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Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 03:15:38 +0100 (MET)
To: avant-garde@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: jnech@imaginet.fr (NECHVATAL Joseph)

The digital image is fast becoming archaic & quaint

Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal: >> The digital image is fast becoming archaic & quaint.

Brad Brace: > What?! Just where is this happening? What is its successor?

Joseph Nechvatal:

The question of consciousness, the technology of consciousness, the transcendence of consciousness will be the themes of 21st century, not pictures. Fundamental to this evolution is the development of a telematic art in the cybersphere, and fundamental to that art are the experiments, concepts, dreams and audacity of artists working today with telecommunications systems and services. Questions of consciousness and the construction of reality are at the center of any discussion of the status, role and potential of art in the emerging cyberculture. The fundamental question is this: Can an art which is concerned, as western art has always been, with appearance, with the look of things, with surface reality, have any relevance in our systems-based culture in which apparition, emergence, transformation are seminal? Can representation co-exist with constructivism?

It is the overarching concern with appearance and with representation which has hitherto characterised western art and which has made it the servant of ideologies, of both church and state. It is its concern with appearance which has kept it in line with classical science, looking no further into things than their outward forms allow, making of the world a clockwork machine of parts whose movements are regulated by rigid determinism, and seeing (Wo)Man as little more than a material object.

It is the art of pictorial appearance which is purveyed in boutiques, galleries, museums and on the pages of art magazines. It is International Art. And it is dying. It is dying because it is no longer relevant to a culture which is progressively concerned with the complexity of relationships and subtlety of systems, with the invisible and immaterial, the evolutive and the evanescent, in short, with apparition. Questions of representation no longer interest me Brad. I find no value in representation, just as I find no value in political ideologies.

The telecommunications of cyberspace, on the other hand, offer the contemporary artist the means of interaction (both hir own and that of the viewing subject) with dynamic systems, with creativity-in-process, with the emergent properties of an art of transformation, growth and change. It is for this reason also that the narratives and technology of artificial life are so important to me at this time. Cyberspace is the space of apparition, in which the virtual and real not only co-exist, but co-evolve in a cultural complexity .

However, our insight into the ways in which reality is constructed in our consciousness, leaves us in no doubt that the processes of apparition are authentic and that appearance is a fraud. Representation in art was always essentially mendacious, illusory, and counterfeit. The mirror always lies.

More and more artists now take global networks, virtual reality, high speed computing for granted. These technologies are no longer seen as simply tools for art, they now constitute the very environment within which art is developing. Given this increasing familiarity, artistic questions now are not so much concerned with these dataworlds per se but with the interface between them, between us, between our own minds and that larger field of consciousness we call the world.

More important to me now is the conceptual implications of the shift taking place in art from appearance to apparition, from object to process. Art, which was previously so concerned with a finite product, a composed and ordered outcome, an aesthetic finality, a resolution or conclusion, reflecting a ready-made reality, is now moving towards a fundamental concern with processes of emergence and of coming-into-being. This raises critical, theoretical, and aesthetic questions which we can no longer avoid.

The revolution in art which prompts these questions lies in the radically new role of the artist. Connectivity, interaction and emergence are now the watchwords of artistic culture. Art is no longer a window onto the world but a doorway through which the observer is invited to enter into a world of interaction and transformation. The importance of telematic networks, of the inherent connectivity of cyberspace, in all of this, cannot be overestimated. Whatever the dominant media, whether electronic, optical, or genetic, the art of the cyberculture is generically interactive. This interactive art is characterised by a systems approach to creation, in which interactivity and connectivity are the essential features, such that the behavior of the system (the artwork, network, product or building) is responsive in important ways to the behavior of its user (the viewer). More than simply responsive, it constitutes a structural coupling between everyone and everything within the Net. This kind of work is inherently cybernetic and typically constitutes an open-ended system whose transformative potential enables the user to be actively involved in the evolution of its content, form or structure.

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Joseph Nechvatal, Paris, France, Europa
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X

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Thanks to the author.

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