InterviewStream » Blog Archive » Joseph Nechvatal

My (increasingly successful) intellectual artist friend Joseph has his interview for ZKM up at InterviewStream. It’s all about his thinking concerning his work (computer-robotic assisted painting and computer animations), his critique of ideologies of power and, most interesting to me of course, great stuff on the viral.

A couple of sweet tidbits:

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. If the word was made flesh, as the Bible teaches us, then we are all viral beings.

But the real power of the virus as a life/non-life model entity in our times of body/machine interfacing is in its broad associative value. Its metaphorical value, if you will. As Bruno Latour says in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991/ engl. ed. 1993), the smallest virus takes you from sex to the unconscious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco, but the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers slice the delicate network traced by the virus for you into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex. I want to avoid this slicing. But “VCA” focuses a bit more on ideas of war and the war game. The times seem to demand it.

If I were still living in Paris, I would be spending a lot of time with Joseph. He is completely grounded – both in reality and in theory. I remember that in our conversations he would just toss out a response that would so effectively summarize what had taken me months to put together that it was like having my mind read – and improved. He reminds me of what I should have done, what I should be doing. It’s both depressing and inspiring. He is one of the few people in the world that really “got” what I was trying to accomplish with my dissertation. I wish that he were here – I miss him. I just don’t know anyone else who can reel off something like this

An aesthetic algorithmic viral logic of non-linear and indeterminate latent excess facilitates our desire to transcend the boundaries of our customary human cognition so as to feel that state of unconditionality which Hegel called the absolute (our absolute sense as an unalloyed being akin to non-being) by way of a neuro-metaphysics conveyed through art’s necessarily singular experience. This dispersion, which presuppose a loss of fixed reference points within fixed points, implies a diaphanous neural-metaphysics constructed around the disembodied psyche’s enhanced identity as non-site consistent with Jean-François Lyotard’s assertion that metaphysical concepts have been realized in the contemporary world. By the synthetic psyche taking up in algorithmic viral art an anti-position of circuitous non-site, we can ascertain that the viral sensibility is essentially non-logocentric, ecstatic, variational, non-hierarchical, and excessive.

and I not only know exactly what he means, but I agree.

An exceptional read for the “self-re-programming ontologically minded.” Kudos Joseph!