Hyper-Noise Aesthetics

Back cover blurb for ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even

Originally written in 1995 during Joseph Nechvatal’s artist-in-residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even is a semi-autobiographical farce that, in parts, captures the birth of the internet, New York City cultural life in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the sex life of an American painter in Paris in 1995. Incorporating a broad range of Western (pop) culture references—from art to music to literature—Nechvatal places us in the midst of an esoteric cacophony of myth and colour and sound and sensuality as the buzz of a nascent internet sounds the opening of doors and minds.

Purchase ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even at Lulu here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/paperback/product-mjp76n.html

Or at any Amazon worldwide.

Pages 129 / Paperback / Interior Color / Dimensions A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297 mm)

$10 (8.5 E) e-book version here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venusñvibrator-even/ebook/product-kvv648e.html

From the Author’s Afterword of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even by Joseph Nechvatal

Though an exaggerated cybersex farce novella, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even (written in 1995 and polished in 1996) is semi-autobiographical in parts and does reflect sincere aspects from my love and sex life up to late-1996. It most likely will be as close as I will get to a recounting of the days of freedom in the 1970s and the 1980s downtown scene in New York City, where I moved in 1975 at the age of 24. Though lugubriously and ludicrously dramatizing much of the erotic episodes in the text, I drew from real experiences encountered during intermittent periods of sexual promiscuousness and experimentation that I would throw myself into when not involved in a committed loving relationship—a state I was not in during the writing of the text in Paris.

Now, polishing again ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even in 2023 for its Orbis Tertius Press release as a paperback book, a tumbling backwards into the past has occurred to a time when the internet was young—when I was single at age 44—having just moved to Paris with my cocker spaniel Ryder. The text reflects, I believe, three revolutions that I participated in: The cultural revolution (mid-60s to mid-80s), the sexual revolution (the 1970s to mid-1980s / but in a way ongoing / I am a TGNC ally), and the mid-1990s computer revolution. These great changes propelled the text, even as I was working my way through the smaller shocks of Conceptual art, French theory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodern critical theory and post-humanist academics. But the rebirth of the author attempted here, I must say, was also inspired by a fourth revolution: the insertion of avant-gardism into popular culture that the “song” Revolution 9 achieved in 1968—the sound collage from the Beatles’ self-titled double album (aka the White Album) credited to Lennon–McCartney but created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Yoko Ono and George Harrison.

I wrote ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even during my artist-in-residency at the Cite des Art International in Paris in 1995. Simultaneously, as a digital art pioneer, I was given a free connection to an Internet Service Provider (Imaginet.fr) that year too, for which I retrospectively thank them. Imaginet gave my networked virtual reality imagination all-night access (through the telephone line) to the then growing World-Wide-Web. The surprise and pleasure of this packet switching hypertext access to blossoming websites and discussion forums is reflected in this text. In 1995, the Internet had just begun to tremendously impact culture and commerce as I began studying the immersive ideals involved with virtual reality.

For that Cite des Art International opportunity I must thank Pierre Restany for placing me at their compound in Montmartre—where I installed myself on a water bed for a year. There I felt a desire to read some of Henry Miller’s books that dealt with Paris and sex, which led me to Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, Gilles Neret’s Erotica Universalis and Anaïs Nin’s book on sex, Delta of Venus, that was so very important to the creation of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even. I had already read all of Jean Genet’s work and his frank but poetic style in Our Lady of the Flowers marked me deeply. Other strong influences for me were Geoffrey Grigson’s book The Goddess of Love, everything by William S. Burroughs, Anaïs Nin’s A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, Gary Indiana’s White Trash Boulevard, Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque, all of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson’s influential cyberpunk books Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). I greatly admired Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and also Jennifer Bartlett’s Rhapsody (1975–76), particularly when considered next to her copious writing: History of the universe: A novel (1985). I was certainly influenced by the poetry community that gathered at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in the late-70s, by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing The Vulva and Anus (aka The Female Sexual Organs), Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde, many drawings by Hans Bellmer and his 1946 photo of a spread vagina on a plate of milk called (prudishly) Untitled, Carolee Schneemann’s work and friendship in general and specifically her filmed performance Meat Joy, photos of Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic, the films and live performances I saw of Erotic Psyche (Aline Mare and Bradley Eros), Henri Maccheroni’s 2000 Photos du Sexe d’une Femme, the broad-spectrum vulva work of Hannah Wilke, and the writings of Georges Bataille (all of Bataille, as he challenges any single discourse on the erotic, but particularly Story of the Eye), James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), Giacomo Casanova, Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Laughable Loves), Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Harold Brodkey (both First Love and Other Sorrows and The Runaway Soul), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), everything by Vladimir Nabokov, Marquis de Sade, Yukio Mishima (The Frolic of the Beasts), everything by Aldous Huxley, Ovid, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and all of Kathy Acker. Indeed, Acker’s snatch style very much urged me on to try my own hand at sex farce. I also drew inspiration and courage by reading during my life the words of Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Joris-Karl Huysmans (discovering and first reading French Symbolism at age 15 at Hinsdale High School was my first experience of rewarding estrangement); then Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo (White Noise), Raymond Roussel, Comte de Lautréamont, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein (her and Alice B. Toklas’s apartment on Rue de Fleurus is just around the corner from where I now live and walking by their door regularly inspires me), Francis Picabia, Samuel Beckett, David Foster Wallace, Allen Ginsberg (Howl but also Wales Visitation), and John Giorno (everything but especially Cancer in My Left Ball). And from seeing the films of Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Ken Russell and Jack Smith. My development as an erotic post-cyberpunk transdisciplinary artist was also touched by Genesis P-Orridge.

