Joseph Nechvatal - paint, robot, virus
an alternative documenta
...what a 21st century documenta could look like

Joseph Nechvatal
paint, robot, virus
by
Christian de Lutz

web published here June 20th, 2012
http://alternativedocumenta.tumblr.com/post/25516483161/joseph-nechvatal...

asstrOnOmical affected autOmata: Art and sound by Joseph Nechvatal 2011

Nechvatal’s work mix painting, programming, politics and biology. He has been working in digital media since the 1980s and in particular with viruses since 1999. His algorithmically and robotically assisted paintings develop from programs where imagery is in part dissolved by computer viruses, a process in which the artist creates an “interface between the biological and the technological.”

His writings include Towards an Immersive Intelligence and Immersion into Noise. Nechvatal, who receiveda PhD in 1999 in The Philosophy of Art and New Technology has developed a set of theories concerning our increasing immersion in the virtual (Viractualism).

If painting is to be rescued from the ruins of postmodernism, it may be through Joseph Nechvatal’s unique body of works and writings.

REAL TIME {a procedure of ignudiO excess} “is a body of paintings from 2003 by Joseph Nechvatal. It is about the viral hermaphroditic body suspended in the ready position of timeless excessive - a sort of sullied Epicurean Hellenism simultaneously antediluvian and post-human. For this sub-theme of double-sexness, Nechvatal drew inspiration from Michelangelo’s famous series of ignudis.

Joseph Nechvatal interviewed by David William Turner, March 2009