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-
© 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 technology, the pretations of that visual data are far sions of either artillery (in the case of bal- space of military interaction clearly ex- from intractable. We are equipped with listic missiles) or manned aircraft (in the panded and, mirror-like, entered the in- eyes with predominantly frontal focuses, case of cruise missiles). ner dimensions of the human psyche. which look straight on, of course, but in In 1944 at the Peenemünde base on Virilio verifies this shift in consciousness holonogic cognitive perception there the island of Usedom in the Baltic, in his book War and Cinema: The Logistics are also aware, attendant fringes to sight Wernher von Braun and his team cre- of Perception [5], in which he traces the that seep in peripherally. ated the V-2. The V-2 was 14.1 m long (47 colonization of the unhurried gaze by The militarized new sense of threaten- ft), and its payload was about 900 kg of military technologies and the introduc- ing external space that I have just out- high explosives. Its horizontal range was tion of military intelligence into the in- lined perhaps is most strongly, and most about 350 km (220 miles), and its peak doctrination of the non-combatant’s fearsomely, exemplified by what has be- altitude usually was about 100 kilometers perceptions. This “rational” scopic ex- come known as C3I (pronounced see (62 miles). It was first fired against Paris tension of vision is accomplished pre- cubed eye): the electronic military- intel- on 6 September 1944. Two days later the cisely at the loss of another sort of vi- ligence spatial fusion of control, com- first of more than 1,300 V-2s was fired sion—habitational ambient/holonogic mand, communication and intelligence, against Great Britain (the last on 27 scopic vision: the artistic visual mode, developed as the electronic/digital sys- March 1945). Belgium was bombarded which is essential to the continuous but tem of strategic command over the almost as heavily with them. Reaching a coherent quality of immersive art. United States military’s nuclear arsenal. height of more than 160 km (100 miles), This ambient/holonogic immersive A fine overview of this trend toward mili- the V-2 marked the beginning of the perception/cognition/interpretation in- tarizing and sighting outer (and hence, space age. After the war, both the United directly refers back to the atmospheric by inference, inner) space is provided by States and the Soviet Union captured perceptual process called spatial summa- Herbert York in his essay “Nuclear Deter- large numbers of V-2s and used them in tion, which we use in apprehending en- rence and the Military Uses of Space,” in research that led to the development of larged receptive fields. And in terms of which he outlines the Strategic Defense their missile programs. this summative sense influencing an Initiative (SDI) program of the 1980s Nevertheless, Pablo Picasso’s monu- immersive cognitive visuality, it is reason- and the ensuing militarization of outer mental 1937 painting Guernica pre- able to make use of the holonogic sche- space. Indeed York makes the point that sented to art consciousness an earlier matic model of Arthur Koestler—in “from the beginning” the use of the (the first) air bombardment of innocent which no set or frame of perceptions may space program has been “primarily of a civilians at home in their city of be viewed in isolation or as a single part military, not civilian or scientific nature” Guernica y Luno during the Spanish of a finite perceptual collection [6]. This [10]. As part of the SDI program U.S. Civil War (1936–1939). Here Hitler’s cognitive-visual model is applicable to President Ronald Reagan put forth in a Junker 52 and Heinkel 51 warplanes, at immersive (unframed, hence, expanded) 1983 speech his “vision” of what became
28 Nechvatal, La beauté tragique A A R N T D pejoratively called “Star Wars”—perhaps with the sculptor Morice Lipsi and the nuity (despite the crises in Yugoslavia) I S W the archetype of this oppressive spatial painter Michel Carrade so as to advance and by inevitable benevolent connectivist T A S consciousness—now making a limited many Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) features of the Internet. R comeback under Clinton. ideals into the 1960s. In this respect I As an American artist living often in What I am proposing here, in agree- should also mention here the French- Europe, I notice this process of ment with Virilio, is that the holonogic based international and multi-disciplin- holonogic synthesis (re-conceived of in sense of human, enfolded space was radi- ary Espace group, which was predicated micro self-segmented ways within mod- cally transformed in 1943, when the Ger- on the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk synthe- est programs) unfold nearly every day man rocket-launched bombs began to fall sis of the arts and on ideals of spatial with the unification of Europe, even without warning, shattering the common unity and spatial continuity. Espace given the retained suspicions towards sense of civilized, non-combatant, pro- (which is French for space) was founded idealist illusions that counterbalance tected space, and that this remade hu- in 1935 by its chairman André Bloc this humanist desire for diverse but har- man feelings toward external space thor- (1896–1966), principally an engineer monious co-existence. oughly. As a consequence, I maintain, a working in rubber and a painter and consciousness of civilian aerial bombing, sculptor, whose interests lay in the ex- References and Notes of atomic weapons, of military rocketry pression of an underlying quest for a 1. An earlier version of this essay was written during and of the eventual militarization of new relationship to space. As such he the bombing campaign conducted against the ra- outer space has greatly engendered the founded the journal L’Art d’aujourd’hui, cial aggression in Yugoslavia in response to the on- line forum Cultural Practice and War, which was abandonment of the horizontal line in the print organ for the Espace group. conducted by Blast under the project title “voti” art, which for thousands of years had L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in the 1930s (
Nechvatal, La beauté tragique 29