Art n Technology

Book-Review
From Technological to Virtual Art
Frank Popper

The MIT Press
Cambridge, England
January 2007
7 x 9, 471 pp., 154 illus.
$48.00/£30.95 (CLOTH)
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ISBN-10:
0-262-16230-X
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-16230-2

Ever heard of technology-inspired art? What about "Light and Movement in Art"? Can technology and virtuality allow us to think differently about our humanness? To think better? To become more human?
Here is a book that ponders over the idea of virtual art flowing out of technological art. How does virtual art relate to truth? The epistemological question. How does virtual art relate to being? The ontological question. And finally, how does the virtualization of art relate to the other? The ethical question …particularly important in light of today’s abundant globalization.
Renowned aesthetician, art theorist, curator, teacher and critic Frank Popper, in his recent book, “From Technological to Virtual Art”, gives an insightful overview of the technological arts by clarifying the concept of 'virtual art.' He outlines its historical development and explains its ability to immerse the body and senses of its participants in a simulated world. He traces the development of immersive, interactive new media art from its historical antecedents through today's digital, multimedia, and networked art. He argues further that what distinguishes the artists who practice virtual art from traditional artists is their combined commitment to aesthetics and technology. Their "extra-artistic" goals—linked to their aesthetic intentions—concern not only science and society but also basic human needs and drives.

Virtual model the author proposes has its epistemological, ontological and ethical connotations. But it has also its aesthetic and philosophical "humanist" sides that should allow us to better understand the multiple existential changes that our society and every individual undergo at the present.

The emphasis is on the different aspects—technical, aesthetic, and extra-artistic—
demonstrated by contemporary artists the author has encountered personally or on the Net. Chapters 1 and 2 are historical sections based very much on author’s personal experience. Chapter 1 covers his own personal itinerary from 1918 up to 1967. The year 1967 marks the end of kinetic art and the preliminary phase of socially engaged art as well as the beginning of a new technically dominated era in art. The second chapter, running from 1968 to 1983—the year of the exhibition of “Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the Twentieth Century”,—covers the different new technologies adopted by artists and leads to what can be named the virtual or digitally assisted art of the present. Somehow these dates also correspond to some outstanding historical events: 1918 saw the end of the First World War, 1967–68 was the year of the student revolution, and 1983 signalled the moment when a certain number of technological innovations, such as the Internet, were becoming reality.
In these historical chapters, the author takes most of virtual art’s artistic origins as well as technical sources like cybernetic and programmed art, and participatory and environmental, telematics, interactive networks, and satellite, video art into account. The effort is also to give some general and several individual examples of art movements and artists that can be regarded as prototypes for the contemporary virtual artists described in chapters 3 through 6.
Chapter 3, the first of the sections on current virtual art and artists, is devoted to materialized digital-based work. This work, which at first sight may resemble more traditional art, is nonetheless virtual (or virtualized) by digital techniques and so takes on a totally different dimension. Although the main aesthetico-technical category involved in chapter 3 is perception and the image, the works can be subcategorized into plastic, cognition, and bio-aesthetic issues.
Chapter 4 deals with multimedia off-line works. In addition to the main theme of multi-sensoriality, it includes secondary aesthetic items such as language, narration, hypertext and synaesthesia as well as socio-political and security issues.
Chapter 5 is based on interactive digital installations and its main aesthetic theme is indeed interactivity. It comprises sub themes such as sensory immersion and reciprocal aesthetic propositions, and looks at individual, social, environmental, and scientific commitments toward interactivity.
Finally, chapter 6, devoted to Net art and multimedia online works, explores artistic communication via the Internet along with the secondary aesthetic subjects of the Internet as a social communications option, personal presence and critical attitudes on the Net, and telematic and telerobotic human commitments.

To explain and illustrate the globalization of virtuality and the emergence of techno-aesthetics, the book deals with two leading lines of discussion: the technical and the aesthetic. The technical line, leads continuously from materialized digital-based work to multimedia on-line works (re: net art), passing through multimedia and multi-sensorial off-line works into the all-important interactive digital installations. The aesthetic line leads from cognitive to telematic and telerobotic human issues in a coherent and uninterrupted style with a beginning and an end. Thus it touches a good number of extra-aesthetic regions, such as the political, economic, biological and other scientific areas. These areas are always treated with a certain distance and within an aesthetic context - as well as with an aesthetic finality. This explains the globalized open-endedness of this virtual work.

The hard bound edition with a modernistic appearance and the good quality of paper is an added advantage for a book like this. The book can be used as a reference post.

Tilak Jha
MACJ (Previous)