"visual blood"

The introductory essay by Donald Kuspit for the FuturelessFuture web art
exhibition (http://www.flf.org/FLF) has been published on the web and is
now available with source material hyperlinks at:

http://plaza.interport.net/FLF/flf.text.html

Here are some highlights from the essay:

"Unsettling historically settled art, it unsettles us: refreshed by new
visual blood from the computer, the old image acquires a new bite, and
stalks our consciousness like a vampire, giving us a disturbing new idea of
ourselves."

"Displacement and condensation, the standard mechanisms of dream work, come
"naturally" to the computer; it is a machine that truly dreams, with a
built-in unconscious, as it were–the first really all too human machine."

"Certainly it is easy to play God with a computer: to know the past, shape
the present, and determine the future, and to spawn an infinite number of
worlds. And to be able to renew the importance of old worlds of meaning by
rendering them with the computer, as the FuturelessFuture artists do…"

To our knowledge, this is the first time a major international art critic
has been exclusively published on the web.

Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State
University of New york, Stony brook, and Andrew Dixon White Professor at
Large at Cornell University. He is the author of eleven books, including
"The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist" and "The Dialectic of Decadence."