Joseph Nechvatal Selected Sound Works 1981-2021.Post-conceptual & multimedia artist

Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal (born in Chicago in 1951) is an American post-conceptual artist currently living in Paris who creates virus-modelled artificial life computer-assisted paintings and digital animations. Themes he has addressed in his art include the apocalyptic, communication excess, the virus, and gender fluidity. For more specific details, see his itemized CV and his extensive 2015 interview at The Brooklyn Rail here.

Nechvatal graduated Hinsdale Central High School in 1969. He then studied fine art and philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (BFA 1973), and did masters work at Cornell University (1974) and Columbia University (1975). In 1975, Nechvatal moved to the downtown Tribeca area of New York City. He began studying at Columbia University with the philosopher Arthur Danto while working for the Dia Art Foundation as archivist to the minimalist composer La Monte Young.

“In the artist/theorist tradition of Robert Smithson, Joseph Nechvatal is a pioneer in the field of digital image making who challenges our perceptions of nature by altering conventional notions of space and time, gender, and self. (...) Nechvatal successfully plunged into the depths where art, technology and theory meet.”

Joe Lewis Art in America

Joseph Nechvatal's contemporary art practice engages in the fragile wedding of image production and image resistance. Through his version of an art-of-noise, he brings a subversive reading to the human body through computational viruses, articulating concerns regarding safety, identity and objectivity. In the introduction to the book Selected Essays 1981-2001 by Peter Halley, Richard Milazzo describes Joseph Nechvatal’s theoretic output as a systematic onslaught of critical theory. (Halley, Peter Selected Essays 1981-2001, Edgewise Press. 2013, pp. 34 – 35)

Since 1986, Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's computer lab in Arbois, France on The Computer Virus Project: an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora.