[spectre] Interview: Popper on Virtual Art

[oliver grau]

Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper Conducted by Joseph 
Nechvatal.

Joseph Nechvatal: Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who 
looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds 
you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical 
record between the years of the late-1960’s up to the early 1990s. 
Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), 
and Gene Youngblood’s reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, 
your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and 
Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable 
research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - 
in your terms virtualized. This astonishes me in that 
technological-informational change is consistently cited as the splintering 
element which instigated mainstream modernism mutating into what has been 
called, for lack of a better term, postmodernism. Can you tell me why you 
first committed your attention as an art historian to this subject of art 
and technology when most historical and curatorial minds were focused 
elsewhere?

Frank Popper: One of the main reasons for my interest early on in the art 
and technology relationship was that during my studies of movement and 
light in art I wasstruck by the technical components in this art. Contrary 
to most, if not all, specialists in the field who put the stress on purely 
plastic issues and in the first place on the constructivist tradition, I 
was convinced that the technical and technological elements played a 
decisive part in this art.
    One almost paradoxical experience was my encounter with the kinetic 
artist and author of the book Constructivism, George Rickey, and my 
discovery of the most subtle technical movements in his mobile sculptures. 
But what seemed to me still more decisive for my option towards the art and 
technology problematic was the encounter in the early 1950s with artists 
like Nicholas Schöffer and Frank Malina whose works were based on some 
first hand or second hand scientific knowledge and who effectively or 
symbolically employed contemporary technological elements that gave their 
works a prospective cultural meaning.
    The same sentiment prevailed in me when I encountered similar artistic 
endeavors from the 1950s onwards in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott 
and many others which confirmed me in the aesthetic option I had taken, 
particularly when I discovered that this option was not antinomic 
(contradictory) to another aspect of the creative works of the time, i.e. 
spectator participation.

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JN: What drew you to a study of movement and light in art?

FP: As I mentioned in my book Réflexions sur l’exil, l’art et l’Europe, in 
1960-61 I was working on a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne entitled 
“Autonomie et correspondance des arts selon Marcel Proust”. But then I saw 
a large Robert Delaunay exhibition and fully appreciated the dynamic 
qualities of his paintings.
    Simultaneously I met several artists, including Nicholas Schoeffer and 
Frank Malina, whose works were founded on virtual and real movement - as 
well as on artificial or natural light. I was so impressed by their 
aesthetic, culturally topical, technical and spectacular qualities that I 
decided to change my dissertation subject to “L’image du mouvement dans les 
arts plastiques depuis 1860”.
    At the same moment I was also asked by the UNESCO Courier to write an 
article onthe subject of “Light and Movement in Art”. The results of the 
research undertaken by me at that moment confirmed my attraction towards 
movement and light, which I feel led me quite logically to the publications 
that followed.

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JN: What were your interests prior to the Sorbonne that led you there? How 
did world events impact on your choices, for example?

FP: I don’t think I can even succinctly enumerate all the personal and 
historic events that preceded my coming to Paris. As you know, I have tried 
to cover some of them in my Reflections book. What I can try is to single 
out one or two events and options that have perhaps a bearing on the 
subjects treated in my present book.
  On the personal front, I could mention my unusual initiation into 
research at a very early age at an experimental primary school in Vienna. 
My training and experience as a textile engineer there and in the 
Sudetenland may have had some influence on my later itinerary. But it was 
mainly my thirst for wide-open spaces - England and its dominions  which, 
at the time, had privileged places for the research profession that 
attracted me. That thirst could have had an impact on my inquiry.
    Also, before joining the Royal Air Force as a wireless operator and 
technical interpreter, I joined a refugee Czech forestry workers camp in 
Somerset, England, where I met writers, artists and other intellectuals 
while at the same time teaching English literature there.
    Then came a long professional stay in Rome where I frequented the 
Sapienza University. I was particularly concerned with Etruscology and 
Italian classical, contemporary and even popular poetry. But then I came to 
stay in Paris - not only because I was interested in many aspects of French 
civilization, but simply because my wife, Hella Guth (1908-1992), a 
surrealist-abstract painter, needed this kind of Parisian environment. So I 
found myself a much-needed artistic and intellectual stimulant.
    There is no doubt that behind all these moves there was also a hidden 
motor made up of world events: the aftermath of the First World War, the 
advent of the Nazis in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, the Second 
World War and its consequences. But I have the impression that my basic 
attitude was influenced by the positive side of emigration and exile: a 
kind of creative nomadism that could be put into relationship with the 
present day political and cultural situation in which geographical 
frontiersand intellectual privileges and distinctions are being abolished - 
thus clearing the way to such all-embracing creations as can be found in 
virtual art.

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JN: The electronic music scene, in retrospect, was small but extremely 
strong in Paris beginning in the early 1950s when Pierre Schaeffer 
initiated the famous Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) studio. Indeed 
the musique concrète experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry from 
that time, and Edgard Varèse’s purely electronic composition Poem 
Electronique from 1958, to me, still sounds extremely fresh to the ear. 
Indeed, I must say that it goes perfectly with many types of visual virtual 
art.
    Then too, in the same period there was a creative explosion near Paris 
at the Westdeutsher Rundfunk radio station in Cologne (WDR), where 
composers began to create electronic music directly onto magnetic tape. Of 
course Karlheinz Stockhausen then developed this studio in the early 1960s 
and did some of his finest work there.
    This surge in electronic music coincides with your falling under the 
influence of Nicholas Schöffer and other art-and-technology artists. Did 
you encounter a cross over of these two groups of artists? Were the 
electronic audio and the art-and-technology group (which was already using 
electricity) in touch and in dialogue with each other?

