Frank Popper and Virtualised Art
/fontfamily>This is my unedited original draft of the article
Frank Popper and Virtualised Art which was published Winter 2004 in tema
celeste magazine: issue #101, pp. 48 – 53 (English and Italian – 4
illustrations)
/fontfamily>The handsome 84 year-old Parisian-based art historian Frank
Popper is without doubt something of a scarcity. Anyone who takes a look at the
historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds Frank nearly
unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the
years of the late-1960’s up to the early 1990s. Basically there is Jack
Burnham's book Beyond Modem Sculpture (1968), Gene Youngblood’s reference work
Expanded Cinema (1970) and Frank’s books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art
(1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age
(1993). All are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art
got to where it is today - in Frank’s terms “virtualized”.
In his books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art and Art, Action and
Participation Frank showed how Kinetic Art played an important part in
pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links
between science, technology and art relating to the notion of the environment. This
expanded approach has led Frank into showing us how technology is – or can be –
humanized through art in his latest book From Technological to Virtual Art: the
Humanization of the Machinic through Artistic Imagination – which I have read
in its manuscript form – now being prepared for publication by MIT Press. This
is his long awaited update of the art and technology component in art – an
increasingly important factor in that technological-informational change is
consistently cited as the splintering element which instigated mainstream
modernism mutating into what has been called, for lack of a better term,
postmodernism. So it is illuminating to study Frank’s intellectual evolution
and how he sees the technological influence in art arriving at what he now
calls the virtual situation. Or what I call Virtualism.
/fontfamily>Key to Frank’s initial thinking and activities as an
aesthetician, an art theorist, an art exhibition organizer, teacher, and art
critic was his encounter in the early 1950s with the kinetic artist (and author
of the book Constructivism), George Rickey and Frank’s discovery of the subtle
technical movements in Rickey’s mobile sculptures. Subsequently Frank
encountered the artists Nicholas Schöffer and Frank Malina, whose works were
based on some first or second hand scientific knowledge. Also Op Art in the
early-1960s had a powerful affect on him. Indeed Op proved to be a strong
predecessor to what he is calling Virtual Art in that Op Art called attention
to the spectator's individual, constructive, and changing perceptions - and
thus called upon the attitude of the spectator to transfer the creative act
increasingly upon him or herself. Op beckons forth a consideration of the
enlargement of the audience's normal participation; both in regard to the
spectators ocular aptitude to instigate variations in the perceived optic, as
well as his or her capability to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or
within the work of art itself. Frank’s personal encounters in Paris with the
GRAV group, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Yaacov Agam, Jesus-Rafael Soto and Victor
Vasarely proved to have had a substantial impact on his view of art and art
history.
/fontfamily>Following this inclination he took interest in the works of Piotr
Kowalski, Roy Ascott and many others working with the early concept of
networking. These artists confirmed his interest in spectator participation,
which brought him to the late 1980s and the 1990s when virtual art began to
establish itself. To explain and illustrate the globalization of virtuality and
the emergence of a techno-aethetic Frank in his new book stresses the panoramic
and multi-generational aspects of virtual art by tracking its present condition
and historical roots. As regards virtual art, openness is stressed both from
the point of view of the artists and their creativity and from that of
the follow-up users in their reciprocating thoughts and actions. The point
Frank makes in From Technological to Virtual Art is that this openness implies
a certain amount of liberty and freedom for action and creation but not at all
a radical destruction of what came before. This commitment to the teeming
openness found in virtual art can be traced to the theories of Umberto Eco and
other aestheticians as regards the openness of the work of art - and more
recently Eco’s consideration of the computer as a spiritual tool.
Technically speaking, virtual art, according to Frank, includes all the art
made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s (or a bit
before, in some cases). One of its aspects, at the time, was that interfaces
through which exchanges passed between human and computer - for example:
visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, generators of
three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position sensors, tactile
and power feed-back systems, etc. - allowed us to immerse ourselves completely
into the image and interact with it. The impression of reality felt under these
conditions was not only provided by vision and hearing, but also by the
other bodily senses. This multiple sensing was so intensely experienced, at
times, that one could speak of it as a Virtual Reality. Thus his use of the
word “virtual” signified that we were in the presence not only of reality
itself but also of the simulation of reality in the communications landscape. Yet
his analysis differs radically from what I see as typical of French
apocalyptic-chic negativism. Take for example recent proclamations by the
skeptical - now famously reactionary - technophobe Paul Virilio concerning
virtuality (not to mention the eminent Monsieur Baudrillard).
Aesthetically speaking, virtual art, as Frank sees it, is the artistic
interpretation of the contemporary issues of communications, not only with the
aid of the above mentioned technological developments but through their
integration with them. Such an integration - or combination - allows for
an aesthetic-technological logic of creation which forms the essential part of
the specificity of virtual art.
