the dynamism Of becOming 80
Monday, February 21
Lecture by Joseph Nechvatal: "The Viractual" at the University of Maryland Baltimore County - Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.
4:30 pm
Admission is free.
The Humanities Forum at the University of Maryland Baltimore County presents a lecture by visual artist Joseph Nechvatal.
Since 1986, Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991 to 1993, he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale/Ledoux Foundation's computer lab in Arbois, France on The Computer Virus Project, an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora.
Through the computer hybridization of components of the male and female sexual anatomy, Nechvatal arrives at hermaphroditic abstractions weirdly in tune with the cultural white noise of the present moment. In attaining this "viractual" state (the artist's word for something between the virtual and the actual), Nechvatal's work is simultaneously classical and futuristic--part anatomical rendering, part forensic voyeurism.
Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Wales College, Newport, United Kingdom, where he served as coordinator for the 1st International CAiiA Research Conference entitled Consciousness Reframed: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era (July 1997), which examined new developments in art, science, technology and consciousness.
Dr. Nechvatal presently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He writes periodically on art and new technology. His latest book, Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) has been published by Edgewise Press. In 2011 his book "Immersion Into Noise" will be published by the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office in conjunction with Open Humanities Press.
Sponsored by the Department of Visual Arts and the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
For more information call 410-455-6798.
http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/calendar/
Review: The Retriever Weekly > Arts > Viractual Lecture shows the computer virus as art: http://www.retrieverweekly.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=6409&format=ht...