I would like to
present three works that I'm referring to as a series, because they
were born approximately in the same period, they are supporting each
other and represent a different approach of the same thematic.
"People! Satan is a man among you. He's not immortal,
he lives and reincarnates in mortal. So I'm asking you, who is that
Satan?" - a work exhibited in a museum's window, in Casino de Luxemburg.
A pair of child shoes, from which it's leaking in two directions home-made
bread. The boy is shown to us through a reference both physic and spiritual,
in the idea that bread suggests Jesus' body. Satan, the one who tempts,
lives in each man, and the tempted one, man, is made of bread-the body
of Jesus. Through an act of defying addressed to mankind, he calls for
the satan-man, offering his body, testing the spiritual thirst in the
physical existence. For three months, when it was exhibited in the museum's
window, the bread got mouldy.
For almost a year I left my thumb's nail to grow
(of course, it broke for 3-4 times), moreover, I persuaded a few friends
to wear this "corporeal artefact". In a chronological order (after the
period they worn it, respectively the length of the nail), the brave
ones were Mihai Pop, Orsika Balazs and Koter Vilmos. From this "experiment"
I have in my archive a few photos, and a 3 minutes film, in which two
hands, of a girl and of a boy, play with their long nailed fingers.
My contribution is a "biological design" of an inter-human relationship.
My directions are: prioritizing of the body, sexuality, contemporary
relationships between individual and society, community and spirituality.
I take into account the utopian promises of the new millennium's technologies,
the different practices and fashions in modifying the body, the anchorage
of post-human identity. As an art practice, I manipulate a biological
given state, and with the same practice I illustrate the body, always
unstable and constantly negotiated by the culture.
For a year I was preoccupied with the idea of
a robot, without having a clear concept in my mind. It's only after
this period that I managed to find a use for it, or a purpose of existence.
Seduced by the rhetoric that surrounds the body in technology, I wanted
to emphasize the body, to extend its experience to a new level of interaction,
that is the sound produced by its own movement, its sound shape, detected
with a robotic cloth. I built a robot that measures the body's presence
in the physical space. Through this the body occupies the virtual space
as quantity of information/code that expands its existence. Through
the interaction with the machine, it is measured and transmitted the
interface through its reality's projection under the form of digital
sound, the interface thus becoming an extended cultural experience of
the human body. The use of technology adds a new way of reading and
de-coding the body. What I have to add and which deserves a separate
discussion, is my relationship/friendship with Karacsony Janos, without
whom this robot would have never been born. Coming from a purely technological
field, with the abilities and knowledge that a young student in industrial
automatic has, the "useless" concepts of art don't really affect his
real and practical preoccupations. I believe this collaboration between
me and Janos is unique through its pure nature, based on mutual curiosity,
without precedent in the local context.
Szilard Miklos
http://www.pinkphong.com/ szilard@pinkphong.com