In December
2023 my 1995 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even cybersex farce novella was published in
book form by Orbis Tertius Press, a Canadian book publisher of innovative
and challenging works.
***
***
Back
cover blurb for ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even
***
Originally
written in 1995 during Joseph NechvatalÕs artist-in-residency at the Citˇ
Internationale des Arts in Paris, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even
is a semi-autobiographical farce that, in parts, captures the birth of the
internet, New York City cultural life in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the sex
life of an American painter in Paris in 1995. Incorporating a broad range of
Western (pop) culture referencesŃfrom art to music to literatureŃNechvatal
places us in the midst of an esoteric cacophony of myth and colour and sound
and sensuality as the buzz of a nascent internet sounds the opening of doors
and minds.
***
***
Purchase ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even here:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/paperback/product-mjp76n.html
Pages
129 / Paperback / Interior Color / Dimensions A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297
mm)
***
and/or as
an e-book here:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/ebook/product-kvv648e.html
***
***
From the
AuthorÕs Afterword of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even by Joseph Nechvatal
***
Though an
exaggerated cybersex farce novella, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even
(written in 1995 and polished in 1996) is semi-autobiographical in parts
and does reflect sincere aspects from my love and sex life up to late-1996. It
most likely will be as close as I will get to a recounting of the days of
freedom in the 1970s and the 1980s downtown scene in New York City, where I
moved in 1975 at the age of 24. Though lugubriously and ludicrously dramatizing
much of the erotic episodes in the text, I drew from real experiences
encountered during intermittent periods of sexual promiscuousness and
experimentation that I would throw myself into when not involved in a committed
loving relationshipŃa state I was not in during the writing of the text in
Paris.
Now,
polishing again ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even in 2023 for its
Orbis Tertius Press release as a paperback book, a tumbling backwards into the
past has occurred to a time when the internet was youngŃwhen I was single at
age 44Ńhaving just moved to Paris with my cocker spaniel Ryder. The text
reflects, I believe, three revolutions that I participated in: The cultural
revolution (mid-60s to mid-80s), the sexual revolution (the 1970s to mid-1980s
/ but in a way ongoing / I am a TGNC ally), and the mid-1990s computer
revolution. These great changes propelled the text, even as I was working my
way through the smaller shocks of Conceptual art, French theory,
poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodern critical theory and post-humanist
academics. But the rebirth of the author attempted here, I must say, was also
inspired by a fourth revolution: the insertion of avant-gardism into popular
culture that the ŅsongÓ Revolution 9 achieved in 1968Ńthe sound collage
from the BeatlesÕ self-titled double album (aka the White Album)
credited to LennonŠMcCartney but created primarily by John Lennon with
assistance from Yoko Ono and George Harrison.
I wrote ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even during my artist-in-residency at the Cite des Art International in
Paris in 1995. Simultaneously, as a digital art pioneer, I was given a free
connection to an Internet Service Provider (Imaginet.fr) that year too, for
which I retrospectively thank them. Imaginet gave my networked virtual reality
imagination all-night access (through the telephone line) to the then growing
World-Wide-Web. The surprise and pleasure of this packet switching hypertext
access to blossoming websites and discussion forums is reflected in this text.
In 1995, the Internet had just begun to tremendously impact culture and
commerce as I began studying the immersive ideals involved with virtual
reality.
For that
Cite des Art International opportunity I must thank Pierre Restany for placing
me at their compound in MontmartreŃwhere I installed myself on a water bed for
a year. There I felt a desire to read some of Henry MillerÕs books that dealt
with Paris and sex, which led me to Lawrence DurrellÕs The Black Book,
Wyndham LewisÕs Tarr, John GlasscoÕs Memoirs of Montparnasse,
Gilles NeretÕs Erotica Universalis and Ana•s NinÕs book on sex, Delta
of Venus, that was so very important to the creation of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even. I had already read all of Jean GenetÕs work and his frank but poetic
style in Our Lady of the Flowers marked me deeply. Other strong
influences for me were Geoffrey GrigsonÕs book The Goddess of Love,
everything by William S. Burroughs, Ana•s NinÕs A Literate Passion: Letters
of Ana•s Nin & Henry Miller, Gary IndianaÕs White Trash Boulevard,
Patrick McGrathÕs The Grotesque, all of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick,
and William GibsonÕs influential cyberpunk books Neuromancer (1984), Count
Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). I greatly admired
Marcel DuchampÕs The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and also
Jennifer BartlettÕs Rhapsody (1975Š76), particularly when considered
next to her copious writing: History of the universe: A novel
(1985). I was certainly influenced by the poetry community that gathered at St.
