphysics and technological 
ideology surrounding the details); and also from the other direction, 
through the examination of specific viractual artistic events and details. 
This dual method is still searching for a dynamic equilibrium of 
equivalents, not a disanalogous mechanical cause and effect historicism, 
which often thwarts the radical newness of artistic enterprise in an effort 
to historicize and make what is radically new familiar and comfortable by 
placing viractuality into a smooth, evolutionary continuum where vanguard 
art is made to seem to have evolved out of the past, thereby mitigating its 
newness by homogenising differences into a false perception of sameness. In 
this sense then, my study of viractuality strives to be an addition to the 
developing field of cultural analysis through its multiform and 
interdisciplinary aesthetic approach to techno-cultural phenomena, located 
in a medley of media with a view towards exposing previously unarticulated 
viractual promulgations.

But yes, the East is an important topic because what has happened in my view 
to our visual tendencies with immersion. The immersive perspective, if we 
can still use that word "perspective" anymore, pulls us out of the locked-in 
Renaissance point-perspective and its inert view which is deeply encoded 
unconsciously into Western society and Western visual expectations of a 
horizon-line and vanishing-point. Within viractuality the horizon-line and 
vanishing-point are unmistakably exhausted tropes which are no longer 
needed. Indeed the horizon-line and vanishing-point within virtual space 
appear to me more and more only as an inappropriate habitual holdover from 
the Cartesian mentality which has nothing to do with the specificity of 
virtuality. The space of viractuality is an emergent space of vast 
all-overness and spread-outness quite remote from the customary Western 
pinched perspectivist mentality.

I think the point is that this choice of consciousness can now be recognized 
as a convention of limiting parameters and is no longer an expectational 
given attached to a value of precision. Cartesian perspective within 
virtuality is now a goofy artistic propensity without any sense of truth or 
rightness. This bogus quality of perspective within virtuality can be used 
as a positive value within viractuality. A multi-gendered god(ess) expands 
the boundaries. Probably what we are discussing is a sense of viractual 
feeling experienced within the scope of a vast range; be it cultural, 
digital, or even natural. As we gain experience and sophistication by moving 
more and more through vast areas of aesthetic input, we are no longer 
satisfied with boxy, constrained, framed aesthetic data. Rather we desire 
viractual data which we can feel that we can enter into. We desire aesthetic 
data which at least on some level surrounds us in all-directions. Then we 
want to be sensitive to that data and respond to it profoundly. This entails 
the question of visuality, but it also entails questions of peripheral 
cognition. And this field of peripheral cognitive-viractuality, a field of 
artistic endeavor laced with the juicy strands of imaginative and visionary 
optics, I believe, is a field that is now open wide to artists with the 
advent of virtuality, or more specifically with the advent of what I have 
called "viractuality"; the meeting place between virtuality and actuality.

Here we might speak of a personal sense of viractual beauty in relationship 
to visualizations of the infected mutant. But perhaps instead of the concept 
of beauty we are here talking about the notion of attraction. Perhaps beauty 
doesn't work after all as a meaningful value in viractual art. Perhaps what 
we are all trying to set up instead are situations of viractual attraction. 
Seduction, quite obviously, is an important element in setting up such a 
domain, particularly in the realm of viractuality. That is why I find 
Gregory?s proposal for a nuetered non-sexed viractuality abhorant. That too 
is why the notion of the techno-sublime is an interesting one for me. It 
interests me in terms of viractuality because it contains in itself the 
dialectical opposite of its attractiveness - as it contains an aspect of 
horror too. Without an element of horror there is no sublime function, no 
sublime beauty, if you like. With the viractual sublime you have an 
attraction and a repulsion at work simultaneously which can only be fully 
embraced with the utilization of the conscious element of cognitive 
dissidence. Such a viractual consciousness yields a very enticing and 
complex emotion.

Certainly we cannot use the word viractual in any homogenetic fashion. There 
are too many levels and types and aspects to viractuality. However, I 
believe we in general are drifting away from the preference towards a 
viractuality which is valued in terms of its harmoniousness and more towards 
what François Lyotard called the technological sublime. This technological 
sublime contains a notion of viractuality connected to a more expansive art 
pedigree; a sensibility more fully stated through all manner of post-digital 
art created along the lines of what I have elsewhere connected to the 
lineage of viractuality.

Anyway, my time is up. Sorry that I did not develop a longer response to 
Gregory Little?s last letter, but I am with you as he takes over and will 
try to appropriately respond as I am able. It has been fun for me tossing 
around my ideas of viractuality. I hope I have not been too verbose, too 
introspective and too articulate here and that I have bored you. I know most 
people have a limited intellectual span for this kind of examination and 
that what people want are accounts of my sexual adventures. {^_~} Such 
criticism does sting me, much the way that drop of scalding olive oil had 
the check of sleeping Eros.

Viractually Yours,
Joseph Nechvatal

http://www.nechvatal.net

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