This text on Joseph Nechvatals viral infected art is
by Dr. Alan Liu from his book The
Laws of Cool (The University of Chicago
Press 2004) (pp. 331-336 & 485-486). This is a section of chapter 11 of The Laws of Cool in which Dr. Liu thinks through alternatives to the
aesthetic ideology of "creativity". In this chapter he talks about
what he calls "destructivity" as an alternative principle, starting
with the modernist, avant-garde "auto destructions" of art that Dario
Gamboni surveys in his book on The
Destruction of Art. Dr. Liu then pays
close attention to four case studies: Joseph Nechvatals virus project(s),
William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh's _Agrippa_, Jodi, and the Critical Art
Ensemble.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From The Laws of Cool
Exhibit 1 is the work of the
digital artist Joseph Nechvatal. In the early 1980s Nechvatal produced physical
media works that recombined and recomposed found media images. The results,
as Barry Blinderman describes, were intimately scaled graphite drawings
comprising saturated, interwoven line tracings of pictures culled from
newspapers and magazines. Irrational juxtapositions of images and scale,
Blinderman continues, were submerged into an all-over abstract network.[i]
Such art was not just recombinant, but also conceptually destructive. I tend
to degenerate archetypal media images, Nechvatal said in 1984. I rip off
images from the media . . . then destroy/transform them in the
interests of unintelligible beauty.[ii]
Moreover, Nechvatals (de)compositions alluded to the general destructivity of
contemporary technologies usually fted for their innovation and creativity. As
the artist wrote in 1983, images of mass annihilation wrought by technology
now provide the major context for our art and our lives. With profoundly
disturbed psyches, modern people encounter their existential fear in the atom,
for when technology relieved much of mans fear of nature it replaced that fear
with one of technology itself.[iii]
Beginning
in the late 1980s, Nechvatal migrated into the digital realm by specializing in
computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas paintings.[iv]
His method is to create digital maquettes which fuse drawing, digital
photography, written language, and externalized computer code, then to use a
robotic painting machine to transform the maquettes (or small models, in this
case digital) into high resolution acrylic paintings. As the robotic painting machine passes once over the canvas,
pigments are mixed computationally in real time and an airbrush type
delivery system yields a smooth and lush finished surface.[v] Yet no matter how smooth and lush the
gloss, finish in Nechvatals work is a deceptive concept because the
destructivity he sought to express migrated in a unique way into the digital
realm. During his tenure as
artist-in-residence in 1992-93 at the Pasteur Institute in Arbois, France,
which now researches AIDS, Nechvatal, in collaboration with his programmer Jean-Philippe Massonie, initiated the virus art
projects for which he has become well known.[vi]
In these projects (Virus Projects 1.0 and 2.0 and his more recent vOluptuary:
an algorithic hermaphornology [sic] series), he unleashes what he calls
computer viruses on his original image files or digital maquettes, transforming
and altering those images in unpredictable ways. Unlike the usual breed of
computer viruses, however, which bear only an incomplete or casual resemblance
to embodied viruses (as indicated by their incoherent species classification in
hacker idiom as viruses, worms, Trojan horses), Nechvatals viruses are
actually cellular automata whose use in artificial life research analogizes
embodied life.
Cellular
automata are a form of digital behavior (usually represented in patterns on a
screen) in which complex phenomena emerge from purely local interactions.
Instead of a program that from the top down determines what appears on a
computer screen, cellular automata presuppose that there is no god program.
Rather, there is only a simple algorithm that from the bottom up does nothing
more than instruct individual pixels on the screen how to react to phenomena in
their immediate neighborhood. For example, an instruction might be the
equivalent of: Look around and see if the adjacent pixels are switched on or
off, and in what color. Then average the conditions [or perform some other
calculation] and, depending on the results, move yourself eight pixels to the
left, turn yourself blue, or duplicate yourself.[vii]
The simultaneous interaction of many such discrete, local behaviors over time
(in multiple iterations of the algorithm named generations in imitation of
organic propagation) results in surprising, emergent patterns at higher
levels of organization. Indeed, in the most interesting cases, complex
behaviors emerge that appear actually to live--that is, to create local
formations that maintain themselves, move or glide, reproduce, and die into
stasis.
Applying
the principles of cellular automata, Nechvatals virus projects start with his
digital images, set a cellular automata program to work on them, and then
capture the result at generation n after the algorithm has eaten away at the
original images and transformed them (and their acrylic realizations) into
something not just visually interesting but often hauntingly beautiful. The finished works expose to view the
action of interminable mutation.
In vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min. from the vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology
series, for example, an original image of aggregated red balls--something like
molecules in the lattice structure of a crystal--has been acted upon by a
cellular automata virus to create after 7.5 minutes of iteration a drama of
decomposition and recomposition at four different scales of vision from the
microscopic to macrocosmic.[viii]
The phenomena glimpsed at these perpeptual scales may be described as follows:
Most obviously, the original
has rotted away microscopically until individual pixels of white contaminate
the whole like mold cultures starting in a petri dish. Or perhaps even the
metaphor of mold forming over the image is too sanitary to describe the true depth
of the damage. If we look closely, we note that the eye-catching white pixels
merely distract us from the deeper pixel-rot: not just the pseudo-organic red
balls but the entire visual continuum in which they are embedded is decomposing
as if from the inside out into individual pixels of various colors.
2. Such decomposition into
atomic dust, however, is merely the opening act in a larger narrative of recomposition.
Observing at a slightly larger scale, therefore, we see that individual pixels
that have been freed from the original image do not just wander off in pure
entropy. Rather, they form small clusters or patches (of black, red, green, and
so on) that resemble the jaggies of type fonts displayed on an early computer
screen. Or to overlay upon Nechvatals viral metaphor an astronomical trope, we
may say that the interstellar dust formed by blasting apart old stars
recombines into myriad, new solar systems.
3. Indeed, the grosser our
scale of vision becomes, the more we see that recomposition is the story of the
picture. At a still more expanded scale of perception, the solar
system<n>like clusters of pixels create larger nebulae or swirls as if
beginning to accrete into a galaxy.
4. And at the largest
macro-scale of perception (marked out by the vertical bands of distortion
seeming to sweep across the whole image), it is as if the entirety of the scene
were being rescanned for some great, transcendental Photoshop in the sky that
will subsequently crop, resize, mask, filter, and so on through all the other
recombinant effects in our contemporary graphics repertory.[ix]
vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min.
Hauntingly
beautiful, I called vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min.--or, to apply a phrase from
Nechvatal himself, a work of unintelligible beauty. But really, perhaps, we
are dealing not with the pleasure of beauty (despite the works title, a play
on Latin voluptas, pleasure) but instead with the sublime or its near relative,
the tragic. It is not stretching too far to say that vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min. is indeed what I called it
above: a drama of decomposition and recomposition. If the original,
crystalline image of a well-ordered world is the protagonist of this work (its
Lear, we may say), then there is a fateful way in which the antagonists on the
scene--the viral agents of decomposition and recomposition--are ultimately integral with the protagonist in a way
that is classically tragic. It is as if all the action of the work followed the
Aristotelian plot: decomposition and recomposition are a reversal that do no
more than discover the heros deepest, darkest fear, which descends upon him
not from outside but in the final analysis from within as a tragic flaw. vOluptas
2.0 @ 7.5 min.
thus reveals a frightful, if fractal, symmetry in relation to its original
image of order. It is self-similar through and through: the disassembled
pixels, clusters and patches, nebulae, and so on, are simply a strange, or
estranged, way of reseeing the red balls at different scales. The balls, that
is, were from the first the giant archetypes of pixels, and the mission of
Nechvatals viral art is no more than to defamiliarize those archetypes so
that we see revealed the recombinant possibilities of destruction and
re-creation hidden within the illusion of their gridlike order.
