Metamorphosis - Ethics and Aesthetics are One - from a Neuroscientific Perspective by Erika Matsunami

Wittgenstein's "Ethics and Aesthetics are one" is the starting point of this research. "In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein states that 'the world and life are one', so perhaps the following can be said. Just as the aesthetic object is the single thing seen as if it were a whole world, so the ethical object, or life, is the multiplicity of the world seen as a single object". (Diané Collinson, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 25, Issue 3, SUMMER 1985, pages 266-272) Art transcends boundaries of race, nationality and gender. It is a creative act of unifying in the context of humanity, from the subject to the various topics, by asking questions. This point is the lack of "reality" (dealing with reality) from a sociological perspective. However, it is impossible to define humanity and reality based on sociological statistics alone–which is my perspective of Wittgenstein's "Ethics and Aesthetics are one". Thereby, I examine 'world and life' from the 21st century perspective. In other words, my research is on immateriality from a 21st-century perspective in relation to the context of neuroscience—on multifoldness. I would like to explore the following "What is diversity and its coexistence?" ...

“Wittgenstein’s theory of molecular propositions turns upon his theory of the construction of truth-functions.”^[4]

^[4] Introduction, Bertrand Russell, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, Ludwig Wittgenstein, LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD., NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC., 1922, p.11

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Joseph Nechvatal^[5] (b. 1951 in Chicago) is a post-conceptual artist who works in painting and new media art. He deals, for example, with the theme of the relationship between reality and virtuality.

Since 2002, he has been collaborating with programmer Stephane Sikora^[6] in the field of viral artificial life as part of his artistic research. Their collaboration results in an excellent (exquisite and delicate) combination that reflects the both of high quality explorations: Stephane Sikora's concept of C++ programming and Joseph Nechvatal's nonsense literature.

^[5] Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) University of Wales College, Newport, UK. From 1999 to 2013, Nechvatal taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA). His archive is housed at The Fales Library (Downtown Special Collection) at N.Y.U. in New York City.

https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/body-pandemonium/

^[6] “Since his first robotic-assisted paintings in 1986, the artist Joseph Nechvatal has always questioned the relationship between reality and virtuality. By working in-between these two spaces, Nechvatal has shown their complex interaction. This reciprocity is what Nechvatal sees as typical of viractualism, an art theory term he developed in 1999. This term viractualism (and viractuality) emerged out of his doctoral research into the philosophy of art and new technology concerning immersive virtual reality at Roy Ascott's Center for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), at theollege, Newport, UK. There he developed this viractual concept, which strives to identify and create an interface between the biological and the technological. Viractualism is central to his work as an artist. [Nechvatal, 2011]“

https://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/Balancing/Balancing%20Art%20and%20Complex.htm

I described the features of his robotic-assisted digital painting in the theoretical exploring "On rite Of spring" (2024)^[7].

^[7] https://josephnechvatal.wordpress.com/2024/05/20/erika-matsunami-on-rite-of-spring/

A painting without observation: informational data and its narrativity as a fiction

Joseph Nechvatal has transformed a homemade computer virus into something artistic in his 2015 Berlin exhibition bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion Into Noise. It makes me think about coexistence and the environment at an artificial level. And how research on a vaccine for HIV ^[3] has developed. Coexistence with the AIDS virus in the body's natural environment. For AIDS patients, the only way to live is to coexist with the virus. What is ‘coexistence’ in an environment for us biologically?

^[3] HIV-1 virions contain two copies of a single-stranded RNA genome within a conical capsid surrounded by a plasma membrane of host-cell origin containing viral envelope proteins. The RNA genome is 9750 nucleotides long (Ratner et al., 1985; Wain-Hobson, 1989), and the virions measure approximately 120 nm in diameter.

Many people have no symptoms when they are first infected with HIV. Acute HIV infection (Stage 1) progresses over a few weeks to months to become chronic or asymptomatic HIV infection (Stage 2) (no symptoms). This stage can last 10 years or longer.

Video 1: The Viral Tempest LP, Joseph Necvatal, “Le mariage d’Orlando et Artaud”, même ~ an audio art installation, 2024

“rite Of spring (2005) by Joseph Nechvatal is a mystic and mysterious monochrome acrylic painting that raises questions of viewing (appreciation) and that which is beyond the creator’s intentions (creativity).

The diverse play of time and space in the two-dimensional phenomena of this monochrome world (a world without realistic techniques) is created by a tapestry woven by the overlaps and gaps of its superficial rhythmic layers. Thereby, my understanding of this digital painting that Nechvatal calls rite Of spring is that algorithmic time intervenes. Immersion into noise (whether viral algorithmic activity is noise or not) is the template that is created and constructed by a script that forms a new spatiality. Is that new spatiality that of erosion? If so, it is completely different from the erosion of a biological virus as it functions in an environment in which there is no smell, no sound, and nothing can be said to the existence of metadata.

(...)

According to Roman Bartosch and Julia Hoydis in their essay Narrating the Edges of Humanity: Conceptions of Posthumanism in Anglophone Fiction^[8], “Focusing on the symbiotic interdependencies between the human, the animal, and the machine as well as ethically charged ontological distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the general preoccupation of posthumanism is seeking a redefinition of the category of the human. As a philosophical concept, it also interrogates the legacies of Western humanism and captures the tension between perceived risk of losing the traits of the ‘essential’ human, which Francis Fukuyama, for lack of a better term, calls the “Factor X” (2002, 149), and the embrace of new possibilities of (co)existence, as envisioned, for example, in Pramod K. Nayar’s notion of a “species cosmopolitanism” (2014, 150).”^[9]

The monochrome world of rite Of spring was painted by computer-robotics on a two- dimensional canvas. It’s maquette came from the virtual world, the space without perspective of the world of “seeing-in”4 the real world.

The creativity brought about by the narrativity of this robot-assisted acrylic painting–that is free of clear depictions–lies between random construction and the collapse of a certain rhythm that pulses between unintentional space and time. Here there is no category of gender in our ‘thoughts’; rather, gender is ‘intangible’ in relation to the “I” of physical existence. It might be possible to begin to think in this fiction that the “I” does not lie in my thoughts, but exists in ‘my’ DNA. There, traces of memory are also intangible. The secret of the life-force lies not in an external paradigm, but in a series of random events whose possibilities are immeasurable. Needless to say, today’s science of genomic sequencing has proven that this invisibility is a reality. A collection of cells, formed by formless information, is our individual ‘essentiality’.”

^[8] Narrating the Edges of Humanity: Conceptions of Posthumanism in Anglophone Fiction, Roman Bartosch and Julia Hoydis, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.2 (Summer 2019): pp. 65–68, Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg, 2019

^[9] Ibid. p.65, The relevance of this essay by Roman Bartosch and Julia Hoydis to Joseph Nechvatal's work rite Of spring is from the point of view that "humanism transforms itself into something" goes beyond the essentiality and existentiality in post-humanism.

Figure 1: frOnt windOw retinal autOmata, Joseph Nechvatal, robotic-assisted painting, 2012

Figure 2: rite Of spring, Joseph Nechvatal, robotic-assisted painting, 2005

“A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning. Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language—not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.”^[10]

^[10] Introduction, Bertrand Russell, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, Ludwig Wittgenstein, LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD., NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC., 1922, p.8

A work of art is socially relevant if it reflects a social phenomenon. Usually, it is provocative. The question arises: "What is a reflection through a work of art?

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