Catherine Perret in conversation with Joseph Nechvatal
(12/15/05-04/11/06)
CP: The most important contribution for art of the so-called
New Technologies is that they introduce and/or let appear new process and forms
of thinking. Is it possible to define them and their characteristics?
Do you think that New Technologies reveal these forms of
thinking or that they introduce some kind of innovation in terms of
methodological thinking?
JN: I think that what we now mean when we say New
Technologies is digital technology. I have no doubt that the specificity of
digital technology may be used to change our habits of thinking, our noologies,
in quite dramatic ways. I think that digital technology allows and facilitates
changes in consciousness by primarily allowing us to act differently with new
tools. For example, digital painters, like myself, work and think much
differently from traditional painters through their mastering of digital tools
- if they do so in alliance with a sprit of heterogeneous innovation and inner-directed
risk.
I will try to define some of the main larger issues connected
to digital consciousness as I see them; issues which run parallel to, and feed
into, the epistemological transformations generated by contemporary theories of
physics, biology and mathematics which have become closely associated with
poststructuralist theory and cyber culture.
In the last forty years, certainly since the advent of
computers, civilization has witnessed a paradigmatic shift. The predictability
of the linear equation was found to be insufficient in capturing the total
relevant behavior in natural systems. Non-linear equations were troublesome to
manipulate until computers provided science with the means through which
non-linear mathematical models of self-organization could be demarcated.
What was detected was that matter expressed itself in complex
rich ways which were non-linear but, nevertheless, which displayed long-term
tendencies and organizational patterns. Specifically, certain spots in the
non-linear field were found to manifest as either attraction or repulsion spots
to nearby trajectories. The attractors were found to have a stabilizing
function in the system and represented long-term tendencies of a system.
Chaotic (or strange) attractors signify turbulent behavior in nature.
Furthermore, what was discovered was that attractors may mutate and these
spontaneous transformations became know as bifurcations.
While the classical sciences isolated physical systems from
their surrounding, the new thinking connected to digital fluidity is founded on
the realization that all systems in nature are connected and subject to flows
of matter and energy that move constantly through them. Dynamic equalibriums
result from chaotic energy and manifest themselves in creative processes that
generate richly organized patterns patterns that teeter on the complex stable
and the complex unstable.
For me it is neither surprising nor coincidental that a
paradigmatic epistemological change for thought and art would follow such
developments. In art, science fiction, critical studies, and in an array of
philosophical discourses, chaotic and rhizomatic approaches towards turbulent
behavior are affecting our consciousness in respect to order and composition.
CP: I have several questions, of course, after your answer. I
will take them one after the other. Could you develop what you experienced as
inner-directed risk linked to digital practice?
JN: I found that taking chances in relationship to ones
subjectivity is enhanced through digital practices. Not only does the inherent
newness, trepidation, and jubilation felt when playing with digital consumer
goodies in a non-linear fashion facilitate slight inner-directed risk but
there is an active, moral non-compliant aspect as well. It is quite easy to
slip into excess.
CP: Classical science was founded on a metaphysical model where
you have no relationship between nature and the object of science which was a
pure abstract model of relationships. Although classical science is founded on
abstraction - and if it can define grids of regularities - it is because it
supposes that relationships are fixed because they are conceptual.
The non-linear equation refers to patterns in nature or in
matter itself before those patterns become mathematical models and can be
demarcated by digitalization. It is a succession of "demarcations"
and not abstraction.
JN: The new sensibility/noology that I am feeling, (which
elsewhere I have called cybism) is based on my observation that art and
science, after centuries of separation, are becoming entangled again through
the discredidation of the concept one might say presumption of objectivity.
Richard Rorty writes persuasively about this as does Manuel Delanda;
particularly in his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. This
connectivist non-separateness is part and parcel with a noology of
inter-subjectivity, which on one hand, gives art the license to appropriate
scientific tropes, and on the other, lends science arts powers of non-utility,
freedom, and even excess. It is this border-crossing between Janusian mirror
states that leads me to believe that we are entering a state of a new kind of
natural magic in some ways reminiscent of the Florentine 15th
Century Neo-Platonists. Take Marsilio Fiscino and/or Giovanni Pico as examples.
Their thinking typically placed the reign of significance in-between the vast
remoteness of spiritual infinity and the baseness of present materialism -
therefore concentrating on the zone of transformational actions of humans that
lead to a natural magical alchemy. This noology is about knowledge that can
transform things and states of the system. In that sense I am maintaining that
we are leaving the age of sterile reductive analysis and entering into one of
fecund synthesis; much like the poetic-mythic-scientific age of the early
Renaissance. The binding force of this synthesis is certainly inter-subjective
pleasure (art) and a lust for yeasty comprehensions out of which new
possibilities grow. These comprehensions are obtained by
experiment/chance/inner-risk though need not be verified, nor repeated.
