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Nikola Velkov
Being Digital CIX gallery, July 1 - 14, 1998ON PORTRAIT - THIS TIME IN DIFFERENT WAY
This text sets off from the assumption that imagines the person who can write the following dedication in a book: "To Elaine who has been put up with my being digital for exactly 11111 years". The text, afterwards, asks the following: how would look one - non-digital, non-digitized portrait, rather - portrait of the "digitized one"? Intrigued by the person and the portrait, the text writer is then lead by the analysis of the presented figure in the recent project by Nikola Velkov.
The four variations of the figure of Nicholas Negroponte are realized through: dots and dashes, digits, codes and text. The first three variations for their constituents choose the basic forms of the digital recording: the choice of the most essential form such as the dots and the dashes - used as signs; the digits - the basis of the digital recording in form of 1 and 0 used not because of their numerical value, but rather because of the meaning "there is" -- "there is no"; or the codes - by which is shown the "physical" occurrence of the digital recording; all of this points to the involvement with the starting elements of digitizing. The fourth variation - use of the text as a constituent - is linked with the final elements of digitizing, i.e. it organizes one of the final forms of digitizing (in this case, the textual form). But, in this variation, the text writer recognizes the conclusion of the analysis.
The text that makes up the figure of Negroponte is the whole text of his book. Velkov reads in (the text is not entered by typing) the whole text of the book Being Digital. /Negroponte, Nicholas (1996): Being Digital, London: Coronet Books/ "Being Digital" of Negroponte in this case appears in its duality. On one hand, there is the analytical digitizing that appears as a constituent, while on the other hand is the synthesis digitizing which is manifested as contents. The former speaks with the language of the digital, while the latter speaks of the digital itself. But, in the end, both of them speak of Nicholas Negroponte, both of them show him, and both of them define him. Both of them confirm him in a form in which he appears in the dedication of the book - digitally.
Hence, if Negroponte recognizes himself and as such, declares himself in the world of the analogue, whereby saying that "being digital for exactly 11111 years" and if the form of that declaring is the form of the digital, then the presentation, the figure of Negroponte in the four impressions by Velkov, do speak of the personality of Negroponte. More precisely, speaking with the language of the digital, doesn't Velkov touch the essence of the digitizing or the digitizing as an essence of the personality of Negroponte? Does Negroponte exist in different way then the digital if he is being digital himself, if the constituents of his figure are digital, if his book (as his reflection), i.e. the book that is derived from him, speaks of being digital? Aren't all these digitizings only substantia rationalis individua of Negroponte? If they are, because they speak of the Negroponte personality, than they are also his portraits. Being portraits, they open the discourse between the digitally non-experienced (not inherent, not known to the portrait art) and the analogous experience (the imperative of the portrait art). In other words, the preoccupation and confrontation of Velkov in this project is the altered conception or changing the conception and the definition of the portrait art: all the places and all the ways in which meet the personality and the figure/presentation in the attempt to find themselves in the category of the portrait.
Nebojsa Vilic