FP: There was little direct collaboration between the fine arts and musical 
groups in Paris. However, certain individuals like Nicholas Schöffer 
sometimes maintained very creative collective enterprises. Among the 
individual encounters I know, and in which I sometimes took part, let me 
only mention the circle around the early computer artists and theoreticians 
Vera and François Molnar. It is here where Iannis Xenakis (and indirectly 
Edgard Varèse) became frequent visitors and where also the highly advanced 
composer Pierre Barbaud was often present.
    On the other hand, such art critics as Guy Habasque - yet another close 
friend of Nicholas Schöffer and one of the earliest to take Kinetc Art and 
art and technology seriously - frequented the Domaine Musical concerts and 
the composers whose experimental music was performed there. However all 
these links were rather exceptional and there did not exist, as far as I 
know, a combined visual/musical research announcing the virtual 
art/electronic music to come. Except in the cases mentioned by you and I above.

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JN: The multi-generational diversity displayed in your new book “From 
Technological to Virtual Art: the Humanization of the Machinic through 
Artistic Imagination” leads me to ask you how you see all these artists 
relating to the modernist and postmodernist discourses? Can we say that 
they represent a break with those movements - even though they span 
multiple generations and techniques - perhaps in the interests of what can 
now be better termed Virtualism? Or is virtualism an extenuation of 
modernism and postmodernism?

FP: The modern and postmodern artists I have included in the historical 
sections of my book are there to explain, both technically and 
aesthetically, what happened in the late 1980s and the 1990s when virtual 
art began to establish itself. However, as I see it, the real break during 
that period took place when the technological artists managed both to 
master the technical media, the internet, the computer and even holography 
and combine them aesthetically with the issues I am analyzing under the 
different sub-headings in chapters 3 to 6. These sections include plastic, 
narrative, socio-political, biological and ecological issues. And also, of 
course with the main theme of virtuality in art as I understand it, i.e. 
the humanizing of technology through interactivity and neocommunicability 
as well as sensory immersion and multisensoriality.


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JN: What do you mean by neocommunicability?

FP: I mean by neocommunicability an event - full with 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 andthe wider use of the internet and of 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 classical writings of René 
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. In 
the case of Roy Ascott, this change took place when he introduced the 
notion of consciousness into his research. In that of Fred Forest, we see 
it when he inserted ludic interactive devices into his critical statements.

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JN: How is 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?

FP: 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. Here I have 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 on-line works (re: net art), passing through multimedia and 
multisensorial off-line works into the all-important interactive digital 
installations.
  The aesthetic line leads from cognitiveto 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, 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 virtual works.
    The choice of the artists for this book - and the order in which they 
are discussed - has been established through the criterion of predominance 
of one of the techniques in their work. And of predominance of an aesthetic 
option which is identified also. The order in which the artists are 
discussed in each section thus follows these two lines of thought and 
argument. But the overall consideration for these choices was whether, in 
the first place, they entered into the category of 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 - which 
make up the emerging techno-aesthetic. This aesthetic is fostered by 
collective research in laboratories or on the internet in connection with a 
new attitude towards communication which affects the working methods both 
of artists and theoreticians.

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JN: It is true that for this book you have congregated an astonishing array 
of artists which span many different generations, tools and practices  to 
say nothing of their disparate intentions. It contains a wealth of 
information on both relatively well-known artists mixed in with mostly 
unknown ones. Why so?
    This mix reminds me of the joy I felt in discovering overlooked artists 
of the modernist era in your book Art, Action and Participation, which I 
read as a young man. I’m thinking back particularly of the Event-Structure 
research group. But also it was there that I discovered the Dvizjenije 
movement in Moscow with its leader Lev Nusberg; work which adapted the 
cosmic ideas of the Malevich tradition and applied them to art-technology. 
Do you hope to serve the same function here  to make accessible somewhat 
arcane information which you deem relevant to the emergence of a virtual 
art from the embryo of technological art?

FP: Yes, you are right. It is certain that I have a weakness for the 
outsiders and do not like to be only concerned by the favorites. But more 
generally, Ifind it would be a pity not to mention the work of lesser-known 
artists that often show at least one or two specific traits, which give 
life and a wider context to an artistic tendency or an aesthetic theme. 
Even when I organized exhibitions I wanted to include some of these 
outsiders, although that invited criticism from art historians or gallery 
owners.
    For this book my intention was not to accumulate a maximum number of 
artists and examples, but to create a panoramic, historical and 
multi-generational view of virtual art in which the overall striking 
variety of artists would help in the public understanding what I mean by 
the term Virtual Art.

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JN: I want to briefly come back to something. Is the emergent virtual art 
that you identify here, for you, a counter-revolution against modernism and 
postmodernism  or not?

