Work 1
Joseph Nechvatal, Ledoux Foundation, is an American artist, who has been working as artist in residence at the Louis Pasteur studio in Arbois, France, since 1991. He also works at Ledoux Foundation's computer lab near Arbois. His specific project is to experiment with computer viruses as a creative tool.
The Computer Virus Project
THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT is a new, entirely ocular procedure of cultural criticism. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT strives to develop a field approach to the problems of visual representation in order to reveal hidden casual operations in the kaleidoscopic transformations of contemporary art and social history. Our contemporary technological image environment has created a unique social process that reshapes both art and other technologies alike. Our current international, visually oriented selfconsciousness extends all visual modalities into an electronic unified field of continuity and non-verbal connectiveness. With THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT we can imagine new shapes and structures of human interdependence and abrupt reorganizations of imaginative life. Such a change is always delayed by the persistence of older patterns of perception. Thus THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT proposes that a nonverbal approach towards the creation of a critical art, conscious of the major factors which art has set into motion during the past 25 years, can elucidate a principle of social and artistic change not yet fully realized. The inevitable drive for "closure" and completion in comprehension based on a series of wordy historical observations of our cultural environment can be found elsewhere. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT proceeds on the basic understanding that verbal language is a metaphor, which not only stores but also translates experience from one mode to another. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT will provide a depository of visual images for others to verbally transmute.
Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that we become collectively conscious. This collective awareness and interplay is global in extent. A purely visual interplay with all extensions of our human functions and tastes is now necessary for the progressive integration of our many separate qualities. Thus THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT will seek to problematize the normal linear depiction of visual concepts in favor of a multilinear process. It will not have one singular point of view or a fixed position from which it depicts the visual unfolding of events. Rather it looks for an operative dynamics of all visual data. The dynamics will encase a critical non-verbal discussion as images are deranged to comment each other (while suspending final judgment). Through this process we can transcend the limitations of our own assumptions via a critique of them. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT is not committed to one culture or language, but exists pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously. Our need now is to become culturally aware of the bias of the instruments and technologies of representation existing today in order to correct that bias. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT hopes to make the compartmentalizing of the human potential by single representations look as absurd as it is prevalent today. By mutually stimulating images through contamination and thereby extending the radius of their influence, written codes, which have carried for us the experience of interpretive "content", will give way to the formation of a more collectively conscious cultural ecology. The laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms, which of course always distorts and omits, will give way in THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT to a more fully creative ferment where all the levels of meaning are simultaneous. This is not to suggest that I am not sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visual metaphors and models, in which mere nominalist positions are taken for granted (as in Neo-Geo for example). It is in the exploration of multiple models where THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT expects to contradict the dominant clichés of our time as they continue to move in their regimented grooves of sensibility. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT proposes that we collectively explore and illuminate through visual communications our nomadic, yet interdependent retinal empire (labyrinth), and recreate it. Thus the emphasis is on homogeneity and non-temporal repeatability towards the image; culminating in what one could regard as the cosmic idea, the sacred image common to all non-literate communities (given post-literacy is something quite different than pre-literacy). As a vehicle for such an assertive and contentious absorber and transformer, THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT hopes to aid in the outing of the disembarrassment process of resacralizing social concern. In the infancy of our computer age, the limits of our technological brain are still to be discovered. The world has still to become a computer, still to become an electronic brain administering rationally to all of society. We have been distracted by a mighty backwash of receding cultural habits. The simultaneous field of visual fabrications today demands that we reconstitute the conditions and needs for dialogue and participation. Through the language of vision and it's explicit retinal linkings THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT will attempt to clarify the structural reproductive codes which operate in support of the plastic image and it's role in the "Soft Machine" of visual consumer culture. It's purpose is to represent all possible visual relationships and their interconnectedness, as Andre Malraux has explained in his "Museum Without Walls," in a truly international universalism. This Summa, this Pandora's box, will be open to everyone's noncommercial participation. The sheer increase in the quantity of retinal information today favors this type of organization and the resulting panoply of possible combination-permutations. Let us not forget, however, that throughout "Finnegans Wake" Joyce identifies the Tower of Babel as the Tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of mindless appropriation. Thus all images contaminated by THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT will be treated with the principle of transparency, as surfaces to be overflowed with other prodigious surfaces or prolific activities. They will be treated to contain a wide complex of visual ideas which can then be "read" by the illiterate and the literate alike, and they are destined for both. Today we are aware that formal structures make complex statements in themselves. I am not prone to be concerned with "content" alone and thereby ignore the form of perception.
As the market society defines it, visual representation has been transferred into a consumer commodity. Fine art reversed it's role from that of being a guide for perception into being merely a conventional amenity or somnambulist product. But today the designer- artist-producer is compelled to study the effects of her or his production as never before. As the manipulators of the robo-centered mass media market tyrannized artists, the isolated artist has achieved new clairvoyance concerning the crucial role of design and art as a means to human fulfillment. THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT aims to demonstrate this alteration in convention and the change in feeling. We aim to break open the closed system of rhetorics with the condition of a new collective consciousnessunconsciousness. In our age of fragmented, linear awareness, THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT puts forward a proposition much like the one articulated by Bishop Berkeley in his 1709 manuscript "A New Theory of Vision," in which the lopsided assumptions of Newtonian optics were revealed and countered with a critique based on a unified field of perception. Another conceptual model might be Ruskin's theory of the grotesque. Ruskin states in "Modern Painters": "A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character."
THE COMPUTER VIRUS PROJECT aims then to assist this grotesque and the indispensable cracking open of all closed systems of habitual recognition and the thought in favor of a more inclusive and diversified total field of simultaneous perception and representation.