Towards an Immersive Intelligence
Joseph Nechvatal’s Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) brings together a collection of the artist’s theoretical papers that elucidate the new role of art within our contemporary technologically-impacted reality. Through a profoundly creative analysis, Nechvatal uncovers connections between the virtual and the actual (a relationship that he calls the viractual) and situates his highly imaginative digital paintings in a viractual culture still in the process of recognizing itself.
Since 1986 the artist Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. From 1991-1993 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. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora.
Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at CAiiA – University of Wales College, Newport, UK and presently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at Stevens Institute of Technology. He writes periodically on art and new technology for a variety of art journals.
Contents
Preface
Portrait of Arbois’s Fete de Vin
Computer Cynicism
Towards an Immersive Intelligence
On Austin Osman Spare
Voluptuous Viractualism
Francis Picabia’s Singulier ideal
Fast and Beautiful: The A-life Undeadening of Painting
Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess
From the Preface:
“It is neither surprising nor coincidental that a paradigmatic epistemological change in art could follow these developments in science. I can even say that I see culture experiencing a bifurcation as a result, and that I as an artist have experienced my own particular bifurcation within the cultural field (particularly by my dividing my life between New York and Paris).
In science fiction, in critical studies and in array of philosophical discourses, immoderate and chaotic approaches to order and composition have been addressing rhizomaticly decentralized modes of distribution and this noisy subject is what I found to be interesting to examine in most of these essays.”