FP: I have already mentioned in the conclusion of Art of the Electronic Age 
that according to the critics of modernism, what I am now calling virtual 
art can be described as a purist rejection of both stylistic anarchism and 
historical traditionalism. This is so inasmuch as these critics consider 
that postmodernism eclectically combines a plurality of preceding artistic 
styles and revives history and tradition. They maintain that in 
postmodernism complexity, contradiction and ambiguity are favored over 
simplicity, purity and rationality.
    There is no doubt that in the work of some virtual artists many 
characteristics of either modernism or postmodernism can be found. But 
generally speaking, in our emerging virtual era the stress is no longer put 
on questions relating to style, purism or historical tradition. If 
complexity and ambiguity are not shunned, scientific rationality is equally 
admitted. In fact, the emphasis in virtualism lies now ontechno-aesthetic 
issues that are linked to such notions as cognition, synaesthsia, and 
sensory immersion. But also this aesthetic pivots on individual, social, 
environmental and scientific options towards interactivity, 
neo-communication, as well as on telematic and/or telerobotic commitments.
    One could conclude provisionally that the status of the artist is 
somehow lost in these multiple commitments. Yet I feel that the specificity 
of the virtual artist is nevertheless maintained through the overall 
techno-aesthetic finality he or she pursues and by the verydistance 
maintained towards the areas when explored humanisticly. Thus an 
all-embracing virtuality in art is not really a counter-revolution against 
modernism and post-modernism, but widens considerably the spectrum of 
investigation open to the artist-conceptor.

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JN: Then is the challenge for virtualism now to chart a course between an 
idolatry of the new while avoiding a tyranny of the same?

FP: You are quite right in raising the problem of innovation with regard to 
virtualism. What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, its 
potentiality and above all its openness.
    As regards virtual art, this openness is being exercised both from the 
point of view of the artists and their creativity and from that of 
thefollow-up users in their reciprocating actions. Here again the point is 
that this openness implies a certain amount of liberty and freedom for 
action and creation but not at all to radically destroy what happened 
before. This open-ended virtual state corresponds to my mind both to the 
individual’s and the society’s needs to come to terms with the flux and the 
virtual dynamism that characterizes our present situation.

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JN: Let’s go further into your definition of Virtual Art. What is virtual 
art for you? How does it differ from other art?

FP: Technically speaking, virtual art, to my mind, includes elements from 
all the arts made with the technical media developed at the end of the 
1980s (or a bit before, in some cases). One of its aspects, at the time, 
was that interfaces through which exchanges passed between human and 
computer - for example: visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and 
screens, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, 
position sensors, tactile and power feed-back systems, etc. - allowed us to 
immerse ourselves completely into the image and interact with it. The 
impression of reality felt under these conditions was not only provided 
byvision and hearing, but also by the other bodily senses. This multiple 
sensing was so intensely experienced, at times, that one could speak of it 
as a Virtual Reality. Thus virtual signified that we were in the presence 
not only of reality itself but also of the simulation of reality.
    A similar technical development took place at the same time with regard 
to the internet and the new communications landscape. And also with regard 
to other technologies such as holography applied in conjunction with the 
above-mentioned technical achievements.
    Aesthetically speaking, virtual art, as I see it, is the artistic 
interpretation of the contemporary issues mentioned previously, not only 
with the aid of the above technological developments but through their 
integration with them. Such an integration - or combination - allows for an 
aesthetic-technological logic of creation which forms the essential part of 
the specificity of the virtual art works I am describing in this book and 
which differ from other art works in the sense that the latter lack this 
logic of creation based on the combination of current technical and 
aesthetic issues.

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JN: Is virtual art related to a technological determinism? Is it affiliated 
with a kind of cyber futurism?

FP: I think virtual art does not only depend on technology and 
technological “progress” but has a certain margin of free development and 
free will. The ingredients of cyberfuturism do, of course, play a part in 
this. But I see the artistic imagination as a driving force that can both 
concretisize human ambitions and allow them to form a true social framework.

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JN: I ask in that some people feel when art become too involved with 
technique and technology it becomes geekily irrelevant or, even worse, 
fascistic. Can art, for you, be too technical
? Too much about how a thing 
is done and insufficiently concerned with why the thing is done?

FP: I have always thought that technical knowledge or experience was 
indispensable for a deeper comprehension of art works and have been in 
favor of putting the stress equally on the processes of creation and on the 
open-ended art work. The danger of becoming too much involved - and even 
swallowed-up - by technical considerations seems to me a sign of immaturity 
in an artist.
    As far as I am concerned I have always tried to decipher what the 
aesthetic intention in a work of art was and how it related to the 
artist-conceptor’s technological preoccupations. In fact it is this 
techno-aesthetic criterion which at present interests me most.

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JN: What part does the history of cinema, video, and recorded sound play in 
the technological to virtual trajectory?

FP: I am not dealing in this book with the large fields of video, cinema 
and electronic music except for some cursory allusions to them in the text 
and some references in the bibliography. These areas are closely related to 
the emergence of virtual art from technological art, of course, but have 
always been autonomous - or at least have become so in the 1990s. One can 
thus consider them as being off the main investigative track of my book. 
Here I set out to find a satisfying definition of the changes that occurred 
in art through its confrontation with digital technology by looking at 
artists who are considered primarily as coming from - or working in - the 
fine arts area.

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JN: What role did Marcel Duchamp play in your thinking?

