Joseph Nechvatal
American, Born 1951 Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago. He earned a BFA at Southern Illinois University and went on to study for a Master of Philosophy at Colombia University, New York. In the mid-1980s after he had been working with drawing and photomechanical blow-ups he began to move into computer-assisted painting and robotics. “For me,” he says, “to make contemporary art it is necessary to utilize contemporary tools and materials in conjunction with contemporary social and spiritual issues. The attraction to the computer - both as form and content for my art - was primarily a result of my working with ideologies of power.” Moving to Europe in the late 1990s he pursued a Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The University of Wales College. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-residence 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. Nechvatal has held solo shows in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Sweden as well as the United States. Currently he teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Ideas from his 2011 book, Immersions Into Noise, were developed into a work for the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.