The New Sleep:
by
Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo
pp. 244 -245
In the pressure and splendor of
its
negations, Joseph Nechvatal's
work
quietly proposes that the act of
Scrutiny
must be equal in its power to
the specta-
cle of commercialized Sleep (Fig.
I).
Rendered in the graceful and
intricate
guise of signic entertainment,
these acts
of scrutiny, and their
necessity, are
effectively implied by the use
of a gray.
Renaissance or tatoo-like field
or envi-
ronment of super-statically
charged
images, generated by highly
"over-
worked" or congested
patterns of infor-
mation, seemingly contradictory
in na-
ture, which require the
execution of
discernment and judgment (Fig.
2).
Scrutiny, here, must contend
with this
simulated grid of trans-social
phenom-
ena; in effect, measure itself
against the
gray (visual) noise of social
and genetic
disinformation and, finally, be
equal in
power to the spectacle of
disengaged
History. Scrutiny, in
Nechvatal's view
of things, must process,
ultimately, the
actuality of biological
terrorism.
While Nechvatal's picturesÑdraw-
ings, photographic works, and
video
images (Fig. 3)Ñare
stimulated by the
excess distantiations of the
body, which
are driven mentally into
micro-nega-
tions (or signic negations) in
the weak
temporality of existence, they
also build
a dark, hallucinatory
techno-anterior
synthetic (or a willfully
obsolete or
archaic anti-structure) that
drives the
onslaught of psychic references
and sen-
sations in their binary mode
into a dense
network of intentionality,
desublima-
tion, and scrutiny, a kind of
Biosubjec-
tivity that can surmount (or
appropri-
ate) the fast interiors of the
New Sleep,
and overwhelm the world of
Naturalized
Perceptions.
Ultimately, Nechvatal is
constructing
in his work an abstract history,
a dispa-
rate instrumentality, that can
accommo-
date the images of the Subtended
Psyche in pictures that
categorically
exhaust standardized
consciousness and
institutionalized perceptions.
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See:
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/pdf/collinsmilazzosleep_2515.pdf
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