FP: Before appreciating fully the contribution of Marcel Duchamp which he 
made to the development of a totally revised vision of contemporary art, I 
was mainly concerned with his treatment of virtual and real movement 
leading from the Nude Descending a Stair-Case to his Rotative Demi-Spheres. 
But I appreciated also very early on his second characteristic contribution 
which originated in his Dadaist attitude; the ironical and revolutionary 
spirit which leads straight to Tinguely, and nowadays to Ken Goldberg and 
others.
    I only began to appreciate gradually the third main trait of Duchamp’s 
pioneering spirit; the one that influenced many of the “conceptual” artists 
and which is still discernable today in the work of artists practicing 
virtuality.
    But what also seems to me important in this context is the punning 
spirit that dominates one side of Duchamp’s work, as well as Man Ray’s 
undertakings.

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JN: Was your thinking also shaped by your exposure to Op Art in the 
early-1960s? It seems a natural predecessor to Virtual Art in that Op Art 
called attention to the spectator's individual, constructive, and changing 
perceptions - and thus called upon the attitude of the spectator to 
transfer the creative act increasingly upon him or herself. It seems to me 
that Op beckons forth a consideration of the enlargement of the audience's 
normal participation; both in regard to the spectators ocular aptitude to 
instigate variations in the perceived optic, as well as his or her 
capability to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or within the work 
of art itself. Did your encounters here in Paris with the GRAV group, 
Carlos Cruz-Diez, Yaacov Agam, Jesus-Rafael Soto and, of course, Victor 
Vasarely have an impact?
    I ask in that what I find interesting in your thesis here is that even 
within modernism we can begin to find the rare seeds which grew into what 
you are calling Virtual Art. Is that your intention, to reveal these seeds?

FP: I certainly was aware of the possibilities of an enlarged perception 
and cognition in the public which was solicited by the members of the 
Nouvelle Tendance and other Op artists, including those specifically 
concerned with programmed and permutational art. Their activities formed 
not only a basis for the development of spectator participation into a 
still more global interactivity in the virtual era, but included also such 
plastic phenomena as virtual movement, virtual vibration, virtual light and 
virtual colors, both “musical” and environmental. This is clearly 
discernible already in the work of Victor Vasarely, Yaacov Agam, Carlos 
Cruz-Diez, Jesus-Rafael Soto and the GRAV group.

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JN: In your seminal book Art, Action and Participation you contend that we 
must make a basic distinction between science and technology. For you, 
science, in its comprehensive sense, is the exact and rational knowledge of 
specific phenomena. Technology, on the other hand, is generally considered 
to be the application of science on the industrial level and originally on 
the pre-industrial level of arts and crafts. People, for example, Jacques 
Derrida, now speak of a technoscience where that distinction is blurred. Do 
you still hold to your original contention or have things shifted in this 
respect through cybernetic virtuality.

FP: As a matter of fact, in 1993 I wanted to give Technoscience Art as the 
main title of my book and Art of the Electronic Age only as a sub-title. 
The British publishers turned the main title down after consulting their 
American representative who thought the term to be already out of date.
     At the time and at present my idea was and is still that there is 
little difference between Science and its application in Technology, 
between Theory and Practice in general, and that this amalgamation is 
clearly visible in the work of the practitioners of cybernetic virtuality 
as well asin the presentation of their works in public spaces or on the 
internet.

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JN: Also in Art, Action and Participation you showed the convergence and 
specificity of the notions of environment and creative participation which 
combined to form a principal direction of art research in the theoretical 
and practical domains. Do you still feel that art is best when it involves 
all the senses because it is more conducive to the more complete 
involvement of the spectator?

FP: As regards the multimedia and multisensorial off-line works and the 
interactive digital installations described in chapters 4 and 5 of this 
book, I am still convinced that the complete sensorial involvement of the 
spectator is an advantage. However, this is less the case in the multimedia 
on-line works of chapter 6 and still less, of course, in the materialized 
digital-based works of chapter 3. In the former it seems to me that the 
conceptual involvement outweighs the sensorial one and that in the latter 
visual cognition issues largely dominate.

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JN: I would now like to ask you three rather large, but I think critical, 
questions which concern people in respect to 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 abundant globalization - if one interprets globalization as American 
immanent hegemony rather than some form of a post-colonial technological 
discourse.

FP: The first part of your question suggests that you are asking if virtual 
art enlarges the epistemological range of previous art tendencies, such as 
technological art. The intelligible fact that virtual art encompasses many 
possibilities of actual art would indicate that a supplement of truth is at 
stake. Whether we take epistemology in the senseof the study of origins, 
nature, the limits of human knowledge, or only as a quest for understanding 
nature scientifically, Virtual Art tries to make the best of both worlds: 
the scientific and the philosophical. Consequently, virtualism can be 
considered as an all-embracing area. We are here in the presence of 
knowledge that covers a multitude of natural, man-made and/or artificial 
phenomena, which by its very virtuality and interactive objectives involves 
us within an embracing aesthetic context. This aesthetic context serves us 
both on the level of empirical practice of human learning/perception and on 
the rationalist level by manipulating new theoretical concepts independent 
from experience.
  From an ontological point of view, contemporary virtual art represents a 
new departure from technological art since it can berealized as many 
different actualities. This can also be a useful way to understand the self 
in as far as the self is truly virtual: it has many potentialities. Thus 
the virtual self can be transformed into an actual, living personality as 
has been observed by John Canny and Eric Paulos in Ken Goldberg (ed.) book 
The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the 
Internet, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000 (p.294). We are also here close 
to Edmond Couchot’s interpretation of virtuality and of the virtual as a 
power opposed to the actual, but whose function, technologically speaking, 
is a way of being (un mode d’être) of digital simulation which can lead 
towards a certain expression of the subjectivity of the operator. This 
ontological tendency of virtual art can be clearly observed in the works of 
a good number of artists described in this book who have been using 
telepresence and virtual reality devices in this way.
    As I see it, virtual art can even play an ethical role in the present 
development of globalization by stressing more than any other previous art 
form human factors - both as regards to the artists and the multiple-users 
of the art. Yes, it could have an impact in a critical and prospective way 
on globalization. Ultimately (and idealistically) one could imagine that 
the overall human bias which I identify within this book by example would 
tip the scales in favor of intelligent, ethical control of nuclear and 
post-nuclear technologies. In particular armaments which will find 
themselves, sooner or later, in the hands of many collectivities. This 
stance in favor of responsible conscientiousness would allow the use of the 
new technologies and ways of communication to be operated - both 
economically and culturally - in the interests of all humankind.

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JN: As an historian, how do you feel about the so-called disappearance, 
de-materialization or de-objectification of the artwork? For some, this, 
and other factors, leads inevitably to the end of art. What happens to art 
if it is practiced only as an unenduring, momentary activity? Will the 
future have any idea of what is going on now if the art which best typifies 
our electronic era is largely ephemeral and often becomes quickly 
obsolete  technically speaking?

FP: For a long time I was satisfied by considering that the basic aesthetic 
triangle, the artist, the work of art and the spectator, was developing 
towards one that interrelated the conceptor, the creative process and the 
active participant.
    But I must say that the ephemerality of a good number of works in the 
electronic era did trouble me.
    At first, my reaction was that some of these works would share the fate 
of sculpture, where an original mould is the basis for the “tirage” of any 
number of “copies” and the question of the “aura” of the original work of 
art does not even arise. In other words, the registered data of the 
electronic work of art could survive and allow its reconstruction. Of 
course, the technical obsolence would hinder it to be more than a museum piece.
    But what we have to consider essentially is the difference between the 
historical value and the contemporary value of a work of art in the 
electronic era. The former can be maintained by the reconstruction of the 
work from the preserved data while the actual original is lost sooner or 
later in the vicissitudes of a computer or otherwise. The latter remains in 
the creative minds of the future conceptors, whose memories are impregnated 
by these models or by other means - such as descriptions, analyses and 
reproductions in books - which allow the new creations to be adapted to 
contemporary issues and the state of the technology.

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JN: In your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art and Art, Action 
and Participation you show how Kinetic Art played an important part in 
pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links 
between science, technology and art relating to the notion of the 
environment. The virtual artists that you assemble here, are they all 
directly related to movement  hence speed? Does stillness regulate art to a 
pre-virtual status for you?

FP: No. Movement, real or virtual, is no longer a prerequisite for 
interesting myself in works of art. At present the most attractive criteria 
for me are, as I have perhaps already indicated, the work’s openness to 
reciprocal creative action and their combined aesthetic and technical 
topicality.

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JN: Tell me about your experience with Electra  an art exhibition that you 
curated at the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris in the early 1980s? 
How was that experience formative for you?

FP: What was particularly beneficial to me when I conceived and co-directed 
the Electra exhibition was the fact that I coordinated two very different 
teams: one consisting of the museum staff, and the other made up of 
teachers and students from my own university; Paris 8.
  Just as for my previous exhibition Lumière et Mouvement at the same 
museum, here Imanaged to elaborate a highly technical theme over a 
reasonable stretch of time - more as if we were in a research laboratory in 
which organizers, technicians and artists meet regularly and frequently. In 
the case of Electra, the exhibition team and I managed to integrate the 
different modes of competence into a coherent visual and intellectual make-up.
    Personally, I had an additional advantage in that I held a weekly 
university seminar for one year preceding the exhibition and during its run 
at the auditorium of the museum. In that seminar I developed the different 
themes with the members of the two teams, but also with some invited 
specialists who intervened particularly during the sessions that took place 
during the exhibition.
    Although I devoted a certain amount of my time and energy to practical 
matters, I managed to concentrate myself on acquiring a deeper knowledge of 
the many artistic, technological and scientific parameters involved. This 
allowed me first to write an Introduction to the catalogue, and later to 
incorporate some of these findings into my writings.

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JN: I suppose that science-fiction, more so than hard science, has been the 
leading inspirational force for many virtualizing artists I know. Certainly 
in my own case that is true.
    Unquestionably sci-fi engages the imagination in a gripping way at 
times. Very much so in that sci-fi has a concrete influence on what gets 
built from time to time  like cyberspace. Has science fiction had a bearing 
on your passion for technology and embryonic virtualism?

FP: Unfortunately my real interest for science-fiction is very recent. This 
isperhaps surprising because of my frequent mixing with prominent kinetic 
artists who were influenced by science-fiction - or at least by popular 
science. They should have incited me already at the time to be more 
concerned with this subject.
    I should like to mention, once again in this context, Nicholas 
Schöffer. He never failed to relate to me his latest readings or his 
cinematographic experiences in or close to science-fiction. However, our 
conversations never made a clear distinction between imaginative science 
and science-fiction. At a moment whenhe cooperated with other avant-garde 
creators - like the composers Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Henry 
Pousseur, choreographers like Maurice Béjart and scenographers like Jacques 
Polieri - he took interest in the writings of Jacques Ménétrier, the author 
of La médecine fonctionnelleand De la mesure de soi, un examen de 
conscienceand in Stéphane Lupasco, author of L’énergie et la matière 
psychique. In addition he was reading Werner Heisenberg and Herbert 
Marcuse. So it was this kind of imaginative scientific, literary, 
pluriartistic and philosophicalmixture in our conversations that could have 
had an influence on my passion for technology and embryonic virtualism.
    I must also say that I had an early preference for popular travel and 
astronomic fiction like Jules Verne’s or James Jeans’s. This cannot be 
compared to the virtual artists’ interest in science-fiction literature and 
films - or a book like Neuromancer by William Gibson, however.

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JN: Why did you think that science and technology could act positively as 
creative stimulants in the early 1960s? My memories of the late 1960s and 
early 70s involve a rampant back-to-nature aesthetic, at least among the 
artistic hippie anti-war people whom I associated with. What gave you 
“faith” in technology as a liberating force?

FP: At a time when artists were engaged in creating happenings, land art 
and other early ecological statements they were also making ironical and 
prospective machinistic experimentations. I felt that this combination 
would be the seed for further developments provided that the goal of all 
these undertakings was concerned with the liberty of the individual, not 
only of that of the artists/conceptors but also of that of the 
culturally-ascending ordinary citizens.
    It was again the great variety of artists I met at that time, Jean 
Tinguely, Yaacov Agam, Malina , Schöffer and the members of the GRAV and 
the Nouvelle Tendance, all of them interested in science and technology 
developments, who confirmed my belief that this combination of the two 
types of creation would be conducive for an advent of a new social and 
cultural climate where this apparent antagonism would disappear.

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JN: A main thread in your new book, and the reason that you stress the 
biographical details of the artists, I believe, is your desire to show how 
technology is  or can be  humanized through art. It is true that something 
exciting happens when one looks at a familiar subject not as a closed 
conceptual system, but to find an opening conceptual edge  in this case the 
increasing humanization of technological virtualism. That is what I have 
always detected in your work as an art historian and what I see in your 
expansive research here: that opening edge.
    I think that this conceptual edge is ever more important today after we 
have learned that both fundamentalist and modernist reductionist 
assumptions are not easily changed by mere postmodern negations. What seems 
to be needed globally are mutating conceptual models to think differently 
with; connectivist conceptual models that are never just the completed or 
inverted objectivity of the common conceptions. Does the technological into 
virtual dialogue you illustrate here offer such a modulating model? What I 
am asking is: do you think that technology and virtuality can allow us to 
think differently about our humanness? To think better? To become more human?

FP: In fact, the virtual model I propose has its epistemological, 
ontological and ethical connotations as we remarked before. 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 historically accelerated moment. I 
shall try to explain myself as far as virtuality and as the contribution of 
virtual art are concerned.
    As I see it, I amgoing one step further from what Oliver Grau and 
Christine Buci-Glücksmannn define as the social implication - or the 
aesthetics - of the virtual. According to Grau, media art, that is, video, 
computer graphics and animation, Net art, interactive art and its most 
advanced form of virtual art (with its sub genres of telepresence art and 
genetic art), is beginning to dominate theories of the image and art.
    With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing and 
presenting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests 
that it is possible to enter it. Thus, it has laid the foundations for 
virtual reality as a core medium of the emerging information society.
  Christine Buci-Glücksmann approaches the aesthetics of the virtual 
through the idea that the development of the new technologies of the 
virtual has caused a major historic transformation that touches all the 
artistic practices: the passage from the culture of objects and of 
stability to a culture of flux and instability. Thus the premises in both 
art and architecture can be established that lead to an aesthetics of 
transparence and of fluidities.
    If I accept and try to incorporate these points of view in my own 
theoretical approach of virtual art, I do so to take an additional 
theoretical step by assuming that our wider consciousness  which is 
affected by technological advancement - permits us to better assume both 
our intellectual and our emotional human status at the beginning of the 
XXIst century.

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JN: Many technophiles believe that technology is making us less and less 
human and more machinic. Then too there is much talk of post-humanism 
today. Take two fairly recent books, for example: Katherine Hayles’s How We 
Became Posthuman and Robert Pepperell’s The Post-Human Condition. They both 
suggest that we already live beyond the state of humanness.
    Correspondingly, Michael Heim, in his book Virtual Realism, has 
identified a transhuman attitude which consists of artistic and 
psychological strategies contrived to break through well-worn perceptions. 
What is it about virtual art that confirms your commitment to humanist 
values in our age?

FP: I must say that the notion of the human for me is not linked to the 
classical heroic idea stemming from the Greeks and Romans. Rather, the 
humanist notion symbolizes for me our basic human needs and personal 
achievements.
    This does not preclude this idea from also being connected to wider - 
even universal  issues, of course.
    Virtual Art enters this current anti-human and post-human dialogue - a 
context fraught with the most explosive anti-human and post-human dangers - 
precisely with the intention of humanizing technology by taking into 
consideration the need for human survival: a survival concerned with 
biology and freedom. Humans are beings who try to preserve in all 
circumstances their elementary needs for a certain amount of personal 
integrity and liberty.
    A virtual artist’s activities can deal with these fundamental issues 
while preparing a blue-print for some working solutions of both personal 
and universal dimensions.

