This speech was delivered at Oberlin College in application for The Henry
Luce Professorship in the Emerging Arts Position (2000).
The Emerging Arts Lecture at Oberlin
Technological consciousness provides the substructure from which a new art
is emerging. Specifically, this emerging art is predicated in the telematic
and the immersive. The telematic/immersive is the construction of a
convincing transactional singleness beyond the realm of the corporeal; a
realm which suggests a world of connectiveness which spans from many to many
- united rhizomatically into an expanded hyper-unity. Here the corporeal
heavy weight of the body takes on a lightness of being.
The emerging arts are hyper. 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 hyper telematic/immersive suggests that the body is but the temporary
hardware housing a vast and luminous software immateriality. In this realm
of discourse the corporeal is a complex compendium of multiplicity and
distribution which adds up to a total-art work (gesamtkunstwerk ) - though
an undiagramic one.
At the end of the millennium, vision and the body have made the quantum jump
into a transcendental, multiple self of mediated virtual realities. The
question is no longer what or who I am, but how can I be all that I can be.
The emerging arts are rhizomatically diagonal as they transpire, at least
partially, in deep digital space - and in a sense secure a subterranean
immersive space for us to enter if we ask them to. For example, relevant to
the emerging arts is that under recent epistemological scrutiny is what
Jacques Derrida has described of as logocentrism: the once held distinctions
between subjectivity and objectivity. Today, with heightening telematic
connectivity, these logocentric distinctions are breaking down under the
pressure of telematic (and immersive) art technologies.
By identifying an individual's hyper-real presence in a vaporously
technologically stored set of bits, the post-modernist existential concept
of the logocentric individual has been supplanted by the fabulated
electronically produced simulacrum-persona. This quality of phantasmagorical
replacement has formulated a new understanding of phallocratic existence
which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called schizoid. According to
them, being is now inseparable from a technologically
hallucinogenic/schizoid culture. With telematic connectivity this
understanding of consciousness has become central to the post-industrial
emerging arts and now supplies our hyper society with a rich metaphorical
tool with which to understand itself.
In our hyper age - given our heightened condition of maximizing data-flow -
once fixed logocentric identities based on Euclidean spatial distinctions
are being continuously transposed by malleable, telematic, computational,
and immersive configurations of self-awareness as the borders of the
conventional logocentric object/subject relationship computationally bleed.
Hence hyper telematic immersion - with its insinuated
inside-omni-everywhereness insight - is becoming the pertinent concept for
the recognition of being in the emerging arts.
Salient to this consideration is what I take to be a significant development
in the emerging arts. This late development is the blending of computational
virtual space with ordinary viewable space and objects. Such a blending
indicates the subsequent emergence of a new immersive topological
cognitive-vision which I call "viractual space"; the space of connection
betwixt the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world which merge.
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. This space can be further inscribed as the "viractual span
of liminality" - which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep
(based on his anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the
condition of being on a threshold between spaces. I wish to suggest that the
term (concept) "viractual" (and "viractuality") may be a concordant
conception helpful in defining this third fused inter-spatial place of the
emerging arts which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the
actual.
But even more than viractuality, it is the principle of non-logocentric
telematic immersion as applied to the emerging arts which interests me, as I
find electronically fabricated worlds only superficially connected to
technological means - and more properly concerned with ideals of
self-transcendence.
Allow me now to tell you something of my Ph.D. dissertation called
"Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances" which I earned at the Centre for
Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at the University of Wales in
Newport, Wales. My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central
property of immersion indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality electronic
systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as
well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the
histories of philosophy and the visual arts.
The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a
perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual
space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant to a better
understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a
broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the
visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of
immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture.
A primary subject of the emerging arts is immersion then: an experience
identified as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The
understanding of immersion to the emerging arts informs encounters and
concepts of virtuality and hence "viractuality". To sufficiently address
this subject in a scholarly fashion, I researched, found and accumulated
aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within
the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards
the articulation of what I have come to call "immersive consciousness". As a
result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the
basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been
found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new
uncertain questions.
