The sweeping change, caused by appearance of computers and Internet communiation, common use of interactive solutions in all spheres of life including art, has been a characteristic phenomenon in media for the past two decades. This process gained enthusiasm and fears similar to those during propagation of video recorders in 1970s, yet now there were solid reasons.
Art changes in Hungary were influenced at the same time by political and technological changes, in some respects not independent on each other. The official ending of the totalitary country did not bring expected result that everything belonging earlier to forbidden and tolerated categories would come to the surface and accordingly play its role in the public discourse. One of the reasons may be that those processes in culture began in the second half of 1980s, before the change in political power. The offensive of technological revolution in pragmatic-utopian combination of trend with the basic voice of the 20th century art, stating that art in each case has to say something new, made changes of art functions unavoidable. This process indicates the emergence of a new type of art work, forms of publications, presentations and new institutions, from which I will present two selected.
Intermedia
This rare situation created the only studies in Hungary offering M.A. diploma in media art, available at Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Intermedia. The possibility of opening a faculty emerged at the time of desintegration of Bolshevik political system in Central and Eastern Europe and as a result of support for radical changes of university’s students of the time.
At the time of creating the faculty we defined the character and goals of intermedia as following: the goal of intermedia is to broaden artistic education to such forms of art works and art techniques that originated in fine arts in the 20th century (photokinetic and electric art, multimedia, new communications techniques, interdisciplinarity). Apart from making aware the changes in art, the goal of the studies became to prepare to active participation in the sphere of culture of informative society and research on and support for cognitive (open to knowledge) artistic behaviors.
The faculty, working since 1990 until now, was originated considering the local character and was synchronized with other similar European undertakings. Faculty of Intermedia provides five-year studies centered on artistic use of new media and perceiving the theory/practice, science, technology and art as the whole. According to today’s interpretation the concept and term intermedia comprises two closely related spheres: distinguishing between fine arts media (techniques, types, styles and trends even) and obligation to research of the unknown, that requires contstan and working reinterpretation of art traditions (analyzing the borders).
Among over a hundred of graduates from the Faculty of Intermedia many are active participants on the art scene in Hungary and abroad. Several of them will be mentioned below. Even if we cannot call it a tendency, the past two decades are characterized micro-changes, also regarding the media. Half of and the end of 1990s were characterized by Internet art and interactivity, at the turn of centuries the interest of then students shifted to video (let me provide a few accidental names: Ferenc Gróf, Szilvia Seres, Ádám Lendvai, Éva Kozma, Júlia Vécsei, Brigitta Zics, Gábor Áfrány– Szabolcs Tóth Zs., Léna Kútvölgyi, Sevic Katarina). In recent years students’ interest seems to be more on photography (Barbara Ipsics, Hajnalka Tulisz, Nóra Surányi, Emőke Bada – I do not provide the full list of name here neither), and maybe the interest in collective interaction is also coming back (K27 Group).[1]
C3 Center for Culture and Communication (C3 Kulturális és Kommunikációs Központ, C3 Centrum Kultury i Komunikacji) http://www.c3.hu/
In January 1996 regular visitors of exhibitions in Budapest for over a month had the opportunity to get acquainted with and use Internet in public space free of charge. There were five devices, which during the exhibition everyone could use to surf on the Internet – this exhibition was titled „Butterfly’s effect” (A pillangó-hatás). On one hand it was very well incorporated in the series that for a few past years defined the key actions of Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) Network (Soros Kortás Művészeti Dokumentációs Központ SCCA) – for example Sub voce from 1991 or Poliphony from 1993. Yet on the other hand it brought a series of important novelties, at least in Hungary. The exhibition itself, apart from the novelty of the era, the ancient objects of the media history were put next to the latest works from Hungary and abroad, and thanks to the local data base significant part of the sources discovered during the preparation phase could be researched on ”vision station” computers. Butterfly’s effect was not a single exhibition, but a series of events with an independent website, including scholarly conferences, series of screenings and theatrical events, and other happenings.