Indeed they should not be. It is about a search for originality in that sense.
The new noologys validity is obtained through the force of its correspondences
and its breath of connectivity. The resulting pan-panoramas will luxuriate this
era and be the counter-attack to fundamentalist repression as its imminence
will supercede our mistrust of irrationality and lead us into a qualitative
approach by escaping locked down definitions. In some ways it is a development
of Nietzsches Gay Science.
CP: Digitalization accounts for an empirical model of
rationality that evokes very precisely what early Ienaian Romanticism tried to
conceive of as Naturphilosophie. The question of "attractor" was for
example present under the concept of "magnetizing" of all beings in
nature and in society too.
Nevertheless, when you speak about "fields",
"bifurcations", "connection", "linear" and
"non linear", I ask myself if the model of the classical map is
finished, or still latent, and, under the map, the representation itself.
JN: Yes concepts are fluid. Also patterns in nature overlap
and are simultaneous. We are gazing into a thickly layered field.
In terms of digitalization and its relationship to the
Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schellings System of Transcendental Philosophy,
we might recall its deep roots in neo-Platonic
sublime mind. Techno-Romanticism tends towards a focus on individual passions
and inner struggles and hence produces a new and positive emphasis on the
emotional artistic imagination in the digital realm. This capacious
aggrandizement of feeling over logic becomes perceived as a gateway to
transcendent experiences of unity based on ideas of the unity of our own
consciousness.
Recall that the romantic mysticism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
Novalis, and Friedrich Schelling was a circuitous counter-action against much
of the overt rationalism of 18th century philosophy. They stressed the
accentuation of pathos, fancy, and an aversion to adhering to sociable
etiquette in opposition to rationalist obligation. Their Romanticism announced
a rebuff to the precepts of regulation, tranquility, equilibrium, quintessence,
and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late-18th century
Neo-Classicism in particular. Thus Romanticism was a counter-attack opposing
the Enlightenment's ideals of strict materialism by accentuating the visceral,
the inconceivable, the mercurial, the inner, the extemporaneous, the emotional,
the extravagant, and the spectral. This re-evaluation of ideal human responses
was accompanied by a spiraling within the personality and an intensified
inquiry into the individual personality with its moods and intrinsic
verisimilitudes.
Neo-Platonism is salient to our concerns
because Pseudo-Dionysiuss neo-Platonic thought predominantly appears in the
post-Kantian romantic transcendentalists, such as in the influential work of
Friedrich Schelling, the German philosopher who more than any set the itinerary
for Romanticism. Pseudo-Dionysiuss system was essentially dialectical theology
- the simultaneous affirmation and denial of paradox in any statement or
concept relative to totality. Schelling
regards reality as a manifestation of a spiritual vigor that initially
operated unconsciously, but that in conclusion, consummated in self-awareness
through the instrumentality of human thoughtfulness. Art represented the
culmination of that operation. Thus with Romanticism, philosophy became again
involved in the challenge of art, and conceptions concerning beauty were used
to solve philosophical problems as Romanticism moved away from reason (as it
had been conceived through the tradition of Aristotle's logic) and towards a
revival of Platonism in Plotinusian neo-Platonic epistemology, an epistemology
that embraces an abstract poly-oneness conception which addresses Pagan
polytheism through a unifying oneness.
From the neo-Platonic perspective we
understand that physical experience makes us consider that we are disconnected,
when in actuality we are not. In remarkable parallel developments, 20th century
science found that it became increasingly difficult to keep detached from just
such metaphysical contemplation. With Techno-Romanticism, the comprehension of
both the universe and consciousness as undiminished totality has re-emerged, as
the fields of physics and metaphysics appear to be dropping their separate
distinctions to some extent and forming an intimate rendezvous in digital art.
This is so due to art's attributes of presenting cohesion within apparent
borderless excess. As digital art may exemplify this dynamism, it newly fulfils
art's ancient function as a model-maker of contemplative consciousness too
abstract to be embodied in less circuitous human expressions.
CP: Can we not say that such an epistemological change was
efficient in art since Marcel Duchamp - with the cesura that he introduces
between art and the object of art and a new concept of object like the
ready-made?
JN: Yes Dada thinking is another example of Pseudo-Dionysiusian paradox; the recognition of
the simultaneous existence of affirmation and negation 01 in digital terms.