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JN: When you speak, as you do, of art humanizing technology through the 
artist’s rudimentary human goodness; does that not lead artists and art 
into politics? Might it lead into what, in her book Thinking Past Terror, 
Susan Buck-Morss calls (and calls for): the global progressive Left (or, 
alternatively: the radical cosmopolitan Left)?
    By this idea of a connected global Left, Ms. Buck-Morss stresses the 
connectivist aspect of globalization as a communitve humanizing force when 
theorizing a post-9-11 politics as Hegelian negative dialectics. What role 
did politics and philosophy play in the construction of your commitment 
to  and one might say obvious delight with - art-technology?

FP: Although it is quite difficult and hazardous to try to reconstruct the 
elements that make up my present commitment to the art-technology option, I 
shall attempt to trace these elements first of all from the area of 
theory  but not necessarily only from philosophy - and secondly from action 
- but not necessarily only from politics.
    It would be easy for me to quote a myriad of names that could have had 
an influence on my present commitment, but that would resemble 
name-dropping without really showing any essential traits. So I will limit 
myself to indicating some ideas and their authors that come to mind 
immediately. There is no doubt that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of 
perception, Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology, andEtienne Souriau’s 
correspondence of the arts (with his analysis of the work of art and his 
comparing aesthetic method) have had to do with my comprehension of 
cognitive, multisensorial and interactive elements in technological and 
virtual art. Also Walter Benjamin’stheory of the aura in lieu of 
reproducibility and Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics of the cinema and his 
criticism of psychoanalytic concepts played an important role. However, as 
regards interactivity, I cannot exclude the influence of some 
psychoanalytical thought on my thinking, particularly that of Sigmund 
Freud, whose theories cannot be fully appreciated unless they are put into 
the perspective of a combination of imaginative science, neurophysiology 
and psychological insight. Of course I was aware of Alfred Adler’s 
individual psychology, Carl Gustav Jung’s archetype theories and Jacques 
Lacan’s interpretation and development of Freudian concepts along with 
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the Other. They all played a formative 
role in my thinking.
  But another influence on my commitment to technological and virtual art 
can be traced to the theories of Umberto Eco and other aestheticians as 
regards the openness of the work of art - and more recently Eco’s 
consideration of the computer as a spiritual tool. But my basic 
neo-humanist attitude was originally formed by the thought of philosophers 
like Nietzsche, Hegel, and Adorno and the literature of Franz Kafka, 
Jaroslav Hasek, Elias Canetti, Vladimir Nabokoff and Primo Levi. These 
authors anticipated or described, each one in their own manner, the basic 
events that made up 20th century tragedy - a tragedy which combined 
bureaucratic obsession, widespread persecution and outright murder with the 
misuse of technology.
  We are now close to the second point I am trying to make regarding 
politics and action in my ideological make-up, but this time in a more 
positive perspective. Let me single out the most striking date and event 
that comes to my mind regarding that period. It is May 1968 here in Paris. 
May 68 was not really a revolution, nor simply a cultural revolution, but a 
virtual cultural revolution that was felt as such by many artists and 
intellectuals, especially cosmopolitan ones. This virtual cultural 
revolution - with its unheard-of possibilities and opportunities and its 
effective, real extensions - was anticipatedand felt by me deeply and it 
effectively changed my life and opened up some possibilities for a 
realization of my cultural ambitions which were very much directed towards 
a theoretical consideration of the art and technology relationship and its 
practical application.
    In fact, I was not the only one to experience this phenomenon. People 
such as Isidore Isou and the Lettrists also, in their utopian way, were 
convinced that they had anticipated and even provoked, in many of its 
details, this cultural upheaval. In any case, this gave me the effective 
opportunity to enter, still as a foreigner, the teaching staff of the 
experimental university at Vincennes and I met there, among others, some 
members of the information department - such as Hervé Huitric and Michel 
Bret. They later entered the art department which I directed and for which 
I managed to muster technologically oriented cultural practitioners like 
Edmond Couchot and Jean-Louis Boissier  people who had already collaborated 
with me on the exhibition Cinétisme, Spectacle, Environnement at the Maison 
de la Culture in Grenoble in 1968.
    These observations regarding 1968 Paris could be transposed into the 
present world situation and even its future circumstances whose countenance 
will appear when extreme nationalism and fanatical religious movements make 
way fora pacific, socially and economically just distribution of 
technological and cultural achievements.
  Let me just add that 1968 was also the year when the journal Leonardo 
came to be and an opportunity was given to me - and to many others - to get 
acquainted with, and to measure the importance of, theory and action in the 
art/science/technology field on an international scale.

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JN: But how did politics impact on the early development of the juncture 
between art and technology, which has lead to virtualism? We know of the 
valiant but failed Soviet Constructivist experiments using the coupling of 
art/technology/socialism following their revolution.
    One thinks of Varvara Stepanova’s, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s and Vladimir 
Tatlin's art and technology splice which theorized a move away from 
representation and speculation towards intellectual production based in the 
actual material conditions of life. But Constructivism declared art 
irrelevant in a society committed to creativity and the aesthetics of 
everyday life  and then itself became inapplicable and taboo.
    How do you see the juncture between art and technology and collective 
social action serving as a humanizing influence today? Does it function as 
a leftist utopian influence for you?

