CODE AND ALGORITHM
2x Square Grid Moire – 2019, UV print on paper, 50x50 cm
Exhibition CODE AND ALGORITHM
The exhibition is convened on the basis of personal invitations with the principal objective of placing early generative works as well as new approaches in an international context.
Dedicated to Vera Molnar on the occasion of her 95th birthday
Many dynamic systems in nature and society display nonlinear behavior yet following some rules according to certain known or unknown principles. With small displacements during a fairly long sequence often not much change is observable in the dynamics of the system and/or with its evolutionary behavior. The system could further be loaded without fundamental changes in its characteristics. And then all of a sudden a tipping point/breakthrough is reached when the dynamic behavior of the system changes abruptly and it goes through a mutation. That is how climate change, population dynamics, prison outbreaks and revolutions work, for instance. Examples from the field of contemporary music are the compositions by John Cage and Philip Glass while in art early works by Vera Molnar, François Morellet, Manfred Mohr, Attila Kovács, Frieder Nake, A. Michel Noll, Ferenc Lantos, Dóra Maurer and András Mengyán could be cited in this context, just to mention but a few.
Sequential/serial works often generate aesthetical meaning through certain know, random or hidden rules/algorithms/codes. The rule could be a procedure defined by the artist such as operations on a chosen visual unit, such as a square for instance as is the case with Vera Molnar's works. These operations might include deterministic repetition, shifting, rotation, color or form inversion, symmetrical or asymmetric mirroring, covering, scale transition and/or fractal behavior, respectively.
Or it could be a stochastic manipulation of the visual unit chosen either by probabilistic experiments or by pseudo-random numbers covering a certain range of the process variance, or by random walk models and the combination thereof. The fundamental approach here is basically identical with that of mathematical group theory. First, the choice of a (visual) unit and then operations on that unit such as listed above. Note, however, that this methodology represents a closed or complete system as the results of the operations remain within the same system.
This is clearly an example of art encountering science. The demonstration of the existence of this close relationship is one of the principal missions of OSAS.
These questions were already in the forefront of computer-generated art in the 60s at international level in tandem with the development of early computer graphics. Some of the local Hungarian artists followed the same algorithmic principles, however, manually as there was no access to modern digital technology due the Iron Curtain and the US CoCom restrictions. This has slowly changed with time but of course the breakthrough did not happen before the major political changes that swept through Central Europe at the beginning of the 90s. As a result of rapidly changing technological development a great number of new materials, tools and techniques, such as PCs, video, facsimile, scanners, Xerox machines, Internet and other means are available now for the artists.
Curators: SZEGEDY-MASZÁK Zoltán, SZÖLLOSI-NAGY András, WOLSKY András