Realizing the Virtual
"The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of
rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment which
leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself."
-Félix Guattari, "Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm"
"Like philosophy, art exceeds lived experience by creating an approach to
chaotic virtuality."
-Tamsin Lorraine, "Irigarary and Deleuze : Experiments in Visceral
Philosophy"
My art now is a matter of visualizing aesthetic sensations linked to
technological and sexual concepts. It is essentially a mental prosthetic
then for both the machinic and the corporal domain.
The function of this prosthetic (art) is to create, by extenuation,
different technological-aesthetic percepts. More specifically, my recent
computer-robotic assisted paintings are an investigation into the sphere of
the pan-sexual under the conditions of what I call "viractuality" (occasions
where the virtual and the actual merge) - circumstances which are not quite
historically conditioned yet.
To do this, my computer-robotic assisted paintings focus on an interface
between the virtual and the actual (the viractual) by putting the classical
canvas in confrontation with informatics. But why?
First, I very much like to work with the digital in its predominant visual
form, the immaterial abstract information of pixels and I like very much the
world wide transportable dimension of the Internet, where the digital
data-stream travels at the speed of light - but I also like to see a
large-scaled semblance just sitting still on an unchanging canvas so I can
silently reflect on it and move within the work in natural light at my
leisure with customary unrestrictions to my bodily movements.
Secondly, with the increased augmentation of the self via micro-electronics
feasible today, the real may co-exist with the virtual and the organic fuse
with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested in a new unbridled
sense of artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the
technological and the stable canvas with the ephemeral digital. The work's
extensive ornate excess attempts to give to us an expansive metaphor for our
computational condition - our state of digital-assisted being. In the rising
and collapsing of alternative sexual visualizations and unordered
revelations seen in the work, the circuits of the mind may find a dexterity
exactly congruent with the viractual’s configuration. As such, my viractual
computer-robotic assisted paintings strive for a depiction of an
anti-essentiality of the body-in-bits which allows no privileged sexual
logos, but insists, rather, on a displacement or deferral of meaning. Here
images of the flesh are further undone by viral disturbances they cannot
contain. This viral-viractual-visual situation creates ribald opportunities
for transgressions of conventional erotic limitations. In the work’s
pan-sexual rupture, aphrodisiac thought detaches itself from the order and
authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual
reverie. This pan-sexual viractual contemplation is certainly the most
erudite area of our unconsciousness - as it is the deep down depth from
which we beings emerged into our precarious, but glittering, existence.
Joseph Nechvatal
2001
Published Articles By The Artist
NECHVATAL 2
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