JN: Yes the feeling I have is that we are trying to exit a new
dark age. This time (and again) its the flesh humans verses the robotic
religio-political ideologues. Giordano Bruno hereticlly pointed out that
religious faith is irrational and has no scientific basis. By spreading the
Copernican doctrine and word of a new astronomy he became know as an infidel
and was condemned during the Inquisition for teaching there is no absolute up
or down. His acute observations on the pretensions of superstition are most
relevant to our dark world today. This geniuss death by fire is our beacon of
truth.
CP: I extract two key-words from our exchange now:
consciousness and abstract. You say that, As digital art may exemplify this
dynamism, it newly fulfils art's ancient function as a model-maker of
contemplative consciousness too abstract to be embodied in less circuitous
human expressions. I understand this too abstract contemplative consciousness
differently as the abstract conscious of modernity. Modern abstraction meant
alienation - and alienation of consciousness before all. The consciousness you
write about is not this schized consciousness. It is an abstract-like
reflection as in Schelling's system; reflection of the reflection - or
presentation of the system's form. It is abstract (by which I mean something
like cosmic or systematic or total) because it is without any content of
representation. The idea of "art" as "presenting cohesion within
apparent borderless excess" (what is given in your paintings) and the
concept of "contemplative consciousness" crosses precisely with the
notion of presentation where consciousness becomes form.
JN: Yes. Beautifully stated. What is a system's form when that
system is continually morphing - besides that of the morph? Yet the system is
ripe with an excess of detail at the same time. So we are in a state of
supra-representation - which is another form of abstraction. However it is a
non-reductive abstraction. It is form not empty, but rather full to
overflowing. Good art sets up just such possible alternative models to suggest
connectivist states of awareness. For me painting is not merely a cultural
product. It is a service product. As such the quality of its service grants it
its value. For example digital painting is an alternative method of painting
within the system and history of painting pictures. Digital painting is neither
in opposition to traditional hand painting nor is it complicit with it. It is
both simultaneously within and without the system of painting.
CP: You sat that connectivist
non-separateness is part and parcel with a noology of inter-subjectivity, which
on one hand, gives art the license to appropriate scientific tropes, and on the
other, lends science arts powers of non-utility, freedom, and even excess. This
sentence opens up some very interesting paths that I propose we now explore.
You seem to apply a political model to the relationship between art and
science, particularly when we consider them as subjects associated by social
links. This models identification seems to be based on appropriation. But what
is the basis of this identification for you? Is it the efficiency of the
connectivity itself - or connectivity as a new form of social linkage between
individuals? And if this were the case, how would you define this kind of
linkage?
JN: For me this linkage is exactly what I
look for when I look for art. Yes, this linking of the social, scientific,
technical with the personal-sensual is what I imagine when I dare think of
defining art. This is why when people chatter of the end of art I always feel
that they are missing the point of art. They are missing arts pleasurable and
ethical force of course, its position of the other, but also its ability to
create meta-meanings; comprehensive meanings which are obtained through exactly
such sweeping synthetic maneuvers.
So with art,
synthetic connectivity may be vast. Art can be stupid and stunted as well, of
course. But for me distinguished art, by definition, contains a plethora of
intellectual strains in the interests of providing the foundation for a
strategy of private discovery - which can then be shared with others. Of
course, it must be remembered that in philosophy synthetic statements are those
statements judged to be true or false in relationship to the world (but which
are not necessary ones), as opposed to analytical truths, which are necessary,
and hence cannot be otherwise. In both art and philosophy it is important to
make this distinction between synthetic and analytical statements. Only when we
acknowledge that art partakes in synthetic connecting activity might we enter
the concept of social linkage into consideration,
and only if we understand art to be a synthetic psychological thought-vision.
The key political
notion here for me is omnijectivity, which is
the concept stemming from the discoveries of quantum physics which teaches us
that mind (previously considered the subjective realm) and matter (previously
considered as the objective realm) are inextricably linked. It is a political
concept for me because omnijectivity is possible only with the conflation of
polarities; a stance which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites
apparent opposites (specifically the subjectivity and objectivity). For me art
which takes seriously such scientific understanding supersedes the tabular
space laid out by classical thought.
Art then may promote a non-teleological noology that makes use of the
mutual interpenetrational and rhizomatic nature of the thought process typical
of the art experience -
multiplicitious and heterogeneous.
