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POSTDIGITAL FOOT-NOTES
ARTISTS Adela Muntean Áron Balázs András Blazsek Péter Sárközi
CURATOR Hunor Fogarasi
The physical space identified with geolocation 47°29’42.8”N, 19°04’01.3”E and 137 meters above sea level will be transformed to an art gallery and a virtual transfer station for one day on July 22 to join the 6PM YOUR LOCAL TIME EUROPE event, the first European networked exhibition. 6PM YOUR LOCAL TIME (6PM YLT) is a networked, distributed, one night contemporary art event taking place simultaneously in different locations, coordinated from one central venue and documented online via a web application. After a beta test successfully organized in the United Kingdom in October 2014, the format will show its full potential on July 22nd, when 100+ participants in 23 European countries and 4 different time zones will open their exhibits at the same time, documenting them in real time on the web platform 6pmyourlocaltime.com, the event’s primary venue. Participants and their audiences are invited to take pictures and videos and share them on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #6pmeu. The image feed will be transmitted in real time to www.6pmyourlocaltime.com. (6PM YLT – Presentation) The name ETS AG stands as a fitting gesture to technological platitudes: questioning the grasp all but get little attitude of the digital nomad-being. Can such a statement be true or not? Through this special occasion, with Postdigital foot-notes, we would like to make a brief mention of these transitions, modalities of mediation and layers of transpositions to the only seemingly opposing qualities of the real – virtual, analog – digital.
The exhibition space will provide a meeting place for four artists from different disciplines and their works, and mediates them to the (virtual) space of the 6PM YLT networked exhibition. They have only one thing in common: a particular relation to the digital. Today, art is mostly experienced through its documentation. (‌) The border between first hand and second hand experience, reality and media documentation becomes increasingly blurred. (6PM YLT Conceptual Framework) The quoted statement raises a number of issues, which would contradict accepting such a generalized tendency, but at the same time the nature of a discourse on art is basically already intermediary, based on mediation. It seems that with any kind of medial invention or extension - in other words, upgrade - we are dealing with, again and again we are going to face those layers of reality, which are often nothing more and nothing less than what can be expressed or handed over virtually. Thus, in this sense, the virtual object can also be the most realistic one: what can be knowable, describable or shareable by the subject in particular. In this case the question is merely not how long and to what extent reality’s reserves can remain in their hidden state, but also how the virtual dominated by the digital is going to inscribe back into the artists’ life, becoming an opportunity for them to reflect, and for us an artistic product.
Adela Muntean’s performance entitled XYZ is a single gesture presentation of her reflection made upon the creative process which links her three netart works. Behind the gesture on the one hand stand new kinds of haptic sensation qualities induced by the steadily increasing pixel density of digital imaging technologies, and the gradual demand of the former in virtual spaces that lure the users to their “second� homes. On the other hand stands the examination of the process in which the immaterial and impersonal machinery of the Internet accumulates in layers the human activities and changes to the environment. The mapping of objective reality, for example in the case of Google Earth and Street View, is the result of a patching activity in which (time) layers can be switched on and off, be turned over, and can be compared with each other. All of her three works evolve from these experiences. Through them the artist succeeded in reaching one of the most authentic definitions of the term digital land art.
Áron Balázs is searching for his inner motive through the painter’s gesture. But he might also compromise by finding your or our motives. He’s not interested in the picture or the image itself but something unrepresentable, something impalpable: what is said to be the nothingness behind the mental states resulting from the operating body. Áron Balázs is not a poet, nor a monk. Therefore, what else he can do, but painting pictures? Wanting a tool for indication at least he can use his body. But the events of his movements always show the body of the other. For him the vulva is the same signifier as the phallus. But that’s not the point. He isn’t painting cunts, but the lack of the signifier, which can be compared to him still as something. Thus he is experimenting with the immaterial meat of his inner lack. Again and again. Repeatedly. He is repeating. If he misses it, he will start over again. And he will fail if he finishes it. He shifts medium and technique, but only in the matter does he find intimacy over and over again. The digital is desire-less to him. Therefore he prints it out and frames it. Maybe. Finally he shelters them all in a secret box.
Péter Sárközi’s video installation entitled PLAY in addition to the artist’s personal presence and performance will receive a further meaning. We are going to look behind the video installation to call into interaction in some way its character. Through the parallel play-back of the video installation and the performance we are going to seek together the origins of thought and expression aimed for mediation.
