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.