For me, the basic function
of art is to create mental spaces that allow unaccustomed creative situations
and sensations to connect socially. Given our societys heightening condition
of connectivity, the heterogeneous, multiplicitous, spreading and
non-hierarchical nature of the epistemological rhizome comes together in art
under the hyper (i.e. connected) effect of the hyper-total. I define this
visual hyper-totality as being produced by an all-over, elaborate, spread out
distribution of visual incident which calls upon the optic procedure of spatial
summation; a process which unconsciously totalizes the visual excess
encountered.
This
hyper-cognitive art is where the particular (now updated by electronic
connectivity) is seen as part of an accrual total system by virtue of its being
connected to everything else. The strategy of hyper-anything includes
principles of networked connections and electronic links which give multiple
choices of passages to follow and continually new branching possibilities. The
total-hyper-being model for a new connected art is the self-re-programmable
internal function which explicitly offers a furtherance in envisioning
internal, anti-hierarchical models of our patterns of thought to ourselves.
Moreover, since it is difficult making sense of today's swirling,
phantasmagorical media society, the general proposition behind art may best be
to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by taking advantage of
today's superficial image saturation; a saturation so dense that it fails to
communicate anything particular at all upon which we can concur - except
perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium as the reproduction
system pulses with higher and higher, faster and faster flows of digital data
to the point of near hysteria.
Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance is that
the greater the amount of information that flows, the greater the
non-teleological uncertainty which is produced. So, the tremendous load of
imagery/sound/text information digitally produced and reproduced all round us
today ultimately seems to make less, not more, conventional teleological sense.
If
accepted, this supposition, it seems to me, plays into the history of abstract
art which teaches us that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing
in the form of purposeful representation, and that by scanning the spread of
representation art may formulate an understanding of the laws that provide
representation with its organizational basis. As a result, in my view, it is
art's onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical, summational sense - in
terms of the rhizomatizing world of the imagination - it might make of all this
based on an appropriately decadent reading of our paradoxically material-based
(yet electronically activated) social media environment.
Perhaps such a
basically abstract, open, and thus paradoxical, summation would begin with the
presumption that an information-loaded nuclear weapon has already exploded,
showering us with bits of radioactive-like information bytes, thus drastically
changing the way in which we perceive and act - even in our private
subconscious dream worlds. This subject, and the rhetorical strategy needed to
explore it, especially interests me in that encounters with the computer create
an opportunity for personal transgression and for a vertiginous ecstasy of
thought. Hence excelling the assumed determinism of the technological-based
phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society.
Indeed, it seems to me that as human psychic energies are stifled and/or
bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass informational technology, such
a personally transgressive ecstatic phenomena will most likely increasingly
break out in forms of art. Similarly, simulation technology, when used in the
creation of art, will promote an indispensable alienation from the socially
constructed self necessary for the outburst of such ecstatic experiences/acts
aimed against the controlling world's blandness. Thus the linkage you asked me
about might provide, through significant art, a fundamental antithesis to the
authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical
world.
CP: Your answer gives me the possibility
to be precise again with my question. What is at stake is the epistemological
shift you operate between concepts. The first point for me is your use of the
term meta-meaning. You do not say transcendental, which would plunge us
again immediately into our previous discussion. You name, for example,
connectivity, non-separateness, omnijectivity, polarities, rhizome etc.. They
have a prescriptive sense, deduced from their scientific roots. But when you
speak about inter-subjectivity, even if you add the level of one noology, it is
difficult when not understanding a more descriptive concept of the society
itself. Or when you mention the psychological thought-vision, it too is a
more descriptive approach of facts than a paradigmatic model.
Of course I agree totally with your
conception: the basic function of art is to create mental spaces that allow
unaccustomed creative situations and sensations to connect socially. But this
connection does not need to be projected as if it was not the case. Art happens
because it is in fact intersubjectivity, society, and thought-vision that
permit different kinds of relationships between space and time. This shift
appears remarkably in the strategic question that you bring out. Could the
meta-meaning or synthetic use of scientific concepts provide to art new
political energies?
JN: When you ask this question I think
you go to the heart of the matter. Yes, something exhilarating happens when one
looks at various subjects not as closed conceptual systems, but to find an
opening conceptual edge. The inclusion of meta-meaning (meaning that is
achieved sensually and not only intellectually) and the synthetic use of
scientific concepts in art for me does indeed provide for art a new political
vigor. This conceptual edge is obviously very important today after we have
learned that modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed by mere
postmodern negations. Postmodernists typically reject scientific reductionism
but often assume a kind of fracturing cultural-political reductionism, while
some stay trapped in the scientistic objectivist model because it is largely
the only working one out there politically. What seems to be needed are
self-mutating conceptual models to think differently with; self-re-organizing
political and cultural models that are never just the completed or inverted
objectivity of the usual conceptions.