Inviting András Blazsek’s sound installation within the frame of a networked exhibition based mostly on visuality, especially on the medium of the (digital) picture, could be a very unusual operation. After all, according to one of its most well-founded interpretations, sound art is a kind of installation art, which in an immersive way through the acts of listening gets the recipient’s hearing to the ability of seeing. Are hearing and vision replaceable with each other? How to compare the performance of the act of hearing with the computer software’s potential of transposition? In case of an aesthetic experience, to what extent are the notions describing the hearing experiment comparable with the latter? By exhibiting András’s AMIGZAJ-FIVE sound installation along with its detailed documentation, and by the networked performance that will be realized together with the author (documented in real time too), we are preparing to implement a dual challenge: on the one hand we ask about the (originally?) conceptual nature of sound art, and on the other hand the possibility of differentiation between the aesthetics of sound and music. Blazsek perceives this border very well: he attempts to alter most of his installations into music.
SHORT DOCUMENTATION OF THE PRESENTED WORKS
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XYZ
Adela Muntean’s performance entitled XYZ is an interpretation of three previous net-a
these works’ common pattern: creating final images from different overlapping layers. T
art works which reflect on the shifting and fragmented digital online media, and reveals
Through these works the artist succeeded to approach the term of the digital land art.
https://vimeo.com/122778014 https://vimeo.com/104168716 https://vimeo.com/96934135
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PLAY The mass media’s typical consumer has very high stimulus-threshold. I have created a
social video sharing sites. Normally you can start playing the shared video by clicking t
video, without any act to criticize this consumer. The play button in my hand is used on
this button, but in my video this button is completely useless. (P. Sรกrkรถzi)
http://petersarkozi.com
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Áron Balázs is searching for his inner motivation through the painter’s gesture. He’s not
impalpable. He paints the same image over and over again, creating thus a data set o intimacy. Finally he hides them all dematerialized in a secret box.
t interested in the picture or the image itself but something unrepresentable, something
of his inner self. He shifts medium and technique, but only in the matter does he find
http://balazsaron.hu https://vimeo.com/134857543
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AMIGZAJ-FIVE The sound piece was created for the performance at LACE in Los Angeles in 2012 and
to reproduce the imagined sound of Rife’s instruments. For these performances he con
gallery space and forward them back to a digital 16-channel filtering system in order t
analog and analog-digital conversion. Small light bulbs were placed between the two original Rife machine. (A. Blazsek)
Audio https://besorolasalatt.bandcamp.com/track/amigzaj-four https://besorolasalatt.bandcamp.com/track/point-loma-sd
represented at Horizont Gallery, Budapest in 2015. On both occasions the author tried
nstructed an instrument which can project sounds of basic digital sine waves into the
to control the full spectrum of harmonics obtained from this shift between the digital-
o speakers where the sound was enriched to represent the light of the filament in the
http://amigzajfive.blogspot.de http://www.horizontgaleria.hu/hu/kiallitasok/archiv/blazsek-andras-akaratom-mukoedesre-birja-tudatom
A F T E R EXHIBITION FOOTNOTES
As an artist working in the genre of net art, in her performance Adela Muntean put on her “everyday� online-digital identity. The printed form and its pattern on T-shirt is a product of the preparatory-experimenting phase in developing one of the exhibited digital 3D sculptures. However this was not included in the mentioned work, it lives on its own life on a garment.
As a counterpoint to his video installation, Péter Sárközi’s performance challenged on the one hand the reaction time of the audience, until someone had activated the “real” interface, what in this case meant the end of the performance. On the other hand a playful exploitation of the symbol took place with the collective possession of the Play button. It turned out, that this got continually filled up with different meanings as the way of its placement and the persons who interacted with changed.
In the case of Ă ron BalĂĄzs took place a presentation of his personal archive made for this occasion. By dematerializing the series of his intimate gestures and by moving them into a single animated three-dimensional virtual space we obtained an alienated (authorial) view-point. At this juncture though the hand is resting, the gaze is still not allowed to rest.
