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Reviewed by:
  • From Technological to Virtual Art
  • Paul Hertz
From Technological to Virtual Art. Frank Popper. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2007. 471 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-16230-2.

Frank Popper’s From Technological to Virtual Art could hardly have arrived 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 art-world 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 the 1980s onward in which interactivity, participation and immersion create experiences that simulate reality rather than re-creating 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 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 artworks, 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...

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