FP: There is no doubt that the political impact on contemporary art in our 
time now of world-wide social, economic and intellectual upheavals is as 
great as at the end of the First World War. However, since the main 
characteristics of the present situation are now, as I see it, totally 
different, there is a real necessity to consider the art/technology problem 
in a completely different light. This means abandoning, as much as 
possible, used political terms. Of course it is difficult to find entirely 
new substitutes for such notions as democracy, socialism, capitalism etc. 
without falling into a 100% utopian attitude.
  Nevertheless, my experience at the Experimental University at Vincennes - 
with the clash between anarchists, Maoists, Trotskistes, lined-up 
communists and traditional socialists on the one side and simple students 
attempting to understand all the political and cultural implications of 
their time on the other - have influenced me in such a way that even in a 
complex question, such as the relationship between art and technology 
leading to an open-ended virtuality, I take up the case of the latter: 
their “humanist” case, which seems to me to prevail in the long run.

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JN: Your spirit differs radically from what I see as typical of French 
apocalyptic-chic negativism. Take for example recent proclamations by the 
skeptical - now famously reactionary - technophobe Paul Virilio concerning 
virtuality (not to mention the eminent Monsieur Baudrillard). Is it your 
involvement with factual individual artists and their work that makes the 
positive difference?

FP: Yes, my personal commitment and working method explain why I have such 
a different attitude to the art-technology problem than Virilio or 
Baudrillard. This commitment and method is closely connected with my 
encounters with artists and their work - and my status as a non-mainstream 
art historian.
    Indeed, when I describe myself as an “art historian”, I simplify 
matters - just as I do when I meet someone in the street who asks me who I 
am and what I do. I thus tend to avoid misunderstanding when I say that I 
am an aesthetician, an art theorist with a degree in the science of art, an 
art exhibition organizer, a teacher, or an art critic - although I am a 
little bit all of these things! This personal profile is in fact directly 
associated with my working method, which establishes the closest 
relationship possible with the artist. I have applied this method of 
affinity as I wrote art books, taught art in an experimentaluniversity, and 
organized exhibitions that had an impact on the public awareness of 
avant-garde artistic issues. This explains also my positive attitude as an 
alternative art historian who takes a completely different stance than does 
Paul Virilio. Monsieur Virilio’s attitude is based on the assumption that 
accidents and other catastrophic events are inevitable and which can only 
be recorded by the artists who are unable to propose other possibilities or 
virtualities. According to him, the work of these artists cannothave any 
impact politically or intellectually on the course of events, which is of 
course not at all my opinion.
    Perhaps I should add that already in the 1960s - when I wrote my book 
on Kinetic Art which formed part of my doctoral dissertation - I had to 
discover the existence of several hundred artists in many different 
countries who largely ignored each other’s work, but who all pursued 
aesthetic goals with the aid of real or virtual movement and natural or 
artificial light. One can of course argue that there was something 
arbitrary in my assumption that these artists had sufficient matters in 
common to be classed together under the term of Kinetic (or Luminokinetic) 
Art. But my way of proceeding was based on some ideas that were in the air 
at the time, which justified, in my mind, this kind of procedure. Of 
course, many of the artists, if not all, were not quite satisfied with this 
classification, but alternatively made use of the term. Some did 
categorically reject being called kinetic artists. However, even though any 
kind of classification can irritate artists (or others) I think 
nevertheless that it is necessary to proceed in this way if one wants to 
situate the work of an artist with regard to timely ideas - thus showing, 
among other things, the work’s involvement with these timely issues and the 
way this work engages or transcends them.
    After my prise de conscience regarding motion and light, I have tried 
similar operations based on the assumption that there was a significant 
relationship to be analyzed between two aesthetic ideas current at the 
time: artistic endeavors to create works on an environmental scale and 
spectator participation. This gave rise to my book Art, Action and 
Participation, which you previously mentioned, for which I was again in 
touch with a considerable number of creators - this time also belonging to 
other disciplines than the visual arts. I must say that a similar procedure 
led me to write Art of the Electronic Age. For this book likewise I 
contacted directly artists engaged in the problem of art and technology. 
This type of procedure is also the basis of my present research into 
virtuality; research founded on the hypothesis that a new departure in 
Technological Art has recently been made which can be termed Virtual Art. 
For this exploration I have established relations and opened discussions 
with artistswhoseinquiry takes place within the categories of digital-based 
projects and environments, multimedia off-line compositions, and on-line 
works in which interactivity and multisensoriality play a more radical role 
than before. Here again I fear that some artists will object to be called 
virtual artists (or artists practicing virtuality), but I still feel that a 
non-arbitrary classification is necessary and can be regarded as a first 
step towards a combined mastering of the aesthetic problems of virtual 
creation.

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JN: Do you think that virtual art will continue to unfold under its own 
weight from the point of view of extended and connected virtuality, with 
the next set of arising lyrical questions necessarily having to do with how 
the virtual itself is to be understood and constituted in the future? Or do 
you see a reactionary resistance to emergent virtualism on the horizon?

FP: I cannot really foresee the future of virtualism. Nevertheless, I have 
a feeling that political reactions such as ecology and corresponding 
scientific and technical discoveries made in contemporary and future 
biological research will alter the general context. The result will 
necessitate a readapting of the individual to a new synthesized 
environmental condition. Art research will no doubt both anticipate and 
assume this situation - and perhaps find a new term for this advanced 
virtualism.

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Begun June 17th, 2003 Paris.  Concluded July 28th, 2003 Paris.