András Blazsek’s sound art performance took place under specific circumstances. We drew on the author’s sound installation and remote participation to raise a theoretical question concerning sound art. While the AMIGZAJ-FIVE sound installation was set-up and activated in the exhibition site, András took part in the experiment with his performance from Köln. Details can be found under the sound art experiment footnote.
SOUND ART EXPERIMENT
A RIFE MACHINE DOCUMENT VIA RELATED LINKS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife http://www.ncahf.org/articles/o-r/rife.html http://www.rife.org/ http://www.rife.de/ http://www.nenahsylver.com/ http://www.introductiontorife.com http://www.rifevideos.com And the technology rediscovered today by a computational musicologist (!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w0_kazbb_U http://www.novobiotronics.com/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/stop-the-suffering-of-children-withcancer#/story And some other related technologies: http://www.pulsedtechresearch.com/ http://www.rifesoft.com/ http://www.frex.com.au/ http://www.zappertechnology.hu/ http://www.thegb4000.com/ etc.
A RIFE MACHINE FOOTNOTE FOR THE 6PM_YLT_EU_2015 EXPERIMENT
In my reading the early Rife machine is a highly conceptual structure and tool of its kind. The period, in which they began to experiment with, was characterized by the general expansion of the radio. Within that, its emergence can be connected especially to those years which lead from the radio renewing patent of the frequency modulation technique to its practical dissemination. (This process – the transformation of radio waves in order to carry information – should not be confused with the frequency modulation synthesis, a much later innovation made in the field of electroacoustic music and engineering.) It is possible that at the time the sound transmitted by radio-waves could have aroused the impression as if the two qualities – the mechanical and electromagnetic waves – would have intermingled with each other. In turn, such an idea would have affected the imagination, the recognition and misunderstanding of the analogies, then their extension as expectations in a fertilizing way. In the reports concerning Rife the reference to the sound frequencies reinforces this idea. The expectation is always great lord, when the chance of healing or of survival is at stake. In turn behind the conversion of qualities stands alone mathematics, the general description of waves, that serves as the tool for access, and thus of comparison and differentiation, in both spaces and media. In the case of the Rife machine the reference regarding the presence of an audio frequency oscillator is telling neither more nor less than that its
operating frequency range coincides with the range of human hearing. However, none of the oscillator generated signals were transformed into sound in the system, so the former was used to modulate the frequency of the carrier wave generated by the other oscillator, which had its output connected to a radio frequency radiator. The Rife machine (or process) is thus kept alive by a multi-layered mystery: • the application of sympathetic (or resonant sound) frequencies to destroy pathogens (regardless of medium); • the gentle light of the so-called plasma tube and its ability to disarm our dangerous enemies; • the staminal interest of those who haven’t lost their last hopes and cling to any alternative cure; • real or presumed negative effects of the growing electro smog in our daily life; • at the same time applications of electromagnetic radiation which have healing effect (PEMF technology); • a NASA study as a positive reference point to the possible applications of PEMF on Earth and in space. This mystery thus radiates further hope for those who believe in the selective applicability of sensitively modulated radio frequencies, namely, the efficiency of a treatment may be increased – by temporarily blocking the electric “apparatus” of the targeted pathogens – if this is applied not alone but together with an orthodox therapy. In turn the palpable data set of different frequency tables is a pattern related to the holistic, speculative thought typical of the new age, as well as the binaural beats’ toolkit intended to modify brainwaves.
The Rife machine thus possesses all the features that make it especially suitable and exciting for a sound art reinterpretation. This potential was recognized by AndrĂĄs Blazsek for the first time.
SOUND ART EXPERIMENT FOOTNOTE FOR THE 6PM_YLT_EU_2015 EXHIBITION The concept of the 6pm_ylt_eu_2015 networked exhibition created a particular situation for presenting a sound art work. Beyond the medial distinction of the local (physical) and networked (online-virtual) space, the reduction to visual media (especially photo documentation) of the latter, gave us the opportunity to raise a question regarding sound art in two well differentiated contexts/media and in front of two separate audiences at the same time. Since the experiment hasn’t worked out exactly as we planned, we do not provide with any conclusions yet. We plan to repeat the experiment in the frame of an independent sound art event. The attached figure can provide with orientation about what we had in plan, but was only partially implemented. For the next event, this will be completed with the necessary modifications and a detailed description of the experiment.
www.6pmyourlocaltime.com July 22, 2015