This emerging activity however is deeply rooted in the past. Indeed, my
active presupposition for looking into immersion was that there have been
manifested, during certain moments in time, ideas of immersion which
approach what we know today as the virtual and the "viractual". These
moments also are suggestive of disembodied experiences and expectations
notable to virtuality, "viractuality", and particularly to Virtual Reality.
What I found was that immersive spherical thinking, as stimulated by the
immersive spherical perspective, today opens up a territory of signification
and possibility for the creation of emergent hybrid and deterritorialized
meanings. With immersiom, meaning in art - and in life - advances by seeing
more clearly the underlying assumptions of excess inherent in the immersive
outlook, by facing up to the radical implications of those assumptions, and
by purging the emerging arts from conventional ways of thinking.
The method used has been be to reflect on the insights Virtual Reality
suggests to the traditional Western history of unified being (which indeed
engenders extraordinarily deep conflicts) and this has entailed a review of
past and present approaches towards ontology and an analysis of a variety of
artistic maneuvers. I have synthesized these questions and examples of
ontology into an interrelated theoretical model for immersive consciousness
for the emerging arts by clarifying an underlying philosophy of immersive
significance. I thus outlined an integrative immersive philosophy by tracing
the immersive impetus through its various expressions so as to examine the
immersive philosophy from all possible sides. Of principal interest has been
the discussion of subject/object cognition.
To a large extent, this look at immersive consciousness in the emerging arts
contains a theory of immersive reconciliation where once apparent
conflicting ideas and intellectual positions are mitigated in interplay.
This self-connected strategic approach is based on the premise that behind
all of the emerging arts today, either representational or abstract, is the
hypothetical exploration of the introspective rhizomatizing world of the
imagination under the influence of today's high-frequency
electronic/computerized environment. Moreover, since it is difficult making
sense of today's swirling phantasmagorical media society, the general
proposition behind electronic-based 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.
If accepted, this supposition for the emerging arts, 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, thought may formulate
an understanding of the laws that provide representation with its
organizational basis. As a result, in my view, it is electronic-based 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
data and code based on an appropriately decadent reading of our
paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) social media
environment.
Certainly the space of cultural has dramatically changed with the revolution
in technology brought about by the rapid development of the networked
computer. The Internet has created a new geography of relations that could
only be imagined as little as twenty years ago. And of course, art cannot
help being of its time and place, but the interesting question to ask about
art that deliberately comments on its time through the use of the latest
technological innovations is what makes it more than mere commentary? What
makes it art? As Goethe put it, "only the mediocre talent is always the
captive of its time and must get its nourishment from the elements that time
contains." The insistence that art reflect only the tangled realities of
high-tech life is a temptation that most digital artists, in my view, should
resist.
This pertains to the emerging arts in that encounters with immersive
computer simulation, one may assume, might create an opportunity for
personal transgression and for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought and hence
excel 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 hyper hybrid ecstatic phenomena will most likely increasingly break
out in forms of what I call "spherical thinking" - an immersively
dimensional thinking which may result in immersive art. Immersive art is art
which attempts to include everything of perceptual worth within its domain
ambiently but coherently and accordantly in an overall enveloping totality
that is concerted, continuous, and without overly evident frame or border).
Immersion's fundamentally spherical, all-over perspective of dynamic
thresholds cast a fraction of art on its course since the Fin-de-Siècle.
This marginal tendency has now amply flowered in the emerging arts as art
practice began shifting VR away from its initial paean to illusionistic
trompe l'oeil. Moreover, with this immersive vision there is a shift to a
more conscious peripheral mode of perception which entails a
deautomatization of the perceptual process (whereby more emphasis is placed
on what is on the edges of sight and consciousness) thus presumably
adjusting the immersant up to an expanded and fuller consciousness. This
emphasis on the peripheral utilizes the Deleuzian broad scan; Deleuze's
non-linear dynamic conceptual displacement of a view along any axis or
direction in favor of a sweeping processes in space/time. Hence immersive
vision may acquire an increasingly computational-like encompassing range
useful in expanding the customary field of view - which is 160° vertical by
180° horizontal - outward so as to increase situational awareness.