All of these artists (and more) have helped inspire ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even’s eccentric erotic sensibility and its self-consciously elaborate stylistic conceits. The long French sections in ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even I wrote in English in 1989 for the catalogue for an art show I curated called Erotic America held at Galerie Antoine Candau, when the gallery was located not far from the Place de la Bastille in Paris. I thank Antoine and the French translator, whose name I have lost. The poem-structured section towards the end of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even mainly comes from my 1983 prose poem 2 Thousand Wings: The Winged Penis that was published in the No Wave literary compilation Just Another Asshole #6 by Glenn Branca & Barbara Ess. It has been republished on pages 109 and 110 in the 2019 Primary Information facsimile edition Just Another Asshole #6. 2 Thousand Wings: The Winged Penis was the first of my semi-erotic love scribblings to see print and I thank Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca for that encouraging early experience.

Then too, Roy Ascott’s 1994 text The Architecture of Cyberception (published in the Leonardo Journal in August 1994) played an influential role in the creation of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even. For this and other of Roy’s influential theoretical texts that mix art with technology with consciousness studies, I point the reader at his book Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (edited by Edward A. Shanken) that was first published by the University of California Press in 2007. On meeting Ascott, one, as I, may fall under the spell of his conceptual mojo. In early 1995 I was introduced by Jill Scott to Roy, who was scattering brainy cyber civility in Paris like fairy-dust. He had just launched his, what is now called, Planetary Collegium and I had been studying Roy’s texts in preparation for earning my virtual reality-based Ph.D. under him with a dissertation called Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms that picked up some of the seminal theoretical threads detectable in ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even. I went on to accomplish, in 1999, a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Art at Roy’s Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA-STAR), that was then at the University of Wales in Newport. It forges a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. Its conclusion also predicts the now called metaverse ~ a vision of what many in the computer industry believe is the next iteration of the internet: a single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual space where humans experience life in ways they could not in the physical world.

Also in 1995 I was active in The Thing: an international net-community of artists and art-related projects that was started in 1991 by my friend and next door neighbor at the time, Wolfgang Staehle. The Thing was launched as a mailbox system accessible over the telephone network in New York feeding a Bulletin Board System (BBS) in 1991 before their website was launched in 1995 on the World Wide Web. I particularly was exchanging theoretically-charged emails with Peter von Brandenburg (aka Blackhawk) there as early as 1992 while I was still working on my Computer Virus Project at the Centre International de Réflexion sur l’Avenir at the Fondation Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in La Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans in the Jura department of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of eastern France.

Arc-et-Senans, and nearby Arbois, were my first locations where I worked and lived in France, between 1991 and 1993, and I thank the people there profoundly for their hospitality. Especially the curator Francois Cheval, who brought me there for an extended artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois and the Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans. There I created my first artistic computer virus code that I used for my Computer Virus Project I paintings (some mentioned in the text). This work was a reflection on my personal experiences of risk and loss with the AIDS epidemic.

Now, in 2023, Kimberley Palsat (my wonderful Orbis Tertius Press editor) and I have given the text a light dusting and small nips and tucks as we wish to maintain the historical validity of the work. The Lobster font used for the chapter headings and the use of the colours pink and blue in the text are the only new significant formal changes. (See page design example just below.)

