>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
>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.
>
>
>Artists included in 'The Techno-Digital Sublime':
>
>Joseph Nechvatal (France/USA) has worked with ubiquitous electronic 
>visual information and computer-robotics since 1986. His recent 
>computer-robotic assisted paintings stem from a computer virus program 
>he developed in 1991 as a Louis Pasteur artist-in-residence in Arbois, 
>France. After returning to New York after an eight year period in 
>France, he presently teaches theories of Virtual Reality at the School 
>of Visual Arts in New York City. Mr. Nechvatal has exhibited his work 
>widely in Europe and the United States, both in private and public 
>venues. He is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum, the Moderna 
>Musset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Mr. 
>Nechvatal 's work was included in Documenta 8.  
>
>Adam Lowe (Great Britain) has been exhibiting mostly in European venues 
>such as the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, IAS in London, the Calcografia 
>Nacional in Madrid, and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. He has 
>curated various exhibitions and has spent a considerable amount of time 
>over the past few years perfecting the pigment transfer process; a high 
>resolution pigment-based print process which is ideally suited as an 
>output method for permanent digital images. He is a director of 
>Permaprint, the only company in Britain specializing in the process. 
His 
>recent works are preoccupied with the spatial and surface qualities 
>inherent in digital processes by simultaneously transforming them into 
>structures of sublime spatiality.
>
>Manuel Franquelo (Spain) has a cult reputation in Spain - a reputation 
>partly based on the fact that he has produced only eleven paintings 
over 
>the past twelve years. They are all still lives worked with an 
obsessive 
>attention to detail applied nonhierachly to every inch of the surface. 
>Mr. Franquelo attempts to reconstitute a pictorial fact that blurs the 
>distinction between image and reality. Over the last few years he has 
>utilized his remarkable skills to program and construct output devices 
>for digital images.  
>
>Peter Coe (USA) has developed a unique visual language which employs 
the 
>use of patterns, diagrams, biomorphic figurations and artificial 
>landscapes. Although the artworks are first laid out and constructed in 
>a computer-aided design program, the final piece is created physically 
>by the artist in a painstaking, obsessive technique devoid of personal 
>or subjective mark. The resulting biomorphic reliefs have a tendency to 
>resemble imaginable utopian deities while underscoring an abstract 
>visual continuum - an infinite, but artificial, sublime universe.
>
>
>
>For further information contact: 
>Central Fine Arts at: [log in to unmask]
>or visit our website: www.centralfinearts.com 
>
>Central Fine Arts, Inc.
>596 Broadway
>Suite 701
>New York, NY 10012
>Tel. 212 966 8836
>Fax. 212 431 6216
>E-mail. [log in to unmask]
>
>Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6 

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