Christiane Paul on Joseph Nechvatal
A completely different form of
digital process is employed by artist Joseph Nechvatal (b. 1951) whose
‘computer-robotic assisted’ paintings are created by means of a viruslike
program that performs a degradation and transformation of the image. After digitally
composing and manipulating image elements, most notably through the
transformations induced by the virus, Nechvatal transfers his files over the
Internet to a remote computer-driven robotic painting machine, which executes
the painting.
The artist himself is not involved
in the process of painting itself, which ultimately takes place as an act of
‘telepresence’. In paintings such as vOluptuary drOid décOlletage (2001) and
the birth Of the viractual (2001), parts of the (intimate) human body are
intermixed with flower or fruit ornaments into a virally created collage. The
hybrid image suggests an androgyny that Nechvatal traces to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which depict transmutation as a universal principle driving the
nature of the world.
Nechvatal’s paintings strive to
create an interface between the biological and technological, the viral,
virtual, and actual or ‘viractual’, as the artist refers to it.
Christiane Paul on
Joseph Nechvatal in Digital Art (Thames & Hudson) pp.
57-58