I have been reviewing my archives of historical materials, and came across a video interview I conducted with artist and theoretician Joseph Nechvatal in Manhattan in 2000. It was originally recorded for Everbeta, which was (at the time) an early streaming content network for the arts. The interview takes place during a walk between our studios in Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side. It is raw footage with in-camera editing only, and is primarily a discussion on Viractualism, the topic of Nechvatal’s Ph.D thesis.

Nechvatal is a post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Viractualism is an art theory concept developed by Nechvatal in 1999 from the Ph.D. research Nechvatal conducted in the philosophy of art and new technology concerning immersive virtual reality at Roy Ascott‘s Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, UK (now the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth). There he developed his concept of the viractual, which strives to create an interface between the biological and the virtual. (source: Wikipedia)