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‘Sculptures’ Tamas Waliczky

A 20-year retrospective of Hungarian media-artistTamas Waliczky’s work opened this evening (Saturday) at Millenaris Park. It’s his first major exhibition in his home town, having left Budapest many years ago for the advantages of living and working in London, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin. Tamas is currently a professor in media arts at HKB Saar, on the Germany-France border.

I was most fascinated by ‘Sculptures’ where he explores the idea of time from what he suggests may be God’s perspective - that being of an entity having four dimensions, as opposed to a mortal perception of time being one dimensional. He communicates this four-dimensional perception of time by extending images of the human form.

I also liked ‘Pseudo perspective study’ where he makes the apparently empty space between the images of three people seated round a table as important as the physical forms - suggesting that there is something in that space that makes it not as empty as it appears to be at first glance.

Indeed, exploring perception is his focus, and when speaking with him tonight he said it was what attracted him to using computer animation as an art form - the fact that he can explore and expand on perception.

Millenaris curator Gyula Július has captured that essential element of Tamas Waliczky’s art in the works he has selected for this exhibition, while also showing the viewer evidence of the artist’s ability to think well outside the box and in the space between the objects with his computer mobiles made in 1986, 87 and 88 when media arts were largely viewed as photography, video and such and the people using computers were definitely on the cutting edge.

It’s not surprising he has received numerous prizes and is exhibited in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I, for one, could spend a long time with his work and ideas. When viewing his computer mobileWheel from 1988, I can’t help but think about my art video made that same year with grants from Canada Council Explorations and SAW Video in Ottawa, Canada.

To visualise my swimming poems, I videotaped a swimmer swimming butterfly and made a loop - making it look like he was swimming forever, while in that same year Tamas created a computer animated figure of a man walking in a wheel that never stops turning. We were both into the idea of endlessness it seems.

I also bought my first computer that year. Encouraged by the artistic director at SAW Video to go the artistic route, I bought an Atari - and ended up mostly writing on it - which is what I mostly use computers for now - whereas Tamas uses them to make pictures - while also exploring the possibilities of making a visual rendition of the dimension not immediately visible.

If you want to challenge everyday ideas about reality, go look at his website and read some of his theory.