Origins of Virtualism: an interview with Frank Popper

Popper: I mean by neocommunicability an event--full of unaccustomed possibilities--that took place at about the same time as the passage from technological art to virtual art occurred. It was an event not only associated with radical technological changes--such as the latest computer developments and the wider use of the Internet and cell phones--but also with an aesthetic change that concerned artistic intercommunication on a wider and more personal scale. This phenomenon can be traced from the now-classic writings of Rene Berger on art and communication to Mario Costa's symposium Artmedia 8, which was held in Paris in 2002. Neocommunicability can even be found at a certain moment in the works of prominent early communications artists like Roy Ascott and Fred Forest.

Nechvatal: How are art and technology related to each other in the formation of what you are calling in this book an emerging "techno-aesthetic"? With techno-aesthetic virtualism, instead of simple postmodern pluralism, might we be seeing and experiencing a conglomerate, connective art aesthetic made up of multiple techniques--all of which are shepherding creative applications into a more poetically virtual and consequently global context?

Popper: In order to explain and illustrate the globalization of virtuality and the emergence of a techno-aethetic, I will take as example the method followed in constructing this book: I established two leading lines of discussion, the technical and the aesthetic. The technical line, for current virtual art and artists (approximately 1983 to 2003), leads continuously from materialized, digital-based work to multimedia online works, passing through multimedia and multisensorial offline 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--but not yet straight--line with a beginning and an end. Thus it touches a good number of extra-aesthetic regions, such as the political, economic, and biological 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 virtual works.

The choice of the artists for this book--and the order in which they are discussed--has been established through the criteria of predominance of one of the techniques in their work and the predominance of an aesthetic option, which is identified also. But the overall consideration for these choices was whether, in the first place, they entered into the humanization of technology through the artistic imagination.

It is the combination of these two leading theoretical lines--illustrated by the work and itineraries of these virtual artists--that makes up the emerging techno-aesthetic. This aesthetic is fostered by collective research in laboratories or on the Internet in connection with a new attitude toward communication, which affects the working methods both of artists and theoreticians.