In the accelerated moment of "virtual reality," art is just another word for privatization. When the reality that art responds to is "virtual,'' it is best described with money. It's not even money. It's numbers that flow from a Third World nightmare, to a bank, to a foundation, and finally to a corporate sponsored research center like the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. There, supercomputers crunch the novel of the future, as Henry James called it, at a cost of $10,000 per minute.
What virtual reality and computer animation make clear (in case you haven't been paying attention to the last seventy years of Hollywood) is that capital would like to own the "means of production" for art. The art that is produced by these unimaginable concentrations of money provides a new aesthetics of beauty.
It is a neo-romanticism. We are meant to stand in awe of the rareness of its pure image. But this is a neo-romanticism which creates no intimations. It is not interested in the messy human.
It is an antiseptic futurism. (There is within it no danger that beauty could blow up and carry away your hand.)
It provides a fascist cleanliness of image.
Watch the human figures in this video (most of which dance to an industrial synth-rhythm) and then watch one of the aerobics programs on ESPN. Boys and girls with hyper-bodies in metallic tights. Crotchless. Deathless.
These computer generated images are beautiful, seductive. They flow, mutate, spiral, create galaxies of fish, dinosaurs, birds. A fish changes into a bird changes into a fighter jet. There is no difference. There is no difference between birds and fighter jets. They are all just part of the new beauty. Of course, real fighter jets don't visit Urbana, Illinois. They don't send their smart bombs down the labyrinthine corridors of the Beckman Institute.
On the other hand, there is Negative Space a computerized video novel in which one of us messy humans makes an incursion into the Land of VR and rubs herself all over the shiney equipment.
Negative Space is set in Kansas City and is the story of a university professor and his wife who are desperate to conceive a child. "Their story is told through the media of print, videotape and software, creating a new form of the novel for the postmodern era." Be prepared for large doses of theory (Derridean and Bahktinian) and high-art (James Joyce as subject and inspiration for a lot of language play).
What most impressed me about this finally likable "novel" was the way in which its high-tech nuance (computers! video! theory!) was resisted "dialogically" by the wonderful sloppy humanity of the author and her husband. The video, in particular, seems like an attempt to invent high-tech primitivism. The video camera is handled sans sophistication. Professor Andrews mumbles and stumbles through his Derridean reading of "Cristobel." (A funny, quirky idea in itself. Who'd put that in a novel?) We glimpse the chubby thighs of our heroes locked in erotic embrace. We find out far more than we're happy to know about Mrs. Andrews' vaginal mucus.
Is this novel the leading edge of the "postmodern era"? Perhaps. But Holly Franking's hindmost foot is happily still sunk back in rag and bone.
The artist strikes back against corporate art. Incorporate me? I'll turn myself into a corporation first. Thus: Team Leyner. Funny and frightening. By commodifying himself, Leyner (but which Leyner?) hopes to outrace commodification. It's brinksmanship after the end of the world. Think of Lazarus. Think of James Dean. Think, as Leyner encourages us, of Connie Chung.