Machine, Mind, Plasticity
Interthinking – An Exhibition of the Kate Vass Galerie at the Budapest Art Factory

Rita Kéri

Action | Reaction is the work of Studio U2P050, and it was inspired by Nicolas Schöffer’s monumental public sculpture in Liege, titled Tour Cybernetique. This piece by Schöffer is the culmination of an extremely rich and diverse oeuvre. The contemporary artist team evokes this work through the industrial build and scale and the use of light in their piece, while they also make a connection with the oeuvre at a more abstract and overarching conceptual level. Schöffer’s creative attitude is characterized by uninhibited, versatile, idealistic intellectual and physical experimentation that is both playful and very considerate at the same time. An essential element of his works is movement, change, impact, and ultimately the generation of non-deterministic, non-repetitive processes with unpredictable outcomes driven by random effects, with the use of physical objects and light. With the progress of his career, tinkering with and thinking about social processes, living environments and processes democratized through cybernetics gradually comes to the fore. The homage piece responds to this dimension of Schöffer’s artistic stance in possession of all the content attached to such concepts over decades. They eliminate a key element of the artist’s repertoire of tools, movement, and by presenting a static piece they also encourage the viewer to halt and contemplate the dilemmas related to the social applications of technology, condensed into a single visually presented dichotomy. Light radiating unobstructed on the front side of the sculpture reassuringly represents the intellectual stimulation and pragmatic potential flowing from playful conceptual and material experimentation. In contrast, the work alludes to the doubts, dilemmas, and warnings raised inevitably and by now evidently even on an everyday level through the dark tone and rigid visual structure made up of blocks of numbers on the opposite side.

We might be tempted to test this single intentionally critical work of the exhibition as an overarching framework and see how the other contemporary works fit into it, but the latter will all also stand their ground without this framework, and create their own spontaneous coherence through multiple common threads. They clearly represent progressive, instantly exhilarating ways of moving forward in the technological paradigm, while they are less outspoken about their optimistic or pessimistic stance, staying in the neutral zone. They typically use a specific work by one of the Hungarian artists as a quote or inspiration, reflecting on and adding to it by adjusting it to the quoting artist’s own focus or praxis, and enmeshing it with contemporary discourse and practices.

Julien Gachadoat had recently had the opportunity to create collaborative work with Vera Molnár, and the work presented in this exhibition might be seen as a direct continuation of this joint work, already executed solo. The kinship is very close, the works share the random generative method combined with the use of the plotter. Gachadoat’s inspiration for this piece came from two earlier works by Vera Molnár, Hypertransformation and Quatre éléments distribués au hasard. The first piece is a large-scale image of concentric squares with playfully dancing uneven lines in black and white. The other work evokes the image of a grid with rambling, mostly diagonal lines that never actually follow along the grid itself, and constitute a labyrinthine image. Gachadoat’s Hypercombination also manipulates the square shape, filling it with lines of random orientation, multiplied in varying sizes and arranged in a grid. This time the viewer also gets to participate in shaping the process by throwing the dice, and the underlying method is made somewhat transparent with a video illustration. The result is an infinitely extendable, delicate web of square elements encapsulating a variety of patterns. As opposed to Vera Molnár’s pieces, the constitutive lines are unanimous and very often horizontal or vertical parallels, and the delight of visual movement arising from the varying thickness and the deliberate obliqueness is replaced by the beauty resulting from the variety hiding in regularity, which becomes intriguing texture when viewed from a distance. If we discover geometry awakened and made organic in Vera Molnár’s works, Hypercombination will remind us, instead, of some abstracted organic, in which individuality is muted, and multiplicity is sounded.

Laura Rautjoki’s photo series is a contemporary take on Brassaï’s photograph of Madame Bijou, which generates interferences between our knowledge and associations about the historic person and more recent discourses about the experience of womanhood. The creative process itself is also a micro-historical exploration, yielding new details and connections to our knowledge of the person and era and its repercussions in contemporary culture, and thereby adding width and richness to the tapestry that incorporates the original work, its creation and context. The images generated with Midjourney aim to grasp the atmosphere of Brassaï’s world and succeed, while also making a very contemporary impression, as they strike a somewhat alienating and yet very human tone, balancing on the boundary between the grotesque and the empathetic, creating a blend between the murky atmosphere of Brassaï’s world and the intensity and dynamism of contemporary night life.

Iskra Velitchkova’s series titled Figures gives a contemporary twist to Victor Vasarely’s geometric whorls. She articulates her personal experience and reflections on our time by setting Vasarely’s static shapes into gyrating motion, arranging the basic shapes used by him into dynamic formations. Only parts of the square are represented directly with luminous reds and blues, with sharp contours or in rastered fields, but the propelling impetus is added by the implied presence of the circle in the gyrating transformation. The experience of speed results from the interplay of the two shapes, from their creative merger.

The Light-Space Modulator, which is one of László Moholy-Nagy’s most widely known works, generates projected images of lights and shadows through deterministic mechanical movement, which nonetheless results in infinite variations depending on the context. Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez takes samples from these projected images, and generates further variations by computer, this is the heart of his interactive installation combining physical medium and algorithm. The work aims to grasp a sense of movement through its analog physical and projected digital mediums, and the inspiration that creates a link with the artist’s own interest is a shape reminiscent of a human profile that he found among the original images. The work is centered around the concept of the volatility and plasticity of identity. The variability of personality and context and the way this affects our perception is represented by a movable physical frame executed with delicate materials.

György Kepes was the artist who coined the concept adopted as the title of the exhibition, referring to the productivity of interactions between man and machine, and between art and science. Kepes’s geometric works, as well as the ones containing human figures, often bear a high-tech character, make a futuristic impression. Kevin Abosch’s work titled Shadow Study is a frame from an AI generated video (projected on the facade of the building during the opening, and also viewable on the artist’s IG profile), which is set against Kepes’s work titled Abstraction. In the image made with contemporary technology, the figures derived from human shadows but only remotely resembling them, have a muted, familiar, soft, almost retro character. In this inverted temporality, the shadow seems to represent the essence that enables translation between past, present and future human experiences and guarantees some kind of continuity by being stripped of particularities. Even if we might wonder whether, in possession of its already acquired knowledge, artificial intelligence still requires human presence to arrive at such machine visions. From here, it is a small step to the philosophical questions about the differences between artificial intelligence and human perception and experience, which were already asked in the twentieth century, and might themselves seem old school today, in light of the very concrete questions raised with AI being part of our everydays. Yet they continue to arise in new forms, and still inspire our curiosity.

Abstracted human figures appear in Mario Klingemann’s works as well, which make direct reference to André Kertész’s photos of nudes distorted by mirrors. Klingemann’s source figures, as well as his mirrors are virtual, machine generated. The procedure is the same as Kertész’s, but as the mirrors (and the nudes) only exist as mathematical formulas, these distortions would very likely be impossible to implement in physical reality. The outcome generated by the machine is still very alike, but its original could never actually be it—at least, not in terms of our existing physical and mental boundaries.

While awe is still a valid and probable reaction to algorithm-generated spectacles and the machine’s visual capabilities, we are also getting used to these today, and the curiosity of the artist and the viewer turns in new directions. While reveling in the intellectual and aesthetic feats, an overarching theme we can discover in the majority of these works is that by using algorithms, they set up situations that zoom in on different aspects of the human experience and human existence, and these become the objects of exploration in the human-machine dialogue. The latest technology will often serve as a mirror in these explorations exactly because it reveals the boundary of the two ways of working and the infinite variety of possible encounters, and also puts the demarcation lines and surfaces into focus. On the shoulders of the pioneers, who sometimes pursued grand ambitions of social scale, these contemporary pieces take an intimately honest stand in the matrix of the personal, the communal, the historic and the viable.

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The exhibition can be visited at the Budapest Art Factory by appointment until 30^th March 2025. Address: 1116 Budapest Építész utca 20.