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Nechvatal Contaminations

Nechvatal Contaminations

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Joseph Nechvatal, my friend and intellectual compadre in viral realms, has his latest exhibition in Ohio. “Contaminations” has been extended to run through June 25th at the Butler Institute of American Art’s Beecher Center. The show includes a selection of computer-robotic assisted paintings starting in the mid-1980’s and concludes with a recent electronic viral installation.

Go see!
Joseph Nechvatal: Contaminations

Or if you happen to be in Youngstown, Ohio:
The Beecher Center for Technology in the Arts
Butler Institute of American Arts
524 Wick Ave. Youngstown, Ohio 44502
tel# 330-743-1711

While you’re visiting his website, be sure to see the new nOOlOgy : guilt of a nation. Here is his introduction:

In art, pleasure is a most legitimate aspiration. Still one may not ignore that people all over the world today bend-over painfully and act in accordance with seemingly normal systems of control: noological systems (*) that may seem at the time logically inevitable.

My current chain of history paintings called “the new nOOlOlogy” are based on a fraction of the infamous digital photos from the Abu Graib abuse scandal. As such, they present embedded images of American torture. Here American detainees are punished and humiliated and then adorned through an a-life process of viral attack laden with the latent content of ambiguous bioterror. These digital (computer-robotic) acrylic paintings link together systems of exposed nerves with the torture at Abu Graib – now festooned with miniature hermaphrodites infected by viral attacks that undermine them.

For me they are an attempt at expressing America’s deep demoralization. They are moral acts then, free with the truth of our penchant for desire. As such, these paintings contribute slightly to the downfall of the present reality in that they bury visual memory at the outset.

To those that persist in the amorality of Abu Graib, I shit on you. You have discredited me by creating a rotting nation. Although I have opposed you at every turn, never-the-less, you have made me feel guilty and dirty too, as only a single officer has been reprimanded for this disgraceful display thus far.

This artistic activity, in tribute to Leon Golub, is a conscious response to the world of irrational conventions in which I can find even myself.

Joseph Nechvatal

(*) Noology is the science of intellectual phenomena. n. study of intuition and reason. nooscopic, a. pertaining to examination of mind.

And as if all that weren’t enough, he has a brilliant article (“Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess“) in the latest issue of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (Volume 3, Number 2 – July 2006).

Intellectual acumen, creative artistry, ethics and tech – this guy stuns me, always. Keep it going Joseph! You are an oasis in the desert.

Got the PhD today!

Got the PhD today!

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I’m a Phd today! Woo-hoo!!!!! Here’s the abstract.

Imagining the Virus: A Discourse Analysis of Contemporary Fiction

This study seeks to apply the insights of discourse analysis to the epidemic of signification surrounding the virus, marking out the traits and terrain of an emerging discourse. The confluence of biological and technological viral language interacts with articulations of health and sickness, literal or metaphorical, already active in other discourses. The virus has rhetorically metastasized across referential domains. The study takes as its starting point concrete examples of viral figuration, and is structured around contemporary novels concerning HIV/AIDS, vampires, the villains and plots of suspense thrillers, and science-fictional transformations of the human.

Imagining the Virus traces the terrain of the virus along two basic strands: the virus as a figure of the other and the virus as a postmodern placeholder for ambiguity. A comparison of their relative weight and functioning attempts to discern the kinds of relationships that occur between these two strands as they play out in different fictions. An examination along such lines unearths dominant cultural tropes and their attendant anxieties. Particular kinds of metaphors influence our attitudes and judgments by selectively focusing on certain aspects of a concept while suppressing other aspects. This study finds examples of reframings of the virus that resist the more destructive of these, either by refusing to be complicit with them, or simply as a function of imagining new constructions and possibilities. As a mutating viral terminology circulates through a diverse American culture, it draws models of horizontal structures and networks, maps clusters of referential associations, and speculates on newly-emergent adaptations and ecologies.