EIKE

Zsolt Kozma
Műertő, Budapest, April 2000

About the things behind the mirror...

Zsolt Kozma in conversation with EIKE:

... Zs. K.: Do your work and your thinking about the media follow a consistent line of thought? Is it possible to discern how you made the progression from film and video to computer art?

EIKE: Looking back, I can see that there was a process; each phase building upon the previous one. My work process is very slow - it can take one or two years, or more, for it to crystalise out the many tiny elements of my thinking process, and eventually there comes a point when it´s possible to say that the piece is finished. As I´ve already said, I occupy myself with a great many different things. I find, in retrospect, that structures have always been important to me: structures of thought, physical structures, or the structure of the space; one could refer rather romantically to the "things behind the mirror". In my computer art, I place importance on thinking within the medium. Of course, I´m interested in a contemporary way of thinking as well, by which I mean, for example, the notion that in order to achieve the same effect that an art work did one hundred years ago, it´s necessary to work with new structures which reflect contemporary conditions, or through a modern handling of the structures of old media.

After working with many different kinds of artistic forms (literature, music, drawing, etc.), I eventually came to the conclusion that film was my ideal medium, because it contains everything: pictures, word, sound, stories and so on. later, however, I came to miss the concrete presence of something that I would describe as "being", a thing that the viewer can grab on to; the tangible presence of energy; the existence of things; this is how I came to the installation. I had often made use of lighting and video effects, but always as one element of the work, because the balance netween all the objects as well as the relationship to the space of the installation is important.

In 1994, I produced my first computer piece, "Landing Place". With this first work, the possibilities for "endlessness" that the computer pocesses and the notion that it can harbour an art piece that it transforms itself sonstantly, came to fescinate me. I think about virtual space in the same way I think about real space. I´m interested in the properties, the parameters, the structure and how virtual space influences the viewer´s perception. The therm "virtual space" is actually nothing new. It has always exist in arts, in other form, of course. An example would be the "space" in which a fairytale takes place: This is a space that we cannot enter because of the physical nature of our bodies, but which we can create and influence, in terms of what happens there, and into which we can look.

The Virtuality Machine, one of my works which demonstrate this pronciple, consists of a half-mirrored cube which contains a pulsating lamp. It is part of the series that I call "Computer Art without Computer". Video is also a virtual world, but nor a limitless one, or to say it better, one that can´t be adjusted anymore once completed. With the pulsating light in Virtuality Machine and the use of video, I can bring rhythm - time, so to speak - into the installation and show a number of perspectives at the same time.

ENCREmental bursts this framework, in that the work changes constantly an never returns to any given state. This makes it a metaphor for computer art, because it wouldn´t be possible in any other medium.

Anikó Erdösi
Balkon, Budapest, April 2001

Here, Elsewhere

(...) The projected surface is filled with the bigger than lifesize figure of a dancing man (Golden Cage). The dancer is the artist himself, EIKE, who has been living and working in Budapest for ten years. His moving body is permanently touching all sides of the dark frame. The dance is rather slow at the beginning, but the choreography gradually accelerates. The body, depending on its position, stretches vertically or grows wider, sometimes even getting stuck within the frame. Our experience concerning the 3 dimensions of the everyday life does not help, we witness a new dimension, yet unkown to our senses. Is it possible that the virtual space is regulated by different spatial rules? The real spatial presence of the frame is being confronted with the space created only in and by our mind. The importance of the frame is stressed, as the spectacle never exceeds it, and keeps being continuously in touch with it from the inner side. As if the picture did not exist without the frame. Indeed, frames determine the pictures for us, although we rarely notice them, concentrating only on the content. Frame, like a window opening to nature and world, is an ancient topos of art, which has never lost its validity through years of time. Even the new media, television, video and computer have not denied this traditional form. The new, strange dimension, in which EIKE is dancing, opens a window on a yet unknown, maybe only virtually existing world. In a previous work (Dancing Place) EIKE has already dealt with the problem of the frame; in that case the moving frame adapted itself to the position of the dancer. Now the frame is fixed, as if it wanted to regulate the movement of the body, however, the body, pursued by the desire to express itself, looks for alternative spaces. Dance is not only the most natural way of human expression, but the means of experiencing the space at the same time. The wooden frame mounted on the wall is powerless against this unknown dimension, and the artist can continue his released, extatic dance.

Sándor Hornyik
Műertő, Budapest, June 2000

Videospace Budapest

(...) Video as an artistic means of presentation by now looks back on a past of several decades, while our visual world shaped by video has become a determinig factor of our culture in the past ten years. (...) Video installation as a medium and the Out of Shape exhibition lead us to revise our expectations concerning images appearing on the screen. (...)

Hajnal Németh's Twice Good Night and Eike's Tuning are apparently successful re- and deformations, which, characteristically of installations, involve the surrounding space. In Twice Good Night, the image is projected on the convex backside of a parabola dