Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper

Joseph Nechvatal: Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting the historical record between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture, and Gene Youngblood's 1970 reference work Expanded Cinema. Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Art—Action and Participation, and Art of the Electronic Age are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today—in your terms “virtualized.” Technological and informational change is consistently cited as the splintering element which instigated mainstream modernism mutating into what has been called, for lack of a better term, postmodernism. Can you tell me why you first committed your attention as an art historian to this subject of art and technology when most historical and curatorial minds were focused elsewhere?