The first three years of C3′s working were defined by its role in popularization of Internet in Hungary and the financial support C3 was receiving at that time from Soros Foundation that enables realization of numerous large artistic and technological projects. Since 1999 C3 functioned as an independent institution of public benefit, non-profit foundation was searching for financial support on its own, so it focused also on artistic-and-cultural and archiving projects. During the time of its work C3 participated in organization or supported realization of almost a hundred works and project in the field of media art, and some of them can be found on the website of C3 collection (C3 Gyűjtemény2). Other projects are presented on websites related to exhibitions realized by C3. The latest from the more important projects, related to archiving and popularization, distribution of international projects C3 participated in, was GAMA, the gate to archives of media art.[1]
Art in the time of information
In half of the 1980s term new technical media hide most of all photography, experimental film and video, sometimes xerocopy, electrography, fax and halography, and the influence of energies from late conceptualism of 1970s, when representatives of postmodern deconstructivist wave also used technological offerings, was felt. Young artists of the 1990s, especially the representatives of new conceptualism in a natural, almost media-neutral way reach for all the techniques efficient as media of artistic expression, often moving their art work towards media art and the presentation into virtual space. In 1985 during projection European Media Art Network, concurrent to and based on the success of video magazine Infermental[1] it seemed impossible that audience from eight European cities would directly meet and consult as a response to such projection. Today artists have the opportunity to make live connections online from remote places, and realize their works – that enable communication through the art work in the real time.
A man using the Internet is confronted with the new visual situation, even when he chooses the screen and the views to read the content, in most cases without previous experience, h/she makes decision previously known only in art. Personal photography, film and video to some extend have prepared the man to this situation, but new features characteristic for interactive multimedia are a novelty for both the viewer and experienced artist in the same way.
The emergence if technical media changes all the spheres of life, requires new types of skills, also from artists. For example interactive and multimedia message and presentation of information require simultaneous changing of information regarding the content and form because the resource from any of the fields has to be converted to properly structurized and comprehensive audiovisual element according to not-linear order and giving the making the change/shape requires basic and functional understanding of the content.
Reorganization of the borders of autonomous and applied arts can be discovered not only in the use of media but also on the surface of colliding interests of the commissioner and creative solutions. Means of expression considered autonomous (condemned to being presented in a gallery or museum) in the field of digital media are often realized as a collaboration of numerous artists representing various fields. Being the integral part of new and valuable art work, technological innovation (often) and installation in media art almost (without exceptions) require a new interface, individual creation of the relationship audience-artist.
Traces and strategies in Hungarian media art
With the exhibition Models of media – new genres, interactive techniques (Média modell – új képfajták, interaktív technikák) I took the opportunity to shortly summarize artistic strategies, recognizable at the turn of centuries: Situationiste – often without knowing the Situationiste Internationale, Sensorial-conceptual – meaning able to use the conclusions from the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s subordinating the idea to sensorial presentation, synthetic-synesthetic or: aiming at synthesis or synesthesis, if in one art work there are used means from different fields of art and means of expression, socio-sensitive (and not new-sensitive) media aware, competent with the same attention to social processes and phenomena in a broader and narrower sense, and to starting and acting of the indirect layers.
In this context (also) reflective and self-reflective, as the new art is international but often anti-globalistic, regional-and-local (at least in aspiration), not provincional. In relation to pseudo-referencial tradition, what means it does not object being related to tradition even when it cannot be precisely identified so it is traditionalistic, materialistic, post-modern, and most of all – intermediary.
Above categories themselves do not have much sense – I wrote at the time – they may be a contribution provoking a theoretical discourse. Today, after ten years, we can see there are issues worth discussing and those, which disappeared because they were void language constructions. The advantage can be that together with issues described earlier they can be a starting point to present some artistic careers, characteristic and keeping the high status.
Firstly, I would like to discuss one of the most complex works by Zoltán Szegedy- Maszák[1], Cryptogram[1] presented to the public in a few versions. For the first time it was presented as an installation Cryptogram7 that converted the text, written on the computer by visitors, to three-dimensional virtual sculpture. The basis of the code was a real sculpture, wire-frame model of the horse sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci. The web version provided access to the functions, enabling conversion sculpture-text, text-sculpture. This web work was in fact a working communications system and the basis of the correspondence-cryptographic program of VRML sculpture is used to code and hide messages. The last one, existing next to cryptography, steganographic character results from the situation when a person surfing on the internet sees virtual works of art does not expect any secretive exchange of information but probably just art.
The interface created during realization of Promenade installation (Promenád) with Márton Fernezely was a technical innovation: in 1999 there were not ultrasonic devices for positioning with precision required by such art work as Promenade’s space. The first version was about the relation between the construction of perspective and viewer’s distinct position. Version 2.0 was complemented with the illusion of the third dimension, the stereoscopic space.
The key element of perspective picture is the point of view: as if when looking with one eye from one point we discover the world. Promenade, using different virtual „rooms” presents the place/location of the person operating interface and the viewer directing the picture with the interface. The viewer moving with the interface in the space suddenly perceives that s/he is a prisoner, the picture follows him/her so s/he cannot look at the picture from different perspective, only her/his own. All visitors in the space see the picture directed by themselves from their own perspective respectively. The work of art defines the point of view and the viewer. Precisely localized and controlled viewer is a modern man with „intelligent” mobile with a photo camera in a particular case records coordinates and technical conditions of taking the picture, which later can be brought back in the same place, screened again in a virtual way.
