Making virtual art present.

FROM TECHNOLOGICAL TO VIRTUAL ART

BY FRANK POPPER

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: MIT PRESS, 2007

459 PP./$45.00 (HB)

Long in gestation, Frank Popper's study From Technological to Virtual Art appears among a new spate of studies and reassessments, reckonings and attempts to establish recognizable historical or aesthetic markers for what is variously called digital or digitally based art, "new media" art, "information art," or what Popper terms "virtual art." After a long flush of experimentation now lasting arguably two decades or more, "new media art" is no longer so novel or difficult to place in long-standing aesthetic contexts. That does not make its definition any less controversial. As Anna Munster writes in her recent Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006), Popper's body of criticism seeks to "promote digital art ... as a new aesthetic based upon the technological nature of the medium," that to Munster "now feels like an attempt to legitimate the digital with a genealogy by entrenching it within acceptable art history traditions." (1)

Yet Munster strikes on what is most valuable in Popper's account: its strength of aesthetic descriptions, its delineation of properly "virtual" out of "technological" threads, and its faithfulness to the perspectives of the "artist-conceptor." A scholar, critic, and curator based in Vienna, London, Rome, and more recently Paris as Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at University of Paris VIII, Popper developed a key analysis of Art, Action and Participation (1975) and, with a "weakness for outsiders," rather painstakingly populates his new book with artists he sees as crucial to the developments in "virtual art" regardless of whether they happen to be based on the commercial axes of New York City, London, or Cologne. Distinct from most similar surveys of "new media" art, Popper devotes at least several paragraphs, if not several pages, to each artist he chooses to include, providing a fuller type of thumbnail biography--letting the work breathe, as it were, and forsaking the breathless pace of a perhaps more trendsetting and striving overview. This method, nearly encyclopedic if admittedly often dry, has the advantage of letting the creativity of the various processes and the artists' development speak to some extent on their own behalf, illustrating Popper's contention that he gave pride of place to the artists who "entered into the category of the humanization of technology through the artistic imagination" (6). On the one hand, "virtual art" refers to a body of work that utilizes the technical means made available in the mid- to late-1980s in terms of computer interfaces and various sensory feedback systems (enabling one "to enter the image"), immersive technologies, "simulated reality," and the combinations of holography with the "new media" as well as the influx and proliferation of the World Wide Web and the ensuing "net art," telecommunication, telepresence, telerobotics, and the like. On the other hand, it also refers to the corresponding change in artistic subjectivity in recognition and use of the "virtual self," as another "way of being" that "can lead toward a certain expression of the operator's subjectivity" (3). Part of how Popper differentiates the practice of "virtualism" in art from its merely technological predecessors is this "opening edge" or "increasing humanization," for which he makes great claims. According to Popper, it has the capacity to play an "ethical role" in the crises of globalization, for instance, "by stressing human factors more than any other previous art form" (3).

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Through these two-fold purposes of techno and aesthetic commitment, opening onto larger ethical and "humanist" action, manifesting in the diverse paths limned by the artist biographies here, Popper paints a profoundly hopeful and optimistic vision of "virtualism." How different this "techno-aesthetic" paradigm really is from much current media theory can be grasped relatively quickly: Popper resists the "posthuman" implications of myriad new technologies one finds for example in Jonathan Crary, (2) in John Johnston's "machinic vision," (3) or in the "sightless vision" of Paul Virilio (4)--all of which emphasize in different ways the severance of "natural" sensorimotor human perception from the new techno-operations. Rather than seeing a technological overdetermination, Popper traces these "techno-aesthetic" roots back to some of the earliest modernist experiments in light and sound, virtual and real movement, so that interactivity, viewer participation, and what he terms "neocommunication" become the lodestones. "Virtualism" in Popper's account indeed grows in an immanent, almost organic manner out of a concatenation of earlier combined technical and aesthetic innovations. These innovations, however, are recounted strictly out of the "fine arts area," whereas the "autonomous" contributions of, for instance, cinema, video, and electronic music, while acknowledged as tremendously important, are left aside. There are various modernist and postmodernist elements in the many artists Popper catalogs here, but he insists that his new paradigm is no "counter-revolution" against either yet "widens considerably the spectrum of investigation" (5), where the role of the individual creator or collective group of artists remains quite crucial. This globalization of the "virtualism" paradigm for Popper almost inevitably leads to ecological and biological commitments, social and political interventions, with this consequent broadening and greater awareness of human capacities and potentialities.

What Popper means by "neocommunication" is exemplified perhaps especially by early innovators in "communication arts" like Roy Ascott and Fred Forest. Ascott, whom Popper describes as "among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation" (77), seems central to Popper's definition of "virtualism," combining as he does his concern for creating "triggers" of inciting creative behavior in the spectator, from his earliest cybernetic works in the 1960s (and therefore part of a "prehistory" of virtual art that Popper traces from 1918 to 1983) of "chance paintings" and "kinetic constructions" to the works in telematic media and planetary interactivity that followed in the 1980s such as The Pleating of the Text: A Planetary Fairy Tale (1983) and Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways Across the Whole Earth (1989). Aspects of Gaia formed a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk--a collaboration in "electronic data space" between artists, engineers, musicians, various scientists, and other figures who shared their representations of the earth, whether in spiritual, mythic, scientific, cultural, or artistic terms. Ascott's work increasingly invoked a "seamless" moving between the "real" and the "virtual," "just as the changes to social behavior deriving from the omnipresent human/computer symbiosis are flowing unnoticed into our individual psyches" (79). Ascott sums up for Popper the five defining features of the "art of our time, which so conspicuously differentiate it from the art of earlier eras"--connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence, or "the perpetual coming into being of meaning, matter, and mind" (79-80). The "neocommunicability" here is "an event--full with unaccustomed possibilities--that took place at about the same time as the passage from technological to virtual art occurred," not only with technical changes but with "artistic intercommunication on a wider and more personal scale." (5) Here Ascott, as a pioneer, introduces consciousness and the mystery of consciousness at the center of his research; (6) likewise, Forest introduces a play of interactive means and devices within his "critical statements."

Full of considerations of artists one would expect in any tome dealing with the field--Mark Amerika, Char Davies, Toni Dove, Eduardo Kac, Tina LaPorta, Lynn Hershman Leeson, David Rokeby, Bill Seaman, Stelarc--as well as the more obscure, it is tempting to sound the "communication" theme as the main cord of the ensemble for Popper, who writes, "language is the most human trait of all" (131). It is his artist-centered approach as an art historian, he claims, that preserves him from the pessimism of a Virilio or a Jean Baudrillard; Popper is strongly looking to the "rehabilitation and prospective powers of technology" (132) through a revivification of art. Thus Popper is neither trapped in any inevitable Heideggerian "enframing" or Gestell of technology, nor does he define the difficult social, cultural, and political complications that can attend the digital era and its increased powers of control and surveillance, as in David Rodowick's description of the "figural," where art runs the risk of becoming merely a marketing strategy. (7) Instead, Popper has provided a widely inclusive sourcebook on how wildly diverse artists have risen to these challenges.

JAY MURPHY is a writer living in New York City and Aberdeen, Scotland.