MarkÕs Church in-the-Bowery in the late-70s, by Leonardo da VinciÕs drawing The
Vulva and Anus (aka The Female Sexual Organs), Gustave CourbetÕs
painting LÕOrigine du monde, many drawings by Hans Bellmer and his 1946
photo of a spread vagina on a plate of milk called (prudishly) Untitled,
Carolee SchneemannÕs work and friendship in general and specifically her filmed
performance Meat Joy, photos of Valie ExportÕs Action Pants: Genital
Panic, the films and live performances I saw of Erotic Psyche (Aline Mare
and Bradley Eros), Henri MaccheroniÕs 2000 Photos du Sexe dÕune Femme,
the broad-spectrum vulva work of Hannah Wilke, and the writings of Georges
Bataille (all of Bataille, as he challenges any single discourse on the erotic,
but particularly Story of the Eye), James Baldwin (GiovanniÕs Room),
Giacomo Casanova, Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Laughable
Loves), Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Harold Brodkey (both First Love and
Other Sorrows and The Runaway Soul), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying),
everything by Vladimir Nabokov, Marquis de Sade, Yukio Mishima (The Frolic
of the Beasts), everything by Aldous Huxley, Ovid, Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, and all of Kathy Acker. Indeed, AckerÕs snatch style very much
urged me on to try my own hand at sex farce. I also drew inspiration and
courage by reading during my life the words of Charles Baudelaire, Stˇphane
Mallarmˇ, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Gˇrard de Nerval, Joris-Karl Huysmans
(discovering and first reading French Symbolism at age 15 at Hinsdale High
School was my first experience of rewarding estrangement); then Saul Bellow,
Don DeLillo (White Noise), Raymond Roussel, Comte de Lautrˇamont,
Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein (her and Alice B. ToklasÕs
apartment on Rue de Fleurus is just around the corner from where I now live and
walking by their door regularly inspires me), Francis Picabia, Samuel Beckett,
David Foster Wallace, Allen Ginsberg (Howl but also Wales Visitation),
and John Giorno (everything but especially Cancer in My Left Ball). And
from seeing the films of Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Ken Russell and
Jack Smith. My development as an erotic post-cyberpunk transdisciplinary artist
was also touched by Genesis P-Orridge.
All of
these artists (and more) have helped inspire ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
evenÕs eccentric erotic sensibility and its self-consciously elaborate
stylistic conceits. The long French sections in ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even I wrote in English in 1989 for the catalogue for an art show I curated
called Erotic America held at Galerie Antoine Candau, when the gallery
was located not far from the Place de la Bastille in Paris. I thank Antoine and
the French translator, whose name I have lost. The poem-structured section
towards the end of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even mainly comes
from my 1983 prose poem 2 Thousand Wings: The Winged Penis that was
published in the No Wave literary compilation Just Another Asshole #6 by
Glenn Branca & Barbara Ess. It has been republished on pages 109 and 110 in
the 2019 Primary Information facsimile edition Just Another Asshole #6. 2
Thousand Wings: The Winged Penis was the first of my semi-erotic love
scribblings to see print and I thank Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca for that
encouraging early experience.
Then too,
Roy AscottÕs 1994 text The Architecture of Cyberception (published in
the Leonardo Journal in August 1994) played an influential role in the creation
of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even. For this and other of RoyÕs
influential theoretical texts that mix art with technology with consciousness
studies, I point the reader at his book Telematic Embrace: Visionary
Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (edited by Edward A.
Shanken) that was first published by the University of California Press in
2007. On meeting Ascott, one, as I, may fall under the spell of his conceptual
mojo. In early 1995 I was introduced by Jill Scott to Roy, who was scattering
brainy cyber civility in Paris like fairy-dust. He had just launched his, what
is now called, Planetary Collegium and I had been studying RoyÕs texts in
preparation for earning my virtual reality-based Ph.D. under him with a
dissertation called Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances: A Study of
the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous
Immersive Idioms that picked up some of the seminal theoretical threads
detectable in ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even. I went on to
accomplish, in 1999, a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Art at RoyÕs Centre for
Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA-STAR), that was then at the
University of Wales in Newport. It __forges a certain rhizomatic
paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality by joining choice immersive examples of
simulacra technology into mental connections with relevant examples culled from
the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space,
consciousness and philosophy. Its conclusion also predicts the now called metaverse
~ a vision of what many in the computer industry believe is the next
iteration of the internet: a single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual
space where humans experience life in ways they could not in the physical
world.
Also in
1995 I was active in The Thing: an international net-community of artists and art-related
projects that was started in 1991 by my friend and next door neighbor at the
time, Wolfgang Staehle. The Thing was launched as a mailbox system accessible
over the telephone network in New York feeding a Bulletin Board System (BBS) in
1991 before their website was launched in 1995 on the World Wide Web. I
particularly was exchanging theoretically-charged emails with Peter von
Brandenburg (aka Blackhawk) there as early as 1992 while I was still working on
my Computer Virus Project at the Centre International de Rˇflexion sur
lÕAvenir at the Fondation Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in La Saline Royale
dÕArc-et-Senans in the Jura department of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comtˇ region of
eastern France.
Arc-et-Senans,
and nearby Arbois, were my first locations where I worked and lived in France,
between 1991 and 1993, and I thank the people there profoundly for their
hospitality. Especially the curator Francois Cheval, who brought me there for
an extended artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois and the
Saline royale dÕArc-et-Senans. There I created my first artistic computer virus
code that I used for my Computer Virus Project I paintings (some
mentioned in the text). This work was a reflection on my personal experiences
of risk and loss with the AIDS epidemic.
Now, in
2023, Kimberley Palsat (my wonderful Orbis Tertius Press editor) and I have
given the text a light dusting and small nips and tucks as we wish to maintain
the historical validity of the work. The Lobster font used for the chapter headings
and the use of the colours pink and blue in the text are the only new
significant formal changes. (See page design example just below.)
I perhaps
need not mention that the text was written well before the current avalanche of
AI algorithms used to produce large language model (LLM) activities that use
deep learning and large data sets to understand and generate new content. Also
well before woke alertness to racial and sexual prejudice-discrimination was as
well articulated as it is now. The same can be said about our increased focus
on gender expression (It was written before cisgender was a thing) although the
number of meditations on pansexual gender sensitivity and non-dualistic
transgender issues found here may have surprised you. The reason being,
transgender issues attracted me through my love for DuchampÕs flamboyant and
sexually subversive suggestion of the onanistic machine cˇlibataires (bachelor
machines), with which he converted the principle of autoeroticism into one of
the greatest masterpieces in the history of art: The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (1915Š1923). My study of his pansexual bachelor machine
led me to theorize a philosophical space of transversal conceptual linkages,
full of connectivity, that intersect genders. The resulting paintings were
first exhibited in ec-satyricOn 2000 (2000) and then vOluptuary: an
algorithmic hermaphornology (2002) at Universal Concepts Unlimited Gallery
in New York City. Some have been chosen by Kimberley Palsat and used to
ŅillustrateÓ the Orbis Tertius Press book.
Of crucial
interest to this conceptual-painting work that began with ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even is the origin of the hermaphroditic androgyny image. This hybrid image
first appears in OvidÕs classic text MetamorphosesŃand 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 nymph Salmacis fell madly in love. When Hermaphroditus rejected her
sexual advances, Salmacis voyeuristically observed him from afar while desiring
him fiercely. Finally, one spring day Hermaphroditus stripped nude and dove
into the pool of water which was SalmacisÕs habitat. Salmacis immediately dove
in after himŃembracing 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 himŃa prayer that they answered favorably. Consequently,
Hermaphroditus emerged from the pool both man and woman.
As the tale
of Hermaphroditus suggests, my post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator, even
artwork displayed an androgyny eroticism married to a flowery virtuality and
immersive excess. It aimed to depict an imagined realm of political-spiritual
chaosmos where new forms of sexual order ariseŃsuch that any form of order is
only temporary and provisional. Obviously this sphere is attained through an
emergent operation, and, indeed, I took abundant pleasure in the forms of
pan-order that arose within its swelling processes. The point is that within
this text and subsequent paintings, sexual signs are subject to boundless
semiosisŃwhich is to say that they are translatable into other signs. Here, of
course, it is possible to find resonances and affinities between sexual
opposites where we can articulate new gender proportions within ourselves.
My cultural
position is that moral and conceptual benefits of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even can be found in this chaosmos in that the patriarchal construction of
woman as otherŃand the female body as objectŃis 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 these paintings, organ containments usually signifying womanhood or
manhood are subverted by the presentation of ambiguous genitaliaŃthe mutable
image and performance of pan-sexuality. Everything rests between male and
female, between straight and gay, between dominant and submissiveŃnothing but
curves and clefts. All is in a matrix of possibilitiesŃassembled from a flowery
excess of the erogenous. Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming. As such
it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality,
but also to homosexual constructions of identity. Open-minded creativity is its
raison dÕetreŃindeed my epic sex farce poem Destroyer of Naivetˇs,
published by punctum books in 2015, owes its birth to ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even.
I dedicate ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~„~vibrator,
even to all who, through sex and love, have suffered or soothed.
***
***
Pages
129 / Paperback / Interior Color / Dimensions A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297
mm)
The book
can be purchased here:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/paperback/product-mjp76n.html
***
and/or as
an e-book here:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/ebook/product-kvv648e.html
Orbis
Tertius Press website: https://orbistertiuspress.ca
***
Related
audio files are on Bandcamp here: https://magicif.bandcamp.com/album/venus-vibrator-even
***