Central Fine Arts announces the opening of "The Techno-Digital Sublime"
with works by Joseph Nechvatal, Adam Lowe, Manuel Franquelo and Peter
Coe, on Friday, March 12. 1999 from 6-8pm. The exhibition remains open
through April 24. 1999

Today, with the emergence and continual growth of cyberspace, it seems
that no sense of closure will ever be able to contain the
deterritorialization inherent to virtuality. Consequently, art has begun
articulating a new techno-digital sublime sense of space. By looking at
the complex social and technological changes within the 20th century we
perceive the world now as a kaleidoscopic sublime environment in which
every tradition has some valid residual form as information and
sensation. A world of perpetual transformation has emerged and
established a seemingly unrestricted area of abundant options. Joseph
Nechvatal has written: "The presumption is that the cybernetic
information bomb has already exploded, showering us with bits of image
shrapnel, drastically changing the way in which we perceive and act,
even in our private dream worlds."

The exhibition "The Techno-Digital Sublime" subsequently helps define
this explosive complex situation as one of the most crucial changes of
paradigm in our times. While employing a wide range of digital
technological processes available today, all the artists in "The
Techno-Digital Sublime" are pursuing an inner-directed urgency for an
epistemological break with the conventions of traditional painting even
while remaining in dialogue with that tradition. Thus they introduce a
complex re-reading of painting's basic definition from the point of view
of the philosophical sublime. The technological developments within the
digital field gives them the opportunity to create their artwork in a
more multi-transformative philosophically "sublime" manner (sometimes
with alchemical overtones) and to reach out into the deeper and more
complex substructures of philosophical consciousness. In this context
the concept of the sublime emerges again from the infinite space of that
velvety blackness that is both the background of the CAD screen and the
artist's mind.

Throughout the centuries the definition of the sublime has undergone
various interpretations. It was specified possibly for the first time as
such in an incomplete treatise entitled "On the Sublime," believed to be
written by Cassius Longinus in the mid 3rd century AD. Later, according
to Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, John Ruskin, and then again by
Jean-Francois Lyotard, the sublime feeling (which contrasts with that of
the beautiful) is generally defined as an admixture of terror,
admiration, apprehension and supra-attention. Taking in consideration
the work of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable,
Joseph Mallard Williams Turner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and
Barnett Newman (to name but a few), with the sublime in art we feel and
contemplate an imposing simultaneous attraction/repulsion which can only
be fully accepted with the utilization of cognitive dissidence. Such a
discordant consciousness yields enticingly complex emotions.

The exhibition "The Techno-Digital Sublime" is understood as emerging
from these historical precedents while recognizing the vast incognizant
digital totality within which we now currently live; an immense digital
assemblage-aggregate which in sublime manner is experienced as exceeding
our usual sense of lucidity.