CP: So perhaps this requires a new
utopian power? In other words, could we name society otherwise in order to
permit this society to think of itself in agreement with the new modes of
thinking offered by techno-science?
JN: Perhaps not a utopian power but
rather a polytopian energy. An omni-society, developed in serious recognition
of omnijectivity, for example, would take on the features of a mutually
connected society interested in its total well being and that of its host the
earth. We are far from that with our simplistic scenarios of good and evil
white hats vs. black hats. The scientific discovery of oogenesis is another
example, as it demonstrates the connection between femaleness and maleness.
Such concepts are marvelous starting places for the creation and understanding
of a new sort of political art, but not one based in tautological vacuous
statements composed of the trite simple statements and images that makes
politics appear logically true whether the assumed statements are true or false
(which they generally are). The role of a mind-freeing imaginative art in the
context of the so-called war on terrorism is, in my mind, a polytopian act of
the utmost importance as it is full of plausible emergent properties.
CP: I am in agreement with this concept
of synthetic meaning of art. But I would like say that it is the imaginary
function of the art that matters. And that is not related to the new scientific
and technological contents.
JN: Yes for me art may fold into its
synthetic mix scientific concepts but art remains closer to the irrational
belief one expects from religion than scientific utilitarianism. Again this
ties into what I was saying about pagan polytheism. Indeed paganism is more
important to me than scientific theory as it can be traced back to Neolithic
times. I am saddened that it only survived up until the Middle Ages when
Christianity became powerful enough to erase it from existence. For me
scientific understanding and paganism are connected however in that they both
are an earth-based understanding which lays emphasis on the reverence of all
aspects of nature.
My favorite examples of early paganism
are found in ancient Greek and Roman religions, as well as in
ancient Goddess worship and Druidic religions - and I incorporate these
references in my visual iconography continuously. I respect the fact that
ancient people believed that everything had a spirit and thus thought
polytheisticly. The gods were part of everyday life, the gods were immanent and
entered every aspect of their society, influencing everything from laws and
customs to the general workings of their community. So when I speak of synthetic
polytopian energy, now you know what I am thinking of.
CP: This relates to the anthropological
level of reality - to anthropomorphism.
JN: Yes. I think conflating of the human
with the earth is a wise thing given the insensitivity exhibited by the powers
operating out of logical positivist empirical assumptions.
CP: What do you think is the tendency of
human society and what produces the authoritarian and rigidified modes of
functionality which you described?
CP: I have a question of strategy now, which makes me question
your terminology. I understand of course that this terminology is voluntarily
homonymic with the neo-capitalistic world: totality, hypertotality,
hypercognitivity and so on. And what this homonymic strategy is, is a kind of
nietzschean conversion of all values: you go at the limit of nihilism
(non-sense, saturation and uncertainty and so on), so as to go beyond the
nihilism of our neo-capitalistic logic in order to bring a new order of its
excess of nothing. By using excess so as to induce and explode this nothing via
a pure logic of excess was this not one of Bataille injunctions? Was he able
to provide a new political conception or do we not risk falling again into the
impossibility of thinking of a conceptual use of excess in the political field?
And in fact in the moral field too?
JN:
Yes these are very important considerations. First off, I do not believe that
society can run counter to what Georges Bataille considered to be the
non-hypocritical human condition, which he took as being roused non-productive
expenditure (threshold excess) entangled with exhilaration. Excess is, for
Bataille, not so much a surplus as an effective passage beyond established
limits, an impulse which exceeds even its own threshold. As far as morality is
concerned, Bataille (librarian, libertine, paleologist, archivist, radical
thinker, and author of erotic fiction) wrote something in Lascaux: La Naissance
de l'Art which answers your question precisely. He said that truth stems from
desire, and he is right. So when I invoke an artistic conversion of values
laced with the digital I am only speaking about those values which we as a
society desire to change. Digital paintings function, for me, is to propose
those desires by visualizing them by proposing new modes of consciousness to
the eye.
So
yes, Bataille showed me that sanctioned excess is generally inferred in much of
art's perceptible richness and that the syntax of art is inner excess. In
accord, I have concluded that aesthetic excess is about the stimulation of the
body-mind through depicting the excess of our internal perceptual circuitry and
projecting this complexity outward into the social mindscape. In this respect
Bataille argued that the sacred springs from the same sources as those things
we conventionally find repugnant
(images of the brain disgust me). Within sacred social zones, sublime
non-linear interconnected transmissions are meant to transpire - thus provoking
attachments between the cavernous unconscious mind and its conscious active
comportment in the social realm. The marvelous abstract character of such
supposed sublime transmissions and their effect on digital and
techno-scientific states of consciousness needs to be explored further, of
course. But to begin to do so we must keep in mind that all reputed sacred
propositions occur within configuring theories of culture. All that we
apprehend as sacredly significant resides in cultural symbols, which, as we
have discussed, is the gist of art. It is by our encounters with styled
theories of techno-culture, in fact, that we omit or grasp such social
abstractions.
