Voluptuous
Viractualism
Published in Simultaneita
01/2003 - a Roman new media arts magazine, pp. 25-29
My concept of viractuality
- and viractualism - emerged out of the Ph.D. research I conducted in virtual
reality at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, over in the
U.K. (*1). It begins with the realization that every new technology disrupts
previous rhythms of consciousness. It is central to my work as an artist. In
fact, for me, the viractual realm is now the authentic domain of art in light
of the information age. And as you know, I teach a seminar course in it at the
School of Visual Arts in New York. This concept serves a pivotal role in my MFA
Computer Art Department class too; a class which deals in theories of Virtual
Reality.
The basis of the viractual
conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become a
significant means for making and understanding contemporary art and that this
brings us artists to a place where one finds the emerging of the computed (the
virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merge — which tends
to contradict some dominant techno clichés of our time - is what I call the ‘viractual’.
This blending of computational virtual space with ordinary viewable space
indicates the subsequent emergence of a new topological cognitive-vision of
connection between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world.
Gilles Deleuze's
consideration of Baruch Spinoza - the 17th century philosopher who merged mind
and matter into one substance - was a key influence. In Deleuze's
"Spinoza: Practical Philosophy" (*3) Deleuze pointed me towards a
recognition of my desires' productiveness, as he indicated how desires propel
us to move towards greater or lesser states of exalted wholeness depending on
whether the thing encountered enters into composition with us, or on the
contrary, tends to decompose us. (*4)
Digitization is a key
metaphor for viractuality in the sense that it is the fundamental translating
system today. But I think that in every era the attempt must be made anew to
wrest the art tradition away from conformisms that are about to overpower it. The
viractual recognizes and uses the power of digitization while being culturally
aware of the values of monumentality and permanency — qualities which can be
found in some powerful analog art. It is a significant concept, I feel, which
indicates and initiates communions of the protoplasmic body to virtual spatial
conditions. As Roy Ascott, in his essay "The Architecture of
Cyberception"*, has said, "... to inhabit both the real and virtual
worlds at one and the same time, and to be both here and potentially everywhere
else at the same time is giving us a new sense of self, new ways of thinking
and perceiving which extend what we have believed to be our natural, genetic
capabilities." (*2) Consequently, the viractual has begun articulating a
new techno-digital sense of life and art for me.
Surely the viractual has
proven to be a useful conceptual operative for constructing a fuller account of
my own work to myself, as well as much other art today. Take the work of Inka
Essenhigh, for example. Undoubtedly the viractual propels my creativity - and
has since I started exploring the viractual image back in 1986 when I started
creating ridiculously complex numeric images which consisted increasingly of a
mixture of drawing, digital-photography, painting, written language, and
externalized computer code - all of which got submitted to computational
manipulations (including viral attacks).
This viractual subject and
method will be exemplified again in the new digitalia work which I showed under
the title of "vOluptuary : an algOrithic hermaphornology" in
May 2002 at Universal Concepts Unlimited. (*5) The viractual will be
exemplified here by mixing my artificial-life virus project with my continuing
project as a post-Warholian painter. This combination of stasis and a flight
manifests in the form of computer-robotic assisted paintings which depict
representations of the intimate body which are associated with sexuality. But
these representations then are problemitized through hermaphroditic
(alchemical) depictions which are achieved through algorithmic means.
Of crucial interest to
"vOluptuary" will be the origin of the hermaphroditic image. This
hybrid viractual image first appears in Ovid’s classic text ‘Metamorphoses’ -
and perhaps this emergence is well worth recounting here. The hermaphrodite
initially occurs in Western culture as a son of Hermes and Aphrodite named
Hermaphroditus. Hermaphroditus was a typical, if exceptionally handsome, young
male with whom the water nympth Salmacis fell madly in love. When
Hermaphroditus rejected her sexual advances, Salmacis voyeuristicly observed
him from afar while desiring him fiercely. Finally, one spring day
Hermaphroditus stripped nude and dove into the pool of water which was Salmacis’s
habitat. Salmacis immediately dove in after him - embracing him and wrapping
her body around his, just as, Ovid says, ivy does around a tree. She then
prayed to the gods that she would never be separated from him — a prayer that
they answered favorably. Consequently, Hermaphroditus emerged from the pool
both man and woman.
The patriarchal
construction of woman as other and the female body as object is deeply rooted
in the supposed duality (opposites) of the (two) sexes. Most feminist theory
questions this patriarchal construction of sex and gender, suggesting that sex
is expressed through a continuum, rather than as an opposing couplet based on
heterosexist male/female polarities. Accordingly, within my viractual multiverse,
containments designed for womanhood/manhood are subverted by the presentation
of ambiguous genitalia - the mutable image and performance of pan-sexuality. Gender
here is viewed as an act of becoming. Here gender performance fails to sustain
sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other.
As such it is a
provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also
to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of
"representation" in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of
"representation" in the political sense (and vice versa). Art here is
seen as political in the sense that it is a site of power struggles which fail
to presuppose a metaphysics which is itself a politics — a politics which
establishes an order of values which often maintains the dominant order of
meaning and power over break-through ideologies. Need I mention the war in
which we are engaged against Islamic fundamentalism?
As the tale of
Hermaphroditus suggests, my work now is about pansexual eroticism married to
virtuality, quixotic transformation, and, of course, immersive excess. The
viractual realm here is a political-spiritual chaosmos in the sense that new
forms of sexual order arise such that any form of order is only temporary and provisional.
But I don't think it is a chaosmos in the sense of ceaseless flux and chaos. Rather,
this sphere is attained through an emergent viractual operation, and I take
abundant pleasure in the forms of pan-order that arise within its algorithmic
processes.
The point is that within
viractual creation all sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis - which
is to say that they are translatable into other signs. Here, of course, it is
possible to find resonances and affinities between sexual opposites. Here we
can always articulate new sexes within. Here a new-sprung chameleon-like sexual
demeanor is being built from the virtual abyss.
So the viractual is a new
sensibility emerging in art respecting the integration of certain aspects of
science, technology, myth and consciousness — a consciousness struggling to
attend to the prevailing current spirit of our age. This viractual zeitgeist I
identify as being precisely an autopoietic desiring machine in which
everything, everywhere, all at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of
communication. Therefore, the viractual is no longer content with the
regurgitation of a standardized analog repertoire of image-tropes. Rather I
detect in art a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced
scientific discovery - discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive
logical methodology.
Concerning this viractual
span of liminality, I am reminded here of two very different, yet
complimentary, concepts: entrainment and égréore. Entrainment, in electro-physics,
is the coupling of two or more oscillators as they lock into a commonly sensed
interacting frequency. In alchemical terms an égréore (an old form of the word
agréger) is a third concept or phenomenon which is established from conjoining
two different elements together. I suggest that the term (concept) viractual
(and viractuality) may be a concordant entrainment/égréore conception helpful
in defining our now third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the
meeting of the virtual and the actual - a concept close to what the military
call augmented reality, which is the use of transparent displays worn as
see-through glasses on which computer data is projected and layered. A
Lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged and established a seemingly
unrestricted area of abundance which I call the viractual.
Joseph
Nechvatal
(*1) The title of the
Ph.D. dissertation is "Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances : A Study of
the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous
Immersive Idioms". A url introduction to the thesis, entitled "Frame
and Excess", can be read on-line and the entire thesis downloaded in PDF
at: http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm
(*2) Ascott, R. 1994a. "The
Architecture of Cyberception" In Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, No.
8, MIT Press Journals, August 1994
(*3) Deleuze, G. 1984.
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights
(*4) Deleuze, G. 1984.
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights, p. 21
(*5) Universal Concepts
Unlimited
507 West 24th
Street @ 10th Ave
New York, NY
10011
Tel:
212.727.7575 Fax: 212.727.7676 Email: ucu1@rcn.com
Joseph
Nechvatal