I perhaps need not mention that the text was written well before the current avalanche of AI algorithms used to produce large language model (LLM) activities that use deep learning and large data sets to understand and generate new content. Also well before woke alertness to racial and sexual prejudice-discrimination was as well articulated as it is now. The same can be said about our increased focus on gender expression (It was written before cisgender was a thing) although the number of meditations on pansexual gender sensitivity and non-dualistic transgender issues found here may have surprised you. The reason being, transgender issues attracted me through my love for Duchamp’s flamboyant and sexually subversive suggestion of the onanistic machine célibataires (bachelor machines[1]), with which he converted the principle of autoeroticism into one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923). My study of his pansexual bachelor machine led me to theorize a philosophical space of transversal conceptual linkages, full of connectivity, that intersect genders. The resulting paintings were first exhibited in ec-satyricOn 2000 (2000) and then vOluptuary: an algorithmic hermaphornology (2002) at Universal Concepts Unlimited Gallery in New York City. Some have been chosen by Kimberley Palsat and used to “illustrate” the Orbis Tertius Press book.

Of crucial interest to this conceptual-painting work that began with ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even is the origin of the hermaphroditic androgyny image. This hybrid image first appears in Ovid’s classic text Metamorphoses—and perhaps this emergence is well worth recounting here. The hermaphrodite initially occurs in Western culture as a son of Hermes and Aphrodite named Hermaphroditus. Hermaphroditus was a typical, if exceptionally handsome, young male with whom the water nymph Salmacis fell madly in love. When Hermaphroditus rejected her sexual advances, Salmacis voyeuristically observed him from afar while desiring him fiercely. Finally, one spring day Hermaphroditus stripped nude and dove into the pool of water which was Salmacis’s habitat. Salmacis immediately dove in after him—embracing him and wrapping her body around his, just as, Ovid says, ivy does around a tree. She then prayed to the gods that she would never be separated from him—a prayer that they answered favourably. Consequently, Hermaphroditus emerged from the pool both man and woman.

As the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests, my post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even artwork displayed an androgyny eroticism married to a flowery virtuality and immersive excess. It aimed to depict an imagined realm of political-spiritual chaosmos[2] where new forms of sexual order arise—such that any form of order is only temporary and provisional. Obviously this sphere is attained through an emergent operation, and, indeed, I took abundant pleasure in the forms of pan-order that arose within its swelling processes. The point is that within this text and subsequent paintings, sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis—which is to say that they are translatable into other signs. Here, of course, it is possible to find resonances and affinities between sexual opposites where we can articulate new gender proportions within ourselves.

My cultural position is that moral and conceptual benefits of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even can be found in this chaosmos in that the patriarchal construction of woman as other—and the female body as object—is deeply rooted in the supposed duality (opposites) of the two sexes. Most feminist theory questions this patriarchal construction of sex and gender, suggesting that sex is expressed through a continuum, rather than as an opposing couplet based on heterosexist male/female polarities.

Accordingly, within these paintings, organ containments usually signifying womanhood or manhood are subverted by the presentation of ambiguous genitalia—the mutable image and performance of pan-sexuality. Everything rests between male and female, between straight and gay, between dominant and submissive—nothing but curves and clefts. All is in a matrix of possibilities—assembled from a flowery excess of the erogenous. Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming. As such it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. Open-minded creativity is its raison d’etre—indeed my epic sex farce poem Destroyer of Naivetés, published by punctum books in 2015, owes its birth to ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even.

I dedicate ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even to all who, through sex and love, have suffered or soothed.

[1] Duchamp first made reference to the machine célibataire apparatus in 1913, when he wrote notes in preparation for La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), also known as Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass) (1915–1923), now permanently displayed in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Though well-known, The Large Glass, made of two large panes of glass, seems inexhaustible in terms of its larger meaning and thus infinitely mysterious and useful. Conceived as an eroticized corpulent machine, in Duchamp’s notes he used such terms to describe its parts: “sex cylinder,” “desire gear,” “reservoir of love gasoline,” and “general area of desire magneto.” Within the notes, Duchamp also identifies the specific bachelor machine’s component parts as: a water paddle, scissors, a chocolate grinder, a sledge, and nine malic molds. Technically, he employed a toy cannon to shoot paint-dipped matches at the glass ground of this work to determine the positions of these nine malic molds that were intended to represent nine job types, into which males are molded as men (all middle class or lower): a priest, a delivery man, a gendarme (military police), a cuirassier (cavalry soldier), a police officer, an undertaker, a go-fer sycophant, a busboy, and a railroad stationmaster.

Any prurience aroused by the title is not gratified by looking at either the bride or the bachelors, who are linked together, like a daisy chain of mechanical implements or schematic diagrams. They sit well below the looming bride (who scarcely looks naked and hardly looks female), hovering wasp-like in the upper panel, sealed off by a segmenting metal strip. In the lower Bachelor Apparatus section, Duchamp imagined these nine bachelor bootlickers cock-blocked: trapped in a chain of repetitive emotional states that flutter between hope, desire, and fear.