The work of Gábor Palotai[1] is a typical example how borders of earlier „autonomous” fine arts, for example contemporary graphic design, were reorganized. Gábor Palotai is a graphic designer, fine artist. He was born in Budapest, and since 1980 he has lived in Stockholm. He can be put in this context only because during the past few years he had exhibitions in Hungary so we can talk about reception of his works in the country.
His series titled AM MU NA HI anamorphic diorama on digital prints (AM MU NA HI anamorfikus dioráma digitális nyomatokon) and the book are composed of prints prepared and converted digitally. The title AM MU NA HI is a particular shortening of New York American Museum of Natural History where the originals of the photographs with dioramas were created. In pictures by Gábor Palotai we can observe if multilayered process of interpretation, many-times convertions, perceptional and conceptual ambivalence were presented. Photographs in fact are not dioramas, they do not present animals visible in them, but only the transfer, the medium. Color red brings the struggle of the heroic times of photography with colors in the layer of orthochromatic materials, and later panchromatic and yellowish, blueish, and similar to this tone reddish chemical color from the single sequences of the first black-and-white films. The possibilities of the absurd settings of the diorama’s characters are a narration of an ambushed „optical hunter”, imagined as the main or secondary motif. At one time he wants to use this narration, another he hides it with blurring or artificial geometric deformity, engaging „the second view”, which is fishing the photograph, into the discourse. Anamorphosis is adequate to presentation of original scenery. The accidentality of location, presentation, or, let me, their eccentrism illustrates well the central role of the many times shifted observer’s discrepancies and shared elements in behavior of the person waiting for an animal, watching diorama, taking pictures and receiving the exhibited picture of an understanding hunter, visitor, photographer and receiver. The picture itself has its history, not only that what is pictured (it is well characterized the automatic menu „history” changing the picture of each computer program). Instead of thinking about pictures of nature we have to think over about the nature of pictures. The book preceding this project and last book by Gábor Palotai, Maximizing the Audience and Odysseus. A Graphic Design Novel. (Stockholm, 2007) were also presented in Hungary.
At the beginning of the 21st century photography changed in a substantial way. To put it in a short and simpler way, we can say: when using the difficult apparatus the photographed should have been thought over, but with digital devices we can take any number of pictures without thinking. The responsibility for taking pictures is lower, the number of photographs is bigger. Maybe digital photographs (Lichtbild, Photo) should not be called photography since they are so remote from the traditional techniques that leave traces such as drawing or graphiké. Digital images are stored in bites, developed with a button, and with a button massive data of image-processing in almost unlimited amount and with „the speed of light” they gather in our pockets, memory cards (built-in in inevitably and unavoidably bought telephones) of digital cameras and they become public thanks to constant fluctuation of data transmission and less transparent free spaces of memory World Wide Web. It is no longer taking pictures but rather taking notes of such information we neither want to record nor to watch, we delay the direct observation hiding the view in the device´s memory.
There art artistic strategies that are remote from those previously described and they use photography in a new way. For example, Attila Csörgő[1] uses traditional photographic materials, emulsion, photographic paper, photographic plates and designs and builds by himself a camera, assuming the way of light and the form of leaving the trace. He creates pictures we would never see: he does not immortalize anything visible but makes something visible by creating a unified spatial picture of the drawing of a light in time.
The camera used while working on Space -Möbius (Möbius-tér) is a third device constructed by Atilla Csörgő, the last device, contrary to the previous two he built, is a crack camera, in which light reaches the photosensitive material through a very narrow hole. As a result, while taking a picture both camera and the „film” are moving. Camera Half-space (Fél-tér) presents the image on a transparent hemisphere covered with emulsion, the basis of which is a glimmering full circular horizon; and in Space-orange (Narancs-tér ) the photosensitive material is a photographic paper put in a quasi-round shape and it is used as a „negative” of the positive created with it (through contact).
Space-Möbius picture we observe on a transparent film that resembles traditional panoramic picture. The basic difference is the Möbius tape. It was obtained from the twisted half-turn paper strap, with its endings glued on which we can draw with a pencil, without taking it off of the paper, a line touching with its two endings. This shape changing into space is in fact a one-side surface with one border. According to terminology, as found in geometry-typhology textbooks, it is a real projective surface with one hole.
