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| A Mechanism for Reorganizing
the World - Masato Shirai |
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From the time he began working
with computer art until the completion of The Garden (1992), Tamás Waliczky's animation works set out to develop a world of memory and
dreams. The work Pictures (1988), skillfully composed from snapshots
of the artist and his family, delineates a loop that begins with a
single portrait hanging on a wall to traverse through a number of
pictures, as though retracing memories, to finally arrive at the same
picture. At the same time, this work is also expressed as a process
of clicking and zooming within the computer monitor, presenting a
construction in which the element of memory overlaps with the memory
of the data-storing computer itself. In Computer Mobiles (1987), a
collection of a number of small works, "Wheel" depicts the
figure of a person perpetually running atop a treadmill, and "Balance"
presents an endlessly growing stack of men and women trying to maintain
vertical balance as though in a circus performance. Here too, we find
that endless construction in which the images return to the starting
point and, just like the events in a dream, endlessly perpetuate a
cycle similar to that of being absorbed in recollection. Thus the
memory (in both senses of the word) stored in the computer as data
is sealed. In distinction to film and video, the construction of computer
data is characterized by the fact that it has neither beginning nor
end. It is this characteristic which attains such perpetuity as meaning.
After experimenting with the possibilities of the computer's interactivity
in the live audiovisual performance Conversation (1990), Waliczky's
work entered into a transition with The Garden (1992), produced in
Hungary and Germany. In the works which followed, space-related perceptions
became a central theme, and Waliczky began to experiment with the
construction of a new system of perspective for expressing the world.
While his materials are rooted in his own experiences, Waliczky shifted
the emphasis away from fixing memory within those materials towards
the attempt to depict a new world through the methods he had developed.
In the customary technique of perspective, the viewpoint belongs to
the artist/observer, and the viewer shares that viewpoint. By fixing
space within a two-dimensional plane through an objective procedure,
that space itself also attains objectivity. The movement of the viewpoint
within the images is expressed as a variation of the form of the space
which has been transferred onto the two-dimensional plane, but this
movement is not apprehended as a transformation of the space itself,
since the space itself remains static. In The Garden, the space itself
constantly continues to transform. Moreover, what is being transformed
here is not the viewpoint of the artist or the viewer, but rather
that of the child protagonist, and a unique system of perspective
has been devised in order to express this condition. In opposition
to the child, who never moves from the center of the screen, the world
itself is compelled to change form.
Furthermore, Waliczky continued to forge new developments in his system
of perspective in the works following The Garden, so that his works
came to embody both the eternal cycle noted in earlier works, as well
as an infinite spatial expansion achieved by his unique method. For
instance, The Forest (1993) creates the infinite space of a forest
with no vanishing point, and, through a reversal of perspective, The
Way (1994) creates a space which constantly expands towards the horizon
line.
These unfamiliar spaces, generated by a system unrelated to customary
habits, inform us that there exist other ways of looking at the world.
Needless to say, the intricate device for creating such spaces only
became possible through the use of computer processing. Humanity created
the systems of mathematics and physics for the purpose of describing
the world; the resulting product of the computer has made it possible
to go beyond those systems to express a completely different world.
Waliczky is well aware that the computer was originally developed
for military purposes, that it occasionally amplifies the dangers
of war, and also causes stress in people. With these facts in mind,
he published "The Manifesto of Computer Art" in 1990, a
consideration of how the computer should be dealt with.* Pointing
out that "If we approach the computer with our old way of thinking,
grounded on old means and devices, we will be knocking our heads against
brick walls and miss a magnificent opportunity to create a new world,"
this manifesto proclaims the need to approach the computer positively
as "a new means to understand the world."
However, as is particularly apparent in Waliczky's early works, the
drawings themselves are plain to the degree of stoicism, and the picture
quality has been purposely downgraded. Waliczky tells us that in facing
the limitations of his equipment, his ideas actually achieved definition,
enabling him to approach the essence possessed by the objet. Indeed,
he does not use the computer simply to improve picture quality or
increase processing speed. Rather, he takes the computer as a means
for making us conscious of a hidden mechanism of which we were never
aware before. Thus, along with those experiments in perspective enabled
by the computer in his recent works, the computer has become a means
for pursuing and realizing a completely new and unprecedented way
of thinking, and for creating a completely new world.
"Artists' responsibility is the responsibility of those who create
signs; the signs we leave behind will make people of the coming centuries
know we have lived and thought."
*Tam s Waliczky. "The Manifesto of Computer Art," Digitart
catalogue, Budapest, Hungary, 1990. (All quotations are from this
work.)
Translated from the Japanese by Indra Levy
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Jan. 19(Fri)- Feb. 12(Mon),1996 [Finished]
NTT / ICC Gallery
s Waliczky - Anne-Marie Duguet
Artist Talk