(a) VIRTUALITY – Essay: Christian Viveros-Fauné

The three “Daves,” or the Making of (a) VIRTUALITY

 

The most vivid experience of Virtual Reality is the experience of leaving it —Jaron Lanier

 

The most important thing about technology is how it changes. The most important things about changes in technology is how they change people.

With the above noodling at top of mind, I found myself staring quizzically at my iPhone on a recent afternoon. Its polarized screen contained an eerie image of a glowing windowless room. The room was illuminated by flat directionless light so that it looked nearly shadowless. With floors and walls painted uniformly white, the room appeared to levitate five peculiar objects. Said objects looked like art; by which I mean to say that they resembled non-functional things. Like the space itself, the forms and designs and shapes of these items, their bright industrial colors included, appeared to cast around casually— nonchalantly, one might say—for an instrumentality that, despite surface charms, mostly eluded their objecthood.

The room was a digital facsimile of an actual room, I was informed by the person dispatching the image. (Were they really a person? The signature identified the sender only as ‘TL.”) Considered hastily it resembled a dentist’s office, or St. Peter’s waiting room—if heaven’s antechamber was conceptualized not by God’s gatekeeper but by the same firm that designed lobbies for the American Academy of Orthopedics. Thoughts of corporate interiors led me to recall the sameness of certain minimalist museums and the immaculate architecture of Apple stores. Following the circuitous logic of a search engine, I then landed at an especially apt piece of movie recall: the stark neoclassical bedroom suite featured in the penultimate scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 mindfuck of a film 2001: A S pace Odyssey.

All white and illuminated from below by a grid of square panels, the fictional room that was once an actual movie set was designed as a transformational vestibule for David “Dave” Bowman, Kubrick’s Homeric hero in 2001: A Space Odyssey. From its immaculately antiseptic confines “Dave” ascended to the status of celestial Star Child—which Kubrick fan websites describe as “a non-corporeal energy being able to travel the universe freely before merging with the HAL 9000 computer to become Halman.” Dave’s dying bedroom, in other words, was constructed as an otherworldly simulation of virtual reality: a room full of misdirection, an in-between place, a locale where distinctions collapse and the constructions of “superior realities” overtake the defects of actual reality. (The first simulated experience with a VR/AR headset was created by Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull in 1968, the same year as Kubrick’s mesmerizing fiction.)

Which brings me to the following piece of pretzel logic. The image on my phone, I now realize, is a render—a visualization of how things might appear IRL. A render is supposed to be a tool, but in the context of the art exhibition I’m now considering, the render becomes the art. All art, according to the three artist “Daves” who conceptualized this fool-the-I exhibition—Platonists Darren Bader, Jason Brown and Ted Lawson—proposes its own virtual experience, a thing that’s perfect in an imagined way rather than physically; a visualization spun off both from common perception and common sense that is not unlike Kubrick’s Star Child. The limits of their starry vision: the facts and gravity that will, inevitably, maybe even tragically, given the right conditions, plummet their idealized picture back down to earth again.

Titled—what else?—(a) VIRTUALITY, the exhibition features (contains? contemplates? floats?) imagined and hard and fast artworks by Bader, Brown and Lawson. The actual physical room holding these vibrating “objects” is the main exhibition space of the gallery ASHES/ASHES, a NYC-based outfit with a reputation for experimental approaches to art. Located right off the street from the grit and graffiti of Manhattan’s LES, the trio’s collaborative project brings together shiny droll objects—things in the world—with what poet Wallace Stevens termed “a supreme fiction.” Like Stevens’ arch-generative concept, the artists’ visualscum-speculative-prompts represent fictionalizing itself as its own idealized activity or Platonic ideal—a paradoxical hypothesizing of theoretical and actualized forms as models for the world to sloppily shadow and copy.

An itemizing of the artworks that make up (a) VIRTUALITY invokes less high culture than assembly-line ready-mades and Instagram-era mashups. The exhibition takes wing from the following forms: two brightly painted car doors leaning on a wall (Bader), twin cut paper abstractions mounted on aluminum and stainless steel (Lawson) and a solitary painting of two exactingly realized figures seamed by a streak of Bondo, the polyester putty also used as all-around filler (Brown). The banal nature of these objects proves, above all, both perfect and indecipherable. To use a HI-FI metaphor, the exhibition’s concept and design eschews interest in the works’ single-channel constructions; the premium, instead, remains solidly on how these items can blow it out in stereo. (“Stereo” means “solid” or “three dimensional” in Greek.)

Immersive and streamlined, the exhibition is designed to provide a seamless transition from one place to another—an empty airport lounge with Also Sprach Zarathustra, The Simpsons Movie version, piped in over the intercom on repeat. What that transition entails presently constitutes a matter of feverish speculation. So, here’s one possible reading of (a) VIRTUALITY: it delivers wry commentary on technology’s blurred lines, from Kubrick’s HAL 9000 to ChatGPT and LaMDA and beyond. Another: this peculiarly dry exhibition constitutes a 180 degree turn of the screw in the circular logic of art making after conceptualism—by modeling an actualized way of reconsidering and whittling down objects and their images with regards to ongoing developments in virtual technologies.

How do a pair of car doors, two abstractions and hyperrealist picture of faceless humanoids manage that, you ask? By making the installation the concept, the exhibition space the medium and the render the work. If at first glance (a) VIRTUALITY looks more Ecce Homer than Ecce homo, that’s because sardonic humor is part the show’s substantial breakthrough. It helps write the set up for the missing punchline that serves as the ideal metaphor for now.

Christian Viveros-Fauné

Brooklyn, 2024