NECHVATAL'S DIGITAL WORLD

How has the digital altered Joseph  Nechvatal's approach towards painting? And what does the digital allow him to do that traditional paint media does not?

Nechvatal explains: "Most importantly, for me, the digital has brought back from the dead the practice of painting. It has made it alive. It has made it bloom in the enthusiastic and relevant sense of the word alive - but it has made painting alive in a more specific sense also, as I began mixing my digital painting practice with techniques of artificial life (a-life). Therefore the digital as applied to painting excites me - and this excitement allows me to work with passion. A curious alliance: the cold impersonality of technology with the heat of ecstasy. I am excited to work with digital painting – which I have now been doing for 19 years - because certainly it is true that hidden in connected computer space, there is something so large, so astounding, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite space that it excites and frightens us and thus returns us to the experimental and to a state of stimulating desire if we do not turn from it in fear. So I have not twisted away, and as a result I am incredibly energized by the practice of digital painting because it is – in my opinion - where important things are happening in art today. This is so because digital painting is a precise reaction to critical things as they are now in the hyperactive information age while maintaining the position of reflective criticality found in the long tradition of silent and immobile painted surfaces. But this is only a start. In 1987 Deleuze and Guattari decoded for me the tradition of painting and proposed another tack . A tack which leads from and back to Artaud's Body-without-Organs (**), to swarms and rhizomes, to processes of de-territorialization and reterritorialization through the virtual - to desiring cyborg machines and visual lines of flight. They enhanced my general conviction that art is first-rate when it brings compound conceptual abstractions into the perceptual stage - where the result really is an embodiment of real yet abstract forces. They made it clear that painting must reflect the digital if it is to be other than a stinking cadaver. Painting must be digital to be, as Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation, "a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility" - because our consciousness and sensibility is largely now molded by the virtual. But of course that raises the question: which real yet abstract forces? For me, the power of the abstracting force of ideology in distributed information continues to be of critical interest and continues to supply my art with its motivational urgency. In that we live in the information age, the essential abstract political feature now is electronic reiteration and its role in creating psychological viruses (memes) within our culture. In that sense, my post-conceptual digital painting is a virtual dada in its subjectivist approach towards ideology (including the rules and ideology behind the practice of traditional painting) within the field of reproductive technology. My practice and craft is post-Postmodern (what I call viractual – a term which I shall explain below) because it paradoxically defends Modernism as well as it celebrates the radical plurality of a form of knowing that is undeniably characteristic of contemporary electronics. This adherence to the electronic/digital now rejects the relativism that postmodernists insist upon and lends the work a formal consistency that is indicative of modernism. Specifically, this intentional stance defends modernism’s tradition of valuing the opticality of flatness that was established in America just after World War II. "

I chose Nechvatal's work for the highlights of the year,  because he is the master of the elegantly and intelligently chaotic intellectual-digital art of the decade.