I find this emotional chain (or cycle) prescient, as this fearful-hopeful-yearning state has now become emblematic of Art writ large, due to the rhizomatic internet condition of art as spectacle, endlessly flowing in attention-seeking circularity. Like the net, Duchamp’s Large Glass as a mental masturbation machine contains the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden—that requires a circular quest and return (for example, the trail of the Argonauts)—and the space of polymorphic confused borders, of strange affiliations, of magical spells, and of symbolic replacements (the labyrinth space of the Minotaur).

While waiting for the bride’s gratifying attention, the sexually frustrated bachelors below are enacting an enigmatic fantasy drama of competing passion (or aggression), suggested by the phrase “stripped bare” in the full title of the piece. All the bachelors hope and strive to bed the bride, but fear of vague consequences holds them back in a state of frustration, which introduces the important psychosexual function of the chocolate grinder that nearly dominates the Bachelor Apparatus zone. This important form was transferred to The Large Glass from Duchamp’s delicious painting Chocolate Grinder (No. 1) (1913). The grinding machine in the Bachelor Apparatus area signifies how the bachelors, frustrated with their inability to mate with the bride machine, may achieve some sweet satisfaction by repeatedly sexually stimulating their own genital apparatus, thus demonstrating a sort of faux dual-sexuality that can be described as the “simultaneous or successive possession of both sexes by a single individual.”

This feverish theme of onanistic dual-sexual circularity in The Large Glass presents us with a model of gender grandeur: a theoretical imaginative bisexual machine that functions independently of “the other,” thereby pulling faux dual-sexual passion into a developmental logic of its own, leading to a transcendental infinite. It is here, in the faux dual-sexual self-pleasuring chocolate grinder, where I detect some spiritual implications of the nine male types Duchamp has virtualized and sprayed into their discrete zone of remote presence. Their endless faux dual-sexual self-pleasuring (that smoothly shrivels into asexuality or explodes into pansexuality) implies two polymorphic viewpoints: those of asexual and pansexual bachelor machines. Crucial to the imaginative fantasy powers of a pansexual bachelor machine is the implementation of a theory of the variegated virtual. This theory assumes the existence of preposterous and imaginatively configured subjects able to ford human anthropocentric sexual frontiers. Duchamp’s use of post-humanist chance in the making of his bachelor machine implies that the artist relinquishes, to a greater or lesser degree, the power to close down the final interpretation of a work, i.e., keeping it open to interpretation, which facilitates all sort of imaginative and fluid mental processes in the viewer. Thus, for me, a spiritual implication of The Large Glass is the denial of sexual determinism in favour of the potency of apparent pansexual fluidity in circularity ad infinitum. This means an implicit refutation of the assumption that the “neutral” body is always white and straight and masculine. Thus, the circular implication of faux dual-sexuality has directed my focus in theorizing and coding post-bachelor hermaphrodite, artificial life, and viral art projects as early as 1992, as well as computer-robotic painting pansexual bachelor machine images, with Duchamp’s male bachelor machine as starting point.

[2] See Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

In December 2023 my 1995 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even cybersex farce novella was published in book form by Orbis Tertius Press, a Canadian book publisher of innovative and challenging works.

Pages 129 / Paperback / Interior Color / Dimensions A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297 mm)

It can be purchased here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venus%C3%B1vibrator-even/paperback/product-mjp76n.html

$10 (8.5 E) e-book version here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venusñvibrator-even/ebook/product-kvv648e.html

Orbis Tertius Press website: https://orbistertiuspress.ca

Orbis Tertius Press email: orbistertiuspress@gmail.com

Joseph Nechvatal in Paris in 1995 (photographer unknown)

Related audio files are on Bandcamp here: https://magicif.bandcamp.com/album/venus-vibrator-even

In 2024 my publisher has released an image-less, smaller, less-expensive b/w version of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even called ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even HERE: https://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-nechvatal/venusñvibrator-stripped-bare-even/paperback/product-w446kky.html

	Nicola L., an Overlo… on On the passing of Nicola L. /…
	josephnechvatal on Quelques vues d’installation d…
	Lucio Pozzi on Quelques vues d’installation d…
	Professor Frank Edwa… on On the Death of Frank Popper
	From Viruses to Algo… on Artist Statement : Orlando et…

Hyper-Noise Aesthetics

Review(s) of the Alberto Giacometti / Ali Cherri exhibition Envisagement at l’Institut Giacometti

Review of Lacan, the Exhibition: When the artist precedes the psychoanalyst

Book review of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge book: THE LAST SLOGAN

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even / published by Orbis Tertius Press

Review of the Mark Rothko Retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even audio at Bandcamp

Review of Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus

The Viral Tempest Interview at It’s Psychedelic Baby music magazine

Psychedelic Baby picks The Viral Tempest as the Vinyl of the Day

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius Press book announcement)

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta