program 2001: science + fiction Media art exhibition Hidden Parameters Films by Miklós Erdély update 2.0 Contemporary German media art exhibition Science and Fiction in Media Art, International symposium Exhibition in the Barcsay Hall of the Hungarian Academy of
Fine Arts
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Candide
digital video, 4 min.

[...] Oh, che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni! [...]

'I will draw the genealogy of my favorite sexually transmitted disease on the board. The branches of the graph transpire over centuries through a series of accidental or fateful clashes of the genitals. The main root of the genito-fractal, along the origins of the libido-vector, is the silhouette of the "ancestral fornicator" melting into the misty past; but with a clear conscience we can dismiss it, after all, he/she got it from somewhere too. Free will is taken to shreds, and a new universe is born from stalwart origins at every moment. Chaos takes shape and becomes just a pictogram in the Driving School Manual: this U-turn isn't taking you where you want to go either.'

Candide, as a work of literature, is a perfect pre-modern sketch of the media(ted) reality of the century/millennium. The text is fiction and a document(ary of the age); it is a novel and a pamphlet; it is the perpetual and diffused combination of a vision and journalism. The structure of self-deceit and hypocrisy is illustrated with finely chiseled, yet vulgar technique. The stereotypical opposites anticipate the collapse of the dual models. It is, after all, a required high school reading.

I did not wish to rework Voltaire's masterpiece in an illustration. Candide appears in the title as a point of reference, for lack of better. It is an adaptation, or worse, a remix, CUT & PASTE. The stylization of a shadow theater is also an allusion to the 19th century establishment of the Voltaire tradition: the dadaist seances of the group Incoherents (Les Incoherants), which were the main attraction of the Parisian Chat Noir. With the help of the crystal ball of our time, a.k.a. the monitor, I recall the spirit of these unjustly forgotten predecessors of the avant-garde through the chronologically arranged montages of the electronic photograms and silhouettes. Caran d'Ache, return to us!



TELEHOR
www.telehor.c3.hu


This media history collection is a look into the future; in other words, it looks at Hungarian documents of the development of television. By reading the selection of technical descriptions and summaries, we become familiar with an age when fans of the ether hunted for moving pictures with home-made machines. These documents, like Dénes Mihály's work entitled: The Electric Viewer and the Telehor (Das elekrtische Fernsehen und das Telehor, 1923), though they don't fit exactly into the curriculum of politechnic classes, can encourage everyone to follow the technical descriptions and drawings, take hold of a soldering iron, construct a TV studio and get to know things first-hand.