There was once this cave
full of your most beautiful dreams
A review of Joseph
Nechvatal's "Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art
in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality 1993-2006" Edgewise,
New York, 2009, 93pp.
By Erik Empson
http://www.generation-online.org/other/nechvatal.htm
NechvatalÕs book, in large part a collection of essays
that have appeared elsewhere, is an engaging, enjoyable and ultimately charming
attempt to explore themes of selfhood and totality in the context of a critical
struggle to overcome a complicated and complex epistemological conventionality
that has emerged governing what we see and how we see it. The author, an
innovator and practitioner of Ôcomputer-assisted artÕ sees the medium as a way
of going beyond the cynical act, beyond the apparent limits imposed by modern
consumer society and its tyrannies of imitation and simulation.
For Nechvatal, Ôit is in the hyper-logic of decadence,
in the abuse of simulation itself that we might stage the site of contestation
and negation today.Ó Everything is constructed and thus alterable, but parodic
subversion is futile because mass society is able to absorb or negate the
implied critique. However, Ôby showing that everything, all visibility, all
simulation is phantasmagorical, an exit from the current postmodern dead end of
empty surfaces might be uncovered.Ó
Immersive intelligence is a form of conscious
manipulation of virtual reality which allows for an extension of extra-sensory
perception, extending into boundless space, allowing us to be more sensitive to
peripheries. The ideal is a 360 degree visual sensation that allows movement
towards the exterior. Framed, flat surfaces are raised into spatial
constellations, conventional ordering of signs and facts, exploded.
That all-too human flaw, the desire for totality, the
need for a more comprehensive deeper simulation adequate to but not in
contestation with reality, resurfaces in NechvatalÕs writings shorn of its
dark, historical mantle of a universal ordering of space, reborn as the very
experience of the self as it becomes more intelligent about that which lies
beyond it. And there is probably nothing parodic in the fact that this
archetype of modernity, grasping the totality, appears in this demand that art
must not be synthetic and total, but also excessive, to spill over those
boundaries in its reconnection with its audience. What is proposed here is an
augmentation of experience not rooted in reductions to simple dichotomies, but
issuing from free associational operations, out of complexity itself. For
Nechvatal, excess Ôthickens visualityÕ, the internal energies of self can, in
the discursive circuitry, be liberated and transcend our hollow consumer
status.
There is a tension in these writings between the
emboldening of the self and its subsumption into a collective experience. But
this tension reflects the real worldly problem. We want to transcend limits on
the self yet find that the self is a limit. We know that allowing the mind (or
your boss) to regiment the self, can produce Ôwell-beingÕ, yet we know how well
we are when we suspend this order. But NechvatalÕs proposal for Ôthoughtful
languorÕ and Ôtechnical transparencyÕ, two qualities that are crucial
technologies of the common, is right, as is probably his seeming contradictory
position where on the one hand (in the chapter on Spare) collective virtual
experience loses the self, and on the other, the disembodied self (in the
immersive art frame) through passion touches the infinite, leading to a
Ôgeneration of a hyper-embodiment where self-referential consciousness and
unconscious self-perceptionsÕ are expanded, enhanced and connected.
Another tension is apparent in how we position this
virtual visual revolution against governed perception in terms of art history
and theory. Is there an unwritten, unstated but privately held linear history
at work here, could it be that the total aesthetic experience was, from the
Palaeolithic theatre of Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira, to the Pyramids and Athens,
and is, the underlying goal of art? Or indeed, is digitalisation Ð the
corporate-sponsored de-cluttering of space and acceleration of time Ð an end
point of a linear history? Perhaps an immersive art has as many forms of
progress (and to be fair I donÕt think Nechvatal uses this word) as there are
disembodied selves?
ItÕs exciting to read a
healthy celebration of the medium and its possibilities. But maybe this all
gives too much autonomy to the visual in its clamour for the whole. Lascaux is
a testimony to many truths about humankind. For this reason it has also become
the quintessential emblem of the very fact that we are separated from truths
about ourselves. That we must swap the living, physically eroded body of the
real site in all of its cloying dampness for its plastic twin; that a spectacle
must be protected from the very effect of itself, somehow destroys it and
reinvents it once more. This is the stuff of myth. The creation of Lascaux II
has irreversibly changed the meaning of Lascaux. It has restored it by
reconfiguring it (through digital technology) as a simulated surface and that
is, no matter the cost, thoroughly undesirable Ð the utter desolation of the
original, a lesser crime. Surfaces are not bad in themselves, it is just that
they are not the whole picture. Digital art has no real surface and that may
well be a loss as much as it is a development. There was once this caveÉ.