From an ontological point of view, contemporary virtual art represents a new
departure from technological art since it can be realized as many
different actualities. This can also be a useful way to understand the self in
as far as the self is truly virtual: it has many potentialities. Thus the
virtual self can be transformed into an actual, living personality. We are here
close to Edmond Couchot’s interpretation of virtuality and of the virtual as a
power opposed to the actual, but whose function, technologically speaking, is a
way of being (un mode d’être) of digital simulation which can lead towards a
certain expression of the subjectivity of the operator. This ontological
tendency of virtual art can be clearly observed in the works of a good number
of artists described in his new book who have been using telepresence and
virtual reality devices. As Frank sees it, virtual art can even play an ethical
role in the present development of globalization by stressing more than any
other previous art form human factors - both as regards to the artists and the
multiple-users of the art. So he believes that it could have an impact in a
critical and prospective way on globalization.
Indeed something exciting happens when one looks at a familiar subject not as a
closed conceptual system, but to find an opening conceptual edge – in this case
the increasing humanization of technological virtualism. That is what I detect
again in Frank Popper’s work as an art historian and what I detect in his
expansive research for From Technological to Virtual Art: that opening edge. Certainly
I think that this conceptual edge is ever more important today after we have
learned that both fundamentalist and modernist reductionist assumptions are not
easily changed by mere postmodern negations. What seems to be needed globally
are mutating conceptual models to think differently with; connectivist
conceptual models that are never just the completed or inverted objectivity of
the common conceptions.
The virtual model that Frank observes and equally proposes for art has its
epistemological, ontological and ethical connotations. But it has also its
aesthetic and philosophical humanist sides that should allow us to better
understand the multiple existential changes that our society and every
individual undergo at the present historically accelerated moment of
globalization. This is demonstrated as he takes one step further from what
Oliver Grau and Christine Buci-Glücksmannn define as the social implication -
or the aesthetics - of the virtual. According to Grau in his book Virtual Art,
media art, that is, video, computer graphics and animation, net art,
interactive art and its most advanced form of virtual art (with its sub genres
of telepresence art and genetic art), is beginning to dominate theories of the
image and art. With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing
and presenting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests
that it is possible to enter it. Thus, it has laid the foundations for virtual
reality as a core medium of the emerging information society.
Christine Buci-Glücksmann approaches the aesthetics of the virtual through the
idea that the development of the new technologies of the virtual has caused a
major historic transformation that touches all the artistic practices: the
passage from the culture of objects and of stability to a culture of flux and
instability. Thus the premises in both art and architecture can be established
that lead to an aesthetics of transparence and of fluidities.
Popper accepts and incorporates these points of view in his own theoretical
approach of virtual art by taking an additional theoretical step by assuming
that our wider consciousness – which is affected by technological advancement -
permits us to better assume both our intellectual and our emotional human
status at the beginning of the 21st century. He does not believe, as many
technophiles do, that technology is making us less and less human and more
machinic but rather adheres to ideas of humanity closer to those of Michael
Heim in his book Virtual Realism. Here Heim has identified a transhuman attitude
which consists of artistic and psychological strategies contrived to break
through well-worn perceptions as his notion of the human is not linked to the
classical heroic idea stemming from the Greeks and Romans. Rather, the humanist
notion symbolizes for him our basic human needs and personal achievements. This
does not preclude this idea from also being connected to wider - even universal
– issues. For Frank, virtualism enters the current anti-human and post-human
dialogue - a context fraught with the most explosive anti-human and post-human
dangers - precisely with the intention of humanizing technology by taking into
consideration the need for human survival: a survival concerned with biology
and freedom. A virtual artist’s activities can deal with these fundamental
issues while preparing a blue-print for some working solutions of both personal
and universal dimensions.
This basically neo-humanist attitude was originally informed by the thought of
philosophers like Nietzsche, Hegel, and Adorno and the literature of Franz
Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Elias Canetti, Vladimir Nabokoff and Primo Levi. These
authors anticipated or described, each one in their own manner, the basic
events that made up 20th century tragedy - a tragedy which combined
bureaucratic obsession, widespread persecution and outright murder with the
misuse of technology. This explains Frank’s positive attitude as an alternative
art historian who takes a completely different stance than does Paul Virilio. Monsieur
Virilio’s attitude is based on the assumption that accidents and other
catastrophic events are inevitable and which can only be recorded by the
artists who are unable to propose other possibilities or virtualities. According
to Virilio, the work of artists cannot have any impact politically or
intellectually on the course of events. For Frank Popper rather, technological
and virtual tools (and ultimately consciousness) provides the substructure from
which the new art is emerging.
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