ITA ENG

the birth Of the viractual computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas 70 x 70 inches - 2001

It is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of "representation" in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of "representation" in the political sense (and vice versa). Art here is seen as political in the sense that it is a site of power struggles which fail to presuppose a metaphysics which is itself a politics-a politics which establishes an order of values which often maintains the dominant order of meaning and power over breakthrough ideologies. Need I mention the war in which we are engaged against Islamic fundamentalism?

As the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests, my present work is about pansexual eroticism melded to virtuality, quixotic transformation, and, of course, immersive excess. The viractual realm is a political-spiritual chaosmos in the sense that new forms of sexual order arise such that any form of order is only temporary and provisional. But I don't think it is a chaosmos in the sense of ceaseless flux and chaos. Rather, this sphere is attained through an emergent viractual operation, and I take abundant pleasure in the forms of pan-order that arise within its algorithmic processes.

Within viractual creation all sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis-which is to say that they are translatable into other signs. It is possible to find resonances and affinities between sexual opposites. We can always articulate new sexes within. Here a chameleon-like sexual demeanor is being built from the virtual abyss.

The viractual is a new sensibility emerging in art respecting the integration of certain aspects of science, technology, myth and consciousness-a consciousness struggling to attend to the prevailing current spirit of our age. This viractual zeitgeist I identify as being precisely an autopoietic desiring machine in which everything, everywhere, all at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of communication. Therefore, the viractual is no longer content with the regurgitation of a standardized analog repertoire of image-tropes. Rather I detect in art a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific discovery-discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical methodology.

Concerning this viractual span of liminality, I am reminded of two very different, yet complementary, concepts: entrainment and égréore. Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more oscillators as they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical terms an égréore (an old form of the word agréger) is a third concept or phenomenon which is established from conjoining two different elements together. I suggest that the term (concept) viractual (and viractuality) may be a concordant entrainment/*égréore conception helpful in defining our now third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual-a concept close to what the military call augmented reality that is the use of transparent displays worn as see-through glasses on which computer data is projected and layered. A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged and established a seemingly unrestricted area of abundance which I call the viractual.

Notes:

[1] "Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms". A URL introduction to the thesis, entitled "Frame and Excess", can be read on-line and the entire thesis downloaded in PDF at: http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm [2] Deleuze, G. 1984. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights [3] Ibid., p. 21. [4] Ascott, R. 1994. "The Architecture of Cyberception" in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, No. 8, MIT Press Journals, August 1994 [5] Universal Concepts Unlimited.

Dr. Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information and computer-robotics since 1986. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-3 he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's computer lab in Arbois, France on 'The Computer Virus Project': an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. Dr. Nechvatal has exhibited his work widely in Europe and the United States, both in private and public venues. He is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum, the Moderna Musset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Dr. Nechvatal's work was included in Documenta 8

1 2 << of 2