Similarly, expansive simulation technology (when used in the creation of
electronic-based art) will promote an indispensable alienation from the
socially constructed self necessary for the outburst of such ecstatic
experiences/acts. Inversely, electronic technology will enable the
contemporary emerging artists to express ecstatic reactions in ways never
before possible. Thus, this ecstatic counteraction might provide a
phantasmal defiance aimed against the controlling world's blandness. This
aesthetic philosophy might provide, then, a fundamental antithesis to the
authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical
world.
The emerging arts, when postulated from the previously described immersive
slant, promote various theories of consciousness which themselves have been
discussed as being emergent rather than representational. Indeed Sigmund
Freud identified an artist as one who offers insights into an emergent
consciousness as consciousness emerges from within the unconscious realm.
The terminology consciousness means verbatim with knowingness. But that is
not all there is to it as applied to art, for consciousness in art seems to
be ultimately like a web woven in the mind/body of various silken-strands
spun forth from interlacing states of unconscious desire which
semi-automatically control the paradigmatic creation and reception of art.
This definition coincides with R. G. Collingwood's definition of
consciousness, in paradigmatic art terms, as that which is a "kind of
thought which stands closest to sensation or mere feeling" as "transformed
into imagination". Indeed unconscious desires shape the paradigms which
contour intentional expressions in art through the subtle powers of
sublimation when the sexual desires of the libido are turned into cultural
ones via the mediation of the artist's ego. The question of how unconscious
desires are manifest in conscious cultural production and interpretation
will be one of the minor themes of the emerging arts. This is a
non-problematic working assumption in that even those which maintain that
art is fundamentally a materialistic, social, and conscious product
acknowledge that the role and function of art is located in its power to
transformtionally change consciousness.
Certainly it is true that hidden in us and in connected computer space there
is something so large, so astounding, and so pregnant with the darkness of
infinite space that it excites and frightens us and thus returns us to the
experimental and to a state of stimulating desire and perceptual
restlessness.
>From my point of view, the emerging artists who are or will be working with
the power of telematic/immersivity are embarking on a new vanguard phase of
artistic awareness in which total immersive involvement is the primary
characteristic. This means for art an emergent reconception within which
philosophic problems of consciousness are forgrounded. This entails a rich
and diverse practice - for indeed even now the concept of art itself is
pantheoristic. But in my use of the term emerging art (based on my
activities as an artist) I understand emerging art to be fundamentally an
extravagant activity expressing in a symbolic language the desire for joy.
For me, philosophy is a method of understanding and technology a method of
doing art. I should establish that the pantheoristic definition of emerging
art which I am upholding here, and which I find requires reiteration as
artists move increasingly from organic materials to the use of electronic
and synthetic ones, is basically that supplied by Susanne Langer in her book
"Feeling and Form" where she determines that "art is the creation of forms
symbolic of human feeling". Curiously, in answering the question of how art
feels, Ms. Langer proposed that the symbolic space created in painting was
not real but virtual.
For me, the emerging artist's work then is the electronically aided creation
of unfamiliar emotive abstractions of enjoyment. The significant cognizant
value of abstract artistic symbols is that they may confer flickering ideas
which exceed the interpretant's former understandings with unaccustomed
emotive possibilities and scintillating expressive values which may be
characteristic of even deeper inner pathos and jubilant non-logocentric
unfamiliarities. And this is as it should be, for the technique of art is to
make our understanding of both perception and history at first unfamiliar,
particularly when attempting to increase our comprehension of, and
neurological feeling for, telematic/immersive data-space and its vast powers
for handling complex and abstract information.
Thus the central issues of the emerging arts fall necessarily on and between
ideas concerning consciousness, philosophy, telematic/immersive space, art,
joy, sexuality, myth, cognition, information-technology and metaphysical
states of placement and quintessence in the formation of a theory of
immersive connectivity that, I believe, is important for artists and
theorists today.
Joseph Nechvatal
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