Photography written on transparent Möbius surface is an upturned image of space, the look-around. At the beginning and the end of the tape the same motif is recorded – in one version standing on its head – and after turning it 180 degrees it can be placed one on another. The Möbius photographic space, a result of scanning the light of crack camera, is not a snapshot image but it is created for a defined time, and the obtained glued pictured on two ends can be viewed as a tiny art with as many projections as many view point we ascribe to it. A paradoxal situation regarding our perception is created when a work of art is at the same time two- and three-dimensional, depending if we interpret it from viewpoint of the portable surface, the recorded image on it or the form of exposition. Acknowledging this ambivalence can be helpful – but it is not necessary – to understand this particular spatial situation pictured in a photograph.
Creative work of Hajnal Német[1] for the past fifteen years shifted from photographs and video towards installations and use of sound in art context. One of the critics described one of last Németh´s works as: „Broadened pop”. Emergence and success of „Eastern pop” is a phenomenon defining art in countries from the Iron Curtain, Czech Republic, Slovenia, or to be more concrete: Polish group Łódź Kaliska and Russian Blue Noses. They usually were funny and reflective, critical and friendly to the public, intelligent and revolutionary. Works of Hajnal Németh are not like that: although Fall –Passive Interview (Összeomlás – Passzív interjú) instantly brings the series Car crash by Andy Warhol. Yet it is an emblematic point, or a starting point. Hajnal Németh is serious and intellectual but she packs it in elements of popular culture. Her creative work can be related to existential literature (for example Camus), but at a moment of hypothetical representation of such analysis, it is suspended because of increasing because of the context pop-noisy warning of color, form, sound, gesture. This individual-existential sensitivity, that can change its personality and deep existence into a pattern, decides about individualism and aesthetics of Németh´s works.
Picture after picture
„Ontologically, traditional images mean phenomena, while technical images mean concepts” – Vilém Flusser
The moment the possibility of creating digital images became accessible for us, for anyone interested and using these tools as an author or audience, it is clear that terminology related to making pictures and especially with photographic and cinematographic pictures, should be redefined. For 15 years we have known there are applications to rethink and redefine, and even works offering sensual experience to understand better phenomena, so to refresh the storage of ratio category, theory and fantasy, and fiction that became reality, can be helpful.
Moving pictures of Ádám Lendvai[1] based on time, and in particular Trace of time (Időnyomat) is a perfect example of the above mentioned change of situation. A work thanks to distinguished line of pixels enables the artist to reprint, almost in space, the view of recorded moving image in which, as artist claims, „film aimed at time takes place in the spatial direction”.
Digital moving image, as opposed to traditional movie, is composed of „frames” only if I want it to: watching and taking out a moving picture „as a frame” from a stored file is only a matter of decision. The basis recording, storage, presentations do not matter. Those well (?) known basic elements and categories according tot which film is composed of „frames”, „24 per second is a basis” disappear, to be more precise lose sense in case of a moving image replacing video. Instead we can talk about rendering, the most economic way of storing data compression methods and pixels, bites, codes and series of signs as basic elements. Stretched space-time continuum, making the visible, the presentation depends on author and instrumentation of the chosen tools.
The whole of a film is picture – I wrote some time ago, and this (aimed to be provocative) statement, looking back, seems to be an utopian prophecy: let´s look at the diagram explaining Trace of time in its own coordinate system or notice that a film stored on our computer, even if it is not „one picture”, it is one file with a particular icon.
Miklós Peternák
1 http://www.k27.hu/
2 GAMA http://www.gama-gateway.eu/
3 http://www.infermental.de/ , http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/infermental/
4 Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák. Paksi Képtár, 2009. Lub: http://www.c3.hu/~szmz/
5 http://www.c3.hu/cryptogram/
6 Gábor Palotai http://www.gaborpalotai.com/
7 Attila Csörgő: Archimedean Point. Gurgur Editions / Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2010. Lub: http://www.c3.hu/~acsorgo/
8 Hajnal Németh: 2 Songs 1 End. MODEM, Debrecen, 2010. Lub: http://www.hajnalnemeth.com/
9 http://pillanatgepek.c3.hu/kiallitas/muveszek/lendvai-adam/
Prof. Miklós Petenák (b. 1956)
Studied history and history of art, PhD 1994: New Media – Art and Science. He was a member of the Béla-Balázs-Studio, Budapest (1981-87), the Indigo-Group. Head of the Intermedia Dept. at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since its foundation (1990), director of C3: Center for Culture and Communication, http://www.c3.hu since 1997. He has produced several films and videos during the 1980′s and published numerous articles and book on contemporary media art and history. Organized several exhibitions together with C3, among others: Perspective. Kunsthalle Budapest, http://www.c3.hu/perspektiva , Vision – Image and perception. Kunsthalle Budapest, http://vision.c3.hu/en/home.html , Active Image, NCCA, Moscow http://activeimage.c3.hu/index_en.html List of publications: http://www.c3.hu/~pm/ .
