La Beaute Tragique: Mapping the Militarization of Spatial Cultural

A A R N T D I La beauté tragique: S W T A Mapping the Militarization S R of Spatial Cultural Consciousness Joseph Nechvatal A B S T R A C T hy investigate the militarization of cultural tion toward the abstractions of ad- W vanced scientific discovery, now spatial consciousness in lieu of the Yugoslavian crisis [1]? To The author investigates the me now, all cultural work appears significant by its compari- stripped of their fundamentally militarization of immersive cultural son to this, and all, bloody bombing interventions. It espe- reductive logical methodology. consciousness, as initiated by the cially appears significant when the consciousness of the un- Most certainly the art/science/ aerial bombardment of civilians at derlying process of militarization is encoded subtly in the politics/consciousness creators Guernica and during World War II. Parallel to this trend he observes manifestation of the cultural practice. In this sense, art today that I have met understand that an ambient-immersive impetus in can follow an ancient African example, which persists today. in every era the attempt must be post-war art, which he traces in In Benin, Nigeria, chiefs still wear red cloth as part of their made anew to wrest tradition the example of the Espace group, ceremonial court dress, and red (by its association with anger, away from a conformism that is and in the currently developing technology of virtual reality. blood, war and fire) is regarded as pseudo-threatening. By about to overpower it. Therefore, the wearing of such an artistically ominous cloth, a chief pro- the role of the science/politics/ tects himself (his consciousness) from evil; that is to say from technology/consciousness artist witchcraft and from the magical forces employed by enemies. in the face of war is that of the explorer/researcher. The In like manner, our art—by displaying subtle encasements of function of such an explorationally inclined artist, however, is certain aspects of warring consciousness—might protect us not to find—but to participate in and foster a constant insta- from the evil consciousness of (and for) war. bility of consciousness so as to mitigate against self-stabilizing I convincingly encountered such reflection (and art prac- formations. This encourages internal rhizomatic connections tice) in my role as artist coordinator for “Consciousness to sprout and expand. Reframed 1997”: the first international conference to look at This approach clearly is opposed to the tabular thought new developments in art, technology and consciousness (held nestled behind nationalistic, racial and gender biases that at Roy Ascott’s Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive typify the consciousness in back of the warring impulse. Arts in Wales). There I observed (and participated in) a new For such art/science/politics/consciousness creators, elec- sensibility emerging respecting the integration of certain as- tronically augmented consciousness is characteristically a form pects of art, politics, science, technology and consciousness of encounter that precipitates internal shifts in which the gram- [2]. The following brief words are an attempt to outline what mar of art can collide with and interfere with the adjacent dis- I took to be the core of this phenomenon in terms of politics/ courses of science/politics and technology. This integration war by stating what I take to be the underlying causes that I goes far toward exemplifying an aesthetic that has a problem- observed advancing this developing sensibility. atic relationship to material science/politics-based reality. In my interactions with them, I discovered that the art/sci- Though exemplified by the sensibility outlined above, ence/politics/consciousness creators pursuing Ascott’s lead these feelings and strategies of production have been at work are actively exploring the frontiers of science/technology re- for certain significant artists, in my opinion, throughout the search so as to become culturally aware of the biases of con- bloody twentieth century. For example, one might ask—as I sciousness today in order to amend those biases. They begin did myself in my research [3] on the central characteristic of with the realization that every (new) technology disrupts the virtual reality (immersion)—just why was traditionally framed previous rhythms of consciousness. Then, generally speaking, pictorial art progressively challenged and to a certain extent they pursue their work in contradiction to the dominant eclipsed by an ambient-immersive impetus following the Sec- clichés of our time. In this sense, their art research begins ond World War? Evidently there was something endemic where the hard science/politics/technology ends. within the barbarous conditions of twentieth-century modern This moderately negative sensitivity toward hard science, warfare that facilitated this development at its onset, rather politics and technology can be understood best, however, as a than any more laudable human aspirations toward the ex- trellis on which vine-like connections grow between technol- panding of aesthetic perceptual consciousness. We can find ogy and psychology. Digitization is a key metaphor for the cre- examples of the construction of immersive cultural space pre- ative minds I discuss only in the sense that it is the fundamen- vious to the war on occasion, but after it I began identifying a tal translating system today. Digital inventiveness, like large increase in apparent immersive cultural intentions. In- consciousness, is made up of electronic signals—thus digitalia is no longer content with the regurgitation of a standardized, Joseph Nechvatal (artist, educator), 114, rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris, France. E-mail: analog repertoire of image-tropes. Hence, the fertile attrac- <[email protected]>. © 2001 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 27–29, 2001 27 A A R N T D I deed I have deduced that something in the behest of Francisco Franco visual intelligence in that, as the artist S W T A the spatial consciousness of society was Bahamonde, killed 1,654 Basques and Carolee Schneemann has written, “vision S R altered following the war. I have further wounded 889, including the elderly, is not fact, but an aggregate of sensa- deduced that the bombing of civilian women and children. tions” [7]. Victor Burgin supports centers in the course of the war (i.e. Co- Previously there had for centuries ex- Schneemann’s claim when he writes that logne, London, Tokyo)—culminating isted a fairly dependable separation be- “seeing is not an activity divorced from with the American atomic bombings of tween military and habitational space, the rest of consciousness; any account of the civilian Japanese cities Hiroshima, but with the bombing of Guernica y visual art which is adequate to the facts of on 6 August 1945 (circa 140,000 vic- Luno the swathed immersive space of our actual experience must allow for the tims), and Nagasaki, on 9 August 1945 the tellurian domain was suddenly made imbrication of the visual with other as- (circa 70,000 victims)—changed the to seem defunct as previous earthly and pects of thought” [8]. world’s sense of cultural space radically. architectural barriers became porous to According to Koestler’s holon con- However, Paul Virilio, in his esteemed airborne invasions. This sense of air- cept—established in Beyond Reductionism Bunker Archeology [4], indirectly suggested borne vulnerability soon extended fur- and in The Ghost in the Machine [9]—in- the initial date of this spatial conscious- ther and further outward with the stead of cutting up immersive percep- ness transition as being 1943, with the launching of spy and then military-com- tual wholes into discrete focal parts, Nazis’ preparations for launching the V-2 munications satellites (Sputnik in 1957), habitational ambient scopic vision ballistic missile. Although experiments the first manned space flight by the So- should be understood as using synthetic were undertaken before World War II on viet military pilot Yuri Gagarin on 12 sub-whole sets found within the atmo- crude prototypes of the cruise and ballis- April 1961, and then the first manned spheric spectrum of immersive per- tic missiles, these weapons are generally trip to the moon of the U.S. Apollo mis- ception’s entirety. It is the exposé of the considered to have their true origins in sion in 1969, which featured Neil synthetic atmospheric phenomenology the V-1 and V-2 missiles launched by Ger- Armstrong’s televised trek on the moon. of such holonogic sight (dependent on many in 1944 and 1945. The designs of Rocket technology enabled military the linked and amassed sum-total of both these Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance forces to put nuclear weapons on inter- views) that will concern us here as we in- weapons) confronted the problems of continental missiles, due largely to the spect the militarization of cultural spa- propulsion and guidance that have con- former work of Russian rocket pioneer tial consciousness. For even though our tinued ever since to shape cruise and bal- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (whose visionary scopic information is largely determined listic missile development. Indeed strate- ideas came from Nikolai Fedorovich by the way our eyes work, horizontally gic missiles represent a logical step in the Fedorov), the American Robert H. implanted in the front of our face attempt to attack enemy forces at a dis- Goddard and the German Hermann (cross-blending visual fields), our inter- tance. As such, they can be seen as exten- Oberth. With rocket

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