In
classical tragedy, we remember, it was Fate that acted upon the inner, tragic
flaws of heroes to disassemble their tidy worlds into the primary, even tidier
orders nested secretly within them--for example, the strict binary, utterly
cruel order of life vs. death. In Nechvatals work, however, a little, godless
algorithm plays the part of Fate, disassembling order into free pixels whose
apparent anarchy is merely a symptom of a purer knowledge of the brutal
clarities of order: on/off, white/green, and so on. In such a drama, what level
of order, macro or micro, is creative, what destructive? Nechvatals art
refuses to say, which is to say that it ultimately includes the binary of
creative vs. destructive within the recombinant logic of on/off, white/green,
and so on, in which everything is up for grabs. We are all Lears whose life is
staked on the creation of a certain vision of order; we are all therefore also
hosts for multitudes of destructive agents that imagine the possibility of
other orders. Creative or destructive is not a decision that can be made
from a deus ex machina perspective; it is an equivocation that is part of
the inner logic of the system.[x]
[i] Blinderman, Ghost of Electricity.
[ii] Quoted in McCormick, On the Ecstatic Excess of Joseph Nechvatal.
[iii] Quoted in Popper, On
Joseph Nechvatal.
[iv]. Joseph Nechvatal, home page www.nechvatal.net.
See also his Ecstasy of Excess, which
reproduces selected works from 1987 to 1991.
[v] This description of Nechvatals
working method is based on a personal communication from the artist of 9 June
2003. My thanks to Nechvatal for
correspondence about his art.
[vi]. Murphy, Joseph
Nechvatal. See Nechvatals home page www.nechvatal.net and Nechvatal, Joseph
Nechvatal.
[vii] See the technical explanation
titled The Model: Notes by Stphane Sikora
and Joseph Nechvatal on Nechvatals Web page for Virus Project 2.0. For the
code of the cellular automata program in Virus Project 1.0, see Nechvatal, The
Computer Virual Formula..
[viii] vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min. was sent to me by the artist in
December 2001 as a high-resolution photographic reproduction for use in my book
(for high res version see: http://polaris.english.ucsb.edu/ayliu/nechvatal/). At that time, the work was still conceptually part of Virus
Project 2.0. Since then, Nechvatal
has gone on to create his new vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology
series, for which he has written An Artists Statement. Created for the exhibit of works from
the series at Universal Concepts Unlimited in New York City, 22 May to 3 July
2003, the artists statement interprets the visual recombinations performed
upon his initial images of human genitalia and intimate body parts in terms of
a theory of hermaphroditic recombination
inspired by Ovidean myth.
Because my discussion of vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min. was written earlier, I have not
been able fully to integrate the terms of Nechvatals own intepretation. For example, in retrospect I would have
played further variations upon Nechvatals metaphors of organism and sexuality
rather than superimpose my own astronomical metaphors below. However, it is fortuitous
that my analysis of the transformations imposed by viral action upon the
pseudo-organic red balls in vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min. (morphologically related to the
bulbous, organic compositional forms in several of the works exhibited at
Universal Concepts Unlimited) is essentially homologous with Nechvatals
discussion of sexual transformations.
[ix]. It is unclear from the evidence of the image
whether the vertical distortion bands were actually caused by the action of
cellular automata or were instead an additional transformational effect (or
perhaps part of the original image). Cellular automata programs, in the
examples that I myself have run or seen run, either do not produce regular
geometries or--when they do produce such geometries--create patterns more
symmetrical and/or recursive than that seen in the asymmetrical vertical lines
in vOluptas 2.0 @ 7.5 min.
[x] To quote Nechvatals Artists
Statement accompanying the "vOluptuary: an algorithic
hermaphornology" exhibition at Universal Concepts Unlimited in New York
City, these works show incomprehensible transformation, and, of course,
immersive excess. They aim to
depict an imagined realm of political-spiritual chaosmos where new forms of
sexual order arise such that any form of order is only temporary and
provisional.
Dr. Liu teaches at
the University of California, Santa Barbara
Email: ayliu@english.ucsb.edu
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/books/Laws_of_Cool_precis.html