You
are right that Bataille's writings, specifically his Visions of Excess (which
appeared in English translation in 1985) was a conceptual opening for me, after
which I began to experiment with (and analysis through my artwork) various
artistic approaches towards latent excess. In the terms Bataille proposes, any
restricted economy, any sealed arrangement (such as an image, an identity, a
concept, or a structure) produces more than it can account for, hence it will
inevitably be fractured by its own unacknowledged excess, and in seeking to
maintain itself, will, against its own rationalized logic, crave rupture,
expenditure, and loss. More specifically, for Bataille, the term expenditure
describes an aspect of erotic activity poised against an economy of production.
Yet Bataille's accomplishment transgresses disciplines and genres so repeatedly
and so thoroughly that capsule accounts of his oeuvre are compelled to delegate
themselves to abstractions. However, one can say with assurance that his
thinking consisted of a meditation on, and fulfillment of, transgressions
through excess - and I follow his lead. Yes, Bataille's Visions of Excess
immediately impressed me as it resonated handsomely with the overloaded nature
of my palimpsest-like gray graphite drawings from the early-1980s (which were
reflective of the time's concerns with the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
the threat of nuclear holocaust, and the excessive nature of the Ronald Reagan
military build-up; the largest in the history of the world).
Hence
the new political conceptions which we are playing around with here would be
consistent with Bataille's intellectual comprehension of dithyrambian excess
(itself suggestive of the human cortex with its vast array of micro
intra-cortical nerve connections) as a mercurial movement which surpasses
entrenched limits. The intensity of indeterminate dithyrambian excess as
experienced in art is key to this cognition. By refusing the dichotomized,
utilitarian, manageable codes of representation with free non-logocentric
associational operations, latent excess triggers a multitudinous array of
synaptic charges and thickens visuality to the extent that it prevents the
achievement of a determinate, definitive inspection of aesthetic or social
space even while conveying the impression of totality via the unification
operation of the unconscious human desire for summation.
This
extreme threshold component of the excessive digital aesthetic adds to the
usual signals in the internal circuitry of the human biocomputer enough
uncertainty so as to make new configurations of the social self probable by
organizing the internal energies of the society more broadly. The subsequent
and ultimate aesthetic benefit of the excessive art act then, is in attaining a
prospective realization of one's own perceptual circuitry (and those around
you) as a self-re-programmable phenomenological operation. Thus the excessive
synthetic art model offers an alternative visual regime of and for the
self-programming psyche in that mental-visual range is extended (via latent
excess) and hence is counteractive to ontological foreclosure. With aesthetic
excesss quantitative appetite to surpass visual confinements, the human
subject is ready to algorithmically escape and exceed previous limits in accord
with the implied infinity of our expanding aoristic universe. This
self-re-programmable ontological operation occurs specifically in a constructed
space between the excessive art and the subject, similarly to the way Wolfgang
Iser locates the encounter with a written text by its reader in a third realm
of indeterminate interaction which he calls the work; a transaction situated
somewhere between the text and the reader. However, unlike a written text, the
self-re-programmable ontological adjustments and modifications one makes during
the process of coming to understand an excessive art work never ceases and
sensorial closure is never evoked. Hence, in accord with bell hooks'
understanding of antithetical liberational learning as exciting exchanges of
ideas that never end, aesthetic-informational excess approaches an oppositional
Foucauldian kind of ecstasy within the receptive subject. This kind of ecstasy,
potentially found within aesthetic-informational excess, is particularly
liberational in that, if there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no
fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy,
only death. But aesthetic excess non-linear and indeterminate latent excess
facilitates our desire to transcend the boundaries of our customary human
cognition so as to feel that state of unconditionally which Hegel called the
absolute (our absolute sense as an unalloyed being akin to non-being) by way of
a neuro-metaphysics conveyed through excessive art's necessarily digital
milieu. This Foucauldian extrasensory dispersion, which presuppose a loss of
fixed reference points, implies a diaphanous neural-metaphysics constructed
around the social psyche's enhanced identity as non-site consistent with
Jean-Franois Lyotard's assertion that metaphysical concepts have been realized
in the contemporary world. By the synthetic psyche taking up in excess an
anti-position of circuitous non-site, we can ascertain that the excessive
sensibility of digital technology is essentially non-logocentric, ecstatic,
variational, and non-hierarchical. It is particularly excessive in that it
deframes and overwhelms the envelope of hardened fixed-point (i.e., window)
perception with aesthetic input and hence is an excess of and for the prosaic
gaze - as it offers a digital scope beyond our perceptual capabilities. Indeed,
instead of nicely proceeding along towards an expedient comprehension and
appraisal, latent excess actually opens up an oppositional anti-mechanistic
space of self-adumbration for the self-re-programming ontologically minded by
revealing the loose limits of our solipsistic and hedonistic inner circuitry.
The
latent excess necessary for triggering such a keenness offers to the
self-re-programming society a scope of sensibility beyond that which Jacques
Derrida identified as typical of the consolidated, passive, spectator/consumer.
Indeed in our heavily materially oriented, technologically accelerated, information
saturated culture, where experience is increasingly prescribed, facile, and
fast, languor coupled with dynamic contemplation of the discursive circuitry of
perspicacious excess satisfies an essential need for a new cognitive-visuality
consistent with the interpretative theories of both hermeneutics and the
phenomenology of perception.
In
this respect algorithmic excessive art fulfils the negative dialectical ideal
of art as affirmed by Theodor Adorno in that Adorno upheld the view that the
radical potential of art lies in formal innovations which refuse to allow its
passive consumption, demanding instead an active-critical intellectual
involvement (inherent in the latent excess aesthetic) in opposition to
unthinking assimilation. It is for this reason that excessive art possesses a
negative dialectical felicity of its own.
Indeed the negative dialectical confrontation with non-knowing typical
of excessive art is an important component of digital consciousness
intellectual satisfaction, as the entire benefit of this espoused digital
consciousness exists in attempting to adhere to an exciting transmissible
hyper-state which exceeds, transcends, and overwhelms our former inner
territory by wiring it into an excess which consequently disallows itself to be
readily grasped. What we sense then is our own being becoming subliminal.
It
is this sense of incomplete excess (latent excess within immensity) that draws
the eye and mind in and conceptually sublimates our being in the interests of
the construction of the ontological state of synthetic hyper-being. In this
sense, digital excessive consciousness is an expectant consciousness where an
emerging hyper-ontology concentrates attention on an inner, developing,
self-programmable selfhood in a correspondingly expanded society-environment.
CP: Lets explore the question of
"non-separatness connectivity". I would say that there is no
connection without cutting, and that the energy of all systems is founded on
this basis - even biological systems.
JN: Yes, perhaps what I was
getting at is better thought of as a conceptual bridging process. The becoming
conscious of a non-separating
connectivity found in the host/parasite
viral encounter, for me creates discourteous opportunities for transgression of
conventional political limitations. In the viral rupture, thought may detach
itself from the host/parasite order of authority and topple down into the realm
of the virtuoso imagination, of contradictory desire, and into areas of sublime
non-knowledge. This non-separating non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite,
the most aware, the most mindful, and yet the most cluttered area of our
political consciousness - as it is also the very depths from which we may
perceive ourselves as parasites infecting both each others heads and indeed
the entire globe as we humans go about wildly reproducing and thus threatening
the life of our host planet itself. Indeed my work's general Fin-de-Sicle
ornamental excess was conceived as a way to suggest a metaphor for just such a
decadent post-political condition of parasite/host consciousness. In the rising
and collapsing of alternative visualizations and unordered revelations
discovered in the embedded configurations of my work, the circuits of the mind
finds an occupation roughly congruent with the worlds viral structure.
CP: What you say about meta-meaning
opens for our thinking a sort of performative approach, so as to find a new
conceptual edge for producing a sort of auto-organization (or
auto-reorganization) of the epistemological system in which we are thinking
now. Indeed it seems to me that only language can do it, because those opening
conceptual edges can to be found in the language itself, in its play with the
ambiguity of all sorts of meaning.
Could we say that the stake here is to
launch new kinds of languages (for example the language of art which has
traditionally functioned as a subversion of conceptual granted systems), in
order to introduce some distortion of the traditional use of language with the
hope that those monsters could perform or procreate some new hybridizing of
the thinking itself?
To simplify my question: do you think
that this creation could be a sort of common effort for theory and art? And if
this is the case, is it not risky to make art and theory at the disposal of
science - and perhaps of some sort of positivism?
JN: Yes my feeling is that art and
theory can pursue common trajectories, up to a point, but only with debonair
eyes. Particularly interesting to me in terms of meta-meaning is the monstrous
bridging of the dialectic between theory and practice. Can an unabashingly
ambiguous artwork combine explicitly theoretical discourse within its intuitive
practice? Or to state it better, can art show that the intuitive and the
theoretical are not in disagreement? The significant word here may be
'explicit'. Without it, it seems that any discourse with pretensions of
explanation is theoretical. In this sense, almost all conceptual art has
reconciled theory and practice.
On the other hand, however, only
ambiguous, non-explicit discourses which situate themselves within a
theoretical frame can claim to be 'explicitly' theoretical. In other words, for
a discourse or language to claim an explicitly theoretical status, it is
necessary to cling to an established continuity through various rhetorical
effects such as the use of certain jargon contexts with other discourses of
recognized theory. Since there is yet a monstrous meta-meaning framework within
to place deliberately ambiguous artwork rich in multiple-meanings, I think it
is very hard for any such art form to play the role of explication. In other,
very plain- words, such art can do theory, but it cannot call it so. Because
theory, as a practice, has defined itself in terms of explicit exclusion - not
so much of intuitive practice - but of ambiguity itself.
Explicitly theoretical discourses
such as philosophy (but also science) have no problem finding phenomena that
may accommodate them with different sorts of social-political practices. On the
contrary, there are many who see these hybrids not to be the exception but the
rule, for example Bruno LaTour in his book "We Have Never Been
Moderns". In a certain sense ambiguous artworks combine theory and
practice and may even serve as active confirmation of the fact that theory and
practice are not opposed - but so do many other social and political phenomena.
However, some may sustain that this combination does not prove anything against
theorists who still try to avoid all contact with intuitive practice, because
it is the pursuit of both pure theory and purely intuitive practice that ends
up allowing for such combinations as that which takes place in wonderfully
monstrous art. They would say that it is the idea that there are two separated
realms of the symbolic and the imaginary which ultimately invites and makes the
transgression of the boundary between them possible. Many post-Foucaltians
sustain this, I believe.
I am sorry to use the third person
while exposing these positions, but I still haven't worked them out enough to
endorse or reject them fully yet. The point in which I agree with you about the
prospects for cultural practice that may perform or procreate some new
hybridizing of the thinking itself (and the one I am trying to argue for here)
is that the way non-explicit art combines theory and practice does not mean
that such an art has transcended theory, but on the contrary, it is rather in a
state of mutual-dependency with it and the explicit constructs of theory. Thus
for me, the theory of viractuality is of acute interest, as here virtual depth
condenses and enfolds the imaginative capacity into an actual art moment or
object, for the viractual experience is diagonal as it transpires in deep space
and time and, in a sense, secures meta time and space for us in the actual
world.
Perhaps, now that I think about
it, there has always been an idea of the monstrous viractual, whether it was
grounded in mysticism, abstract analytical thinking, or magical systems. All of
these approaches have shaped and manipulated invisible worlds accessible only
through the mind's eye, and in some cases these models have been given
ontological privilege. What has made contemporary concepts and ideologies of
the viractual possible is that these preexisting systems of thought have
expanded out of the imagination, and manifested themselves in the development
and understanding of technology.
Yet no I dont anticipate a
seduction into, as you say, some sort of positivism resulting, as I see considerations of this self-attentive shift in
consciousness analogous to a post logical positivist virus that inhabits
various theories of consciousness which discuss consciousness as being emergent
rather than representational.
CP: The next point seems to go to the
opposite way, but I think it is not the case. It concerns the link that you
establish implicitly between the "earth" (the ecological question)
and "religion". I think that the ecological question is now the most
interesting from a political point of view because it is crucial for anybody
who wishes to provoke a sort of new political awareness. I think that it is
perhaps the most collective preoccupation by all people of all societies at
every social class. But I am not sure that this real link with nature has to do
with a sort of imaginary or religious belief. I think that what we experience
now of the political powers of religion make anyone very prudent about the
question of religion, even if it is paganism. You know that Christianity is in
fact a huge compromise with paganism. It seems to me that the earth/ecological
question can be played from the point of view of non-anthropomorphic politics -
where the question of the human being is taken on a broader basis.
JN: Perhaps I am wrong, but my sense now
is that many, if not most, people are de-sensitized to the fabric of the
earth-world and ignorant of their viral status within it. Utilitarian
non-anthropomorphic assumptions cut and distance our bodies from that which
surrounds them (and indeed constructs them). My attraction to the pagan idea
stems precisely from paganisms archaic lack of orderliness. It is an
un-organized form of collective spirituality. In that sense religion, as
defined as a shared force, does not do it justice.
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