BEING IS DIFFERENCE
pixellated portraits
from the digital edge
Joseph Nechvatal
left, Wolfgang Staehle
Donald Kuspit on Joseph Nechvatal and New Media Art
BEING IS DIFFERENCE is an expandable portrait series started in the winter of 2005 in New York City. Some cyber-tinged artists, gallery owners, critics, collectors and curators, who I wished to celebrate, came and sat for me - and I wish to thank them again. I was interested here in an interlaced sense of artistic viractuality that couples the biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As such, BEING IS DIFFERENCE strives for an understanding and depiction of an anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for a non-privileged logos. Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic and viral disturbances they cannot contain and thus thought detaches itself from the order and authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.
Joseph Nechvatal