Frank Popper

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Frank Popper is one of the foremost historians of art and technology and Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII. He is the author of the books: 'Origins and Development of Kinetic Art', 'Art, Action, and Participation', 'Art of the Electronic Age' and 'From Technological to Virtual Art'.

Popper is nearly peerless when it comes to documenting the historical record of the relationship between technology and participatory forms of art, especially between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Sharing his focus on art and technology are Jack Burnham ('Beyond Modern Sculpture,' 1968) and Gene Youngblood ('Expanded Cinema,' 1970). Popper, Burnham and Youngblood are considered indispensable in showing how art has become, in Frank Popper's terms, "virtualized."

In his books 'Origins and Development of Kinetic Art' and 'Art, Action and Participation', Popper showed how Kinetic Art played an important part in pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links between science, technology, art and the environment. Popper has been a champion of the humanizing affects of such an interdisciplinary synthesis.

Key to his initial thinking and activities as an aesthetician, cultural theorist, curator, teacher, and art critic was his encounter in the early 1950s with the kinetic artist (and author of the book 'Constructivism'), George Rickey. He subsequently encountered the artists Nicolas Schoffer and Frank Malina, whose works were based on first or second-hand scientific knowledge. Also Op Art in the early 1960s had a powerful affect on him. Indeed Op proved to be a strong predecessor to what he is calling Virtual Art in that Op Art called attention to the spectator's individual, constructive, and changing perceptions - and thus called upon the spectator to transfer the creative act increasingly upon him or herself. Op beckons forth a consideration of the enlargement of the audience's participatory role; both in regard to the perception of meaning and actual physical changes to the work of art. Popper also has had many personal encounters in Paris with the GRAV group, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Yaacov Agam, Jesus-Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely which proved to have had a substantial impact on his view of art and art history.

Following this inclination he took interest in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott and many others working with the early concept of networking. These artists confirmed his interest in spectator participation, which brought him to the late 1980s and the 1990s when virtual reality and virtual art began to establish itself. Popper began to investigate a range of works emerging in this era, including that of Shawn Brixey, Ebon Fisher and Joseph Nechvatal. To explain and illustrate the emergence of a techno-aesthetic Popper stresses the panoramic and multi-generational reach of virtual art. As regards to virtual art, openness is stressed both from the point of view of the artists and their creativity and from that of the follow-up users in their reciprocating thoughts and actions. This commitment to the teeming openness found in virtual art can be traced to the theories of Umberto Eco and other aestheticians. Recently Eco has expressed a consideration of the computer as a spiritual tool.

Popper uses the term, "virtual art," in reference to all the art made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s (or a bit before, in some cases). These include human-machine interfaces such as visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position sensors, tactile and power feed-back systems, etc. All these technologies allowed immersion into the image and interaction with it. The impression of reality felt under these conditions was not only provided by vision and hearing, but also by the other bodily senses. This multiple sensing was so intensely experienced at times, that Popper could speak of it as a Virtual Reality.

"Virtual art", as Popper sees it, is more than just an injection of the usual aesthetic material into a new medium, but a deep investigation into the ontological, psychological and ecological significance of such technologies. The aesthetic-technological relationship produces an unprecedented artform.