From Technological
to Virtual Art
by Frank Popper
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007
471 pp. 154 illus. Trade, $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-262-16230-2.
Reviewed by Paul Hertz
The Collaboratory Project
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
60201, U.S.A.
paul-hertz@northwestern.edu
Frank Popper’s From Technological
to Virtual Art could hardly arrive
at a better moment. Interactive digital
art has expanded far beyond the cozy enclaves
where it began, garnering popular and
critical attention if not acclaim. In
the last decade, it has disembarked in
numerous artworld venues, gained a few
outposts in galleries, and settled into
various crowd-pleasing museum shows. A
growing body of contemporary art historical
research examines its origins. Curators
hold conferences on its preservation:
acquisition is the surest sign of recognition.
The oft-repeated complaint of artists
dedicated to the field, that the artworld
has been most comfortable conferring its
favors on established artists who "go
binary" rather than on digital media
pioneers and their inheritors, starts
to sound a little wheezy, even if the
artworld still has a long way to go. Books
like From Technological to Virtual
Art–and there have been quite
a few over the past decade–construct
the art historical corpus of digital media,
identify its pioneers and long-term practitioners,
document the mutual influence of digital
and traditional media, and incidentally
enable future liaisons with artworld markets
by establishing a legitimating critical
record.
As author of Art of the Electronic
Age (1993) and Origins and Development
of Kinetic Art (1968) and curator
of the "Electra" exhibition
of electronic art (Musée d’Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), Popper
brings a depth of scholarship to the field
that few can match. Add to his careful
scholarship a gift for clarity and a generous
capacity for letting artists speak about
their work, and you have a book that should
endure for some time as an art historical
text. Building on his assertion in Art
of the Electronic Age that art humanizes
technology, Popper defines virtual art
as a new departure in art, emphasizing
interactivity, multisensorial perception,
and a philosophical shift from the real
to the virtual. The virtual for
Popper involves technological art from
1980s onward in which interactivity, participation,
and immersion create experiences that
simulate reality rather than recreating
it in physical form. Virtual art partakes
in a larger social transformation, "the
passage from a culture of objects and
stability to a culture of flux and instability."
Artists producing virtual art are developing
a new aesthetic drawn from a commitment
to both art and technology while their
awareness of the social implications of
their medium engages them in extra-artistic
social and scientific goals, not the least
of which is, precisely, the humanization
of technology.
Popper offers his arguments for the category
and term virtual art in his Introduction,
where he also (all too briefly) presents
his criteria for selecting artists and
points out areas of new media, such as
video and electronic music, that he has
chosen to exclude in order to maintain
a focused investigation. The opening chapters
of the book summarize the historical antecedents
of technological and virtual art and review
some of the ground covered in Art of
the Electronic Age. The major portion
of the book consists of chapters largely
constructed from interviews with artists,
divided into various categories with introductory
remarks by the author.
As a condensed scholarly survey, the opening
chapters are immensely rewarding. There
have been many scholarly constructions
of the historical antecedents of electronic
art and the development of practices that
emerge from it. Few offer the range of
Popper’s scholarship. Though often
limited to brief paragraphs and lists
of names, Popper’s text includes
a broad array of tendencies and historical
figures, some quite obscure, that populated
the early 20th century avant-garde,
and which often do not figure in standard
histories, generally focused on painting
and sculpture. He reveals how the ferment
of experimentation of the early avant-garde
in multisensorial and intermedia art works,
light organs, responsive architecture,
and procedural art, to mention but a few
of the early experimental domains, seemed
only to be lacking a proper instrument,
as early electronic artists realized.
Popper’s coverage of electronic art
provides less of an inclusive survey,
because he wishes to emphasize how itineraries
followed by artists serve as models of
the various ways that electronic media
art developed. One could argue that the
text privileges European constructivism,
at least to a degree, but if it is idiosyncratic,
it also has the virtue of giving pioneering
artists who have escaped mainstream histories
(and even digital art histories) some
long overdue attention.
The major portion of the text presents
works by individual artists active from
approximately 1983 up to the present,
distributed into four categories: materialized
digital-based work, multimedia and multisensorial
off-line works, interactive digital installations,
and multimedia online works (net art).
The line of increasing dematerialization
that orders these chapters coincides,
roughly, with a timeline from early virtual
art to the most recent. Dematerialization
proceeds both through increasing interactivity
and participation and through shifting
of delivery from off-line to online. If
the inclusion of an artist in one category
or another occasionally feels arbitrary,
the utility of a systematic approach and
the author’s care not to overstate
the organizational scheme reduce the problematic
nature of assigning categories.
Popper has developed his text from interviews
and artist’s statements, and there
is much valuable material here. When this
presentational technique succeeds, it
has the great virtue of giving us a sense
of the artist’s voice and philosophy.
Occasionally, it must be said, it is a
source of annoyance, when artists lapse
into language too personal or too overburdened
with theoretical constructs to allow the
reader to understand its connection to
the artwork–an annoyance made all
the more patent by the clarity of the
author’s expression. One might wish
that he had employed an editorial scalpel
with greater zeal. Failing that–and
one could certainly argue that the artist’s
words should stand, whatever their failings,
because they are the artist’s words–one
could wish that Popper would elaborate
more on his criteria and interest in the
artists. It would hardly matter if his
selection proved to be somewhat arbitrary,
as one suspects any selection must be,
if his critique revealed the same clarity
that pervades his historical perspective.
Indeed, readers hoping for a systematically
developed theoretical apparatus should
look elsewhere. Popper’s point of
view is that of an art historian. In that
capacity, he would rather let the artists
speak and leave the apparatus in a provisional
state, ready to go off in many directions,
than overload the text with arguments
and conclusions.
The book closes with Notes, Bibliography,
Artist List, and Index, all useful. It
would have been a great favor to researchers
and other curious readers to provide the
Artist List, which mostly consists of
URLs, in online form. In an age when electronic
resources commonly extend the utility
of books, this omission is rather surprising.
Considering From Technological to Virtual
Art as a whole, its flaws seem scarcely
worth noting. This is a book that deserves
a place on the shelf of any artist or
historian seriously interested in new
media art. Moreover, its utility lies
not so much in its being a definitive
history, but in the very provisionality
of its conclusions and inclusions. The
field of virtual art continues to evolve,
in breadth and in complexity. The number
of people working in the field has expanded
beyond the capacity of any one historian
to capture everything or everyone in a
single text. The solidity of the markers
that Popper sets down in the historical
record, the precision with which he describes
the advent of virtual art, and the historical
value of the assembled interviews and
documentation make this an indispensable
text–not because it closes a line
of argument, but because it opens up many.
The most indispensable texts are those
that urge others to research, document,
and write. Let us hope that many more
books, essays, and documents are already
taking form, stimulated by From Technological
to Virtual Art.
