Viractuality in the Webbed
Digital Age
Joseph Nechvatal, scOpOphilia, 2009, computer-robotic
assisted acrylic on canvas & screen with viral attack animation, 20" x
20" & screen. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Edouard Hirsinger
Published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online #5 25th Anniversary Edition
(2011)
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/05/meaning-online-5.html#nechvatal
This paper will investigate the idea of the emergence of the viractual
era in lieu of the age of digital corporate conglomerates and the web 2.0.[1]
First, I will formulate an argument for what the viractual is and what viractualism is about.[2]
First, what it is.
Viractuality is a theory that strives to see,
understand, and create interfaces between the technological and the biological.
The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer
technology has become a noteworthy means for making and understanding
contemporary life (and thus art). This virtual production[3]
brings artists to a place of paradox where one finds increasingly the emerging
of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This
fusion motif[4] - which
tends to contradict some central techno clichŽs of our time - is what I call
the viractual. It is the poetic welding of fusion/paradox that accounts for
much of the potency and transportative agency of the theory - and the art that
it produces.
Digitization is a key metaphor for viractuality in the sense that
it is the elementary translating procedure today. But the viractual recognizes
and uses the power of digitization while being culturally aware of the
glamourous values of monumentality and permanency - qualities that can be found
in some previous compelling analog art that grounded itself in the spiritual
value of beauty.
For me, viractualism signals a new emerging sensibility respecting
the integration of certain aspects of science, technology, myth and
consciousness Ð an aesthetic consciousness struggling to attend to the
prevailing contemporary spirit of our age in which everything, everywhere, all
at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of transmission. But the lurking
viractual realm is also a political-spiritual chaosmos in the
sense that new forms of order may emerge in such a way that any form of order
is only temporary and provisional. Within viractual creation and understanding,
all signs are subject to boundlessly inverted semiosis - which is to say that
they are translatable into other signs.[5]
Now, what it means for our webbed digital age.
The history of art and the history of technology are often marked
by ruptures. Most histories overlook moments where deep fusion occurs, as I see
happening now with viractuality. Perhaps another temporal model for cultural
consciousness is needed. Something other than the majestic forward and upward
thrusting model of evolution. Something more humbly folded[6]
in on itself. Or perhaps something even more insinuatingly penetrating: as in a
viral-host model. I choose the viral model Ð so let us now consider the
activities of the viractual as a viral surge of emergent and embedded critical
consciousness that offers us a formal clarity true to our webbed digital age.
After a long period of temporal disjunctions following the demise
of the modernist project and the excessive abuses of the post-modernist
non-project; I wish to now suggest that a new clarifying paradigm has emerged
based not, however, on the ideals of the raw, the pure or the reduced - but
rather on the internal tic-tic-tic bomb time of the embedded and patient viral
attack.[7]
When looking at cultural production through the paradigm of the
viral viractual, many former binary oppositions fail to function in a stable
way. Thus transfusing consciousness. Most basically, even the definitions of
life and death are destroyed by this model; as a biological virus is precisely
neither alive nor not-alive - as it depends for its existence totally on it's
host's viability. The seeing-power of the host/parasite model alone must not
escape us. A virus cannot Ð and does not Ð exist alone. It exists solely by
entering in and coupling. So when we add the once binary definitions of virtual
and actual into the voluptuous viral model of existence - and observe how they
interact - a form of both/and fusion difference appears dominant within the
scope of the viractual lens.
What I find exciting about this viral viractuality is the tendency
here to discover and produce stuttering, nervous discrepancies between art's
internal theoretical and external manufacturing mechanisms. For example, the
instantaneous reading of reduced modernist form[8]
is problematized by buried (often cryptic) fugitive qualities of informational
de-materiality.[9]
So viral-viractality means cultivating another form of
sumptuousness more concerned with inter-related passage than avant-garde
rupture. Its leitmotiv is an interest in seductive infiltrations.[10]
But it is revolutionary in a new non-ruptured sense (what a dreaded sense of
stress waiting for a rupture that may or may never come) as it uses an
inner-outer confusion (or double sense writ grand) that is not clearly obvious
on first-take by design.
It is an idea of viral temporal interruption alined with the
haunting quality of the phantasmagorical Ð and that is what lends it its sense
of authenticity in our age of de-materialized corporate informational codes.
Joseph Nechvatal
[1] Web 1 or Web 2: what is
the real difference here? In 1999 I already sketched out a theory of a
post-electronic art in which what matters is no longer clear identities, or
logos, or distinctive characters but rather dense hidden phantasmagorical
forces developed on the basis of inclusion: where things are represented only
from the depth of an inclusive virtual density - perhaps adumbrated and
darkened by its obscurity - but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped
by the vigor that is hidden in its digital depths. Such dynamic, semi-abstract
representational forms (with their rhizomatizing connections) and the non-blank
space that never isolates them (but rather surrounds their outline with excess)
- all these might be presented to our gaze in a post-corporate matrix where
only an already vivacious virtual state is articulated in an insinuated nether
darkness that is reprogramming our eyes towards a phantasmagorical visual
discourse which is both capricious and, paradoxically, informationally honest.
See: Henri Michaux's Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their diagrammatic
relevance to RHIZOME's "STARRYNIGHT" programming) @ http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/rhizo05.htm
[2] As
I work on this idea in my own work, I will illustrate my argument with examples
from my own art practice. But by no means is the concept of viractualism limited to my art activity alone. On the contrary, it is a
widely used Ð perhaps dominant - technique, even if it has not yet been fully
recognized as being so, yet.
[3] a
digital production that has been going on for a long time now
[4] A
key influence in the formation of my theory of viractuality was Gilles
Deleuze's consideration of Spinoza - the 17th century philosopher who merged
mind and matter into one material. Moreover, it is a concept close to that of
augmented reality, which is the use of transparent displays worn as see-through
glasses on which computer data is projected and layered.
[5] Here, of course, it is
possible to find resonances and affinities between formal and conceptual opposites.
Hence, I wish to suggest that the term and concept viractual (and viractualism or viractuality) maybe helpful in
defining our now third-fused inter-spatiality reality Ð a reality forged from
the meeting of the virtual and the actual.
[6] as
Deleuze suggests
[7] So
I am suggesting here a seething project of critique within critique that
re-energizes the broken gaps of temporal displacement that followed the demise
of modernism and the appearance of now listless Ð super fragmented Ð
irresponsible Ð glut of post-modern de-construction.
[8] also
typical of photography and pop art form
[9] Unsustainable forms of
opposition that are exploded by the viral viractual time bomb are: the
mind-body dualism typical of the western philosophical tradition, thus the once
held opposition between the physical and the conceptual, reality and
representation, nature and culture, presence and potentiality, and the (most
central to my artistic production) still and the moving. A clear enthusiasm for
post-humanist metamorphosis is evident here, where the interchange between one
body and another dominates. Other now exploded
ruptures include: the classical and romantic, repose and energy, carnality and
spirituality, organization and vigor, simplicity and complexity, smooth and
rough, clarity and chaos, restraint and effusion, sparseness and abundance,
abstraction and specificity, stability and stress, composure and imbalance,
plan and chance.
[10] Yet
I believe it still can be said that viral-viractality is revolutionary in that
it surfs the wake of the digital revolution while, in my case, participating in
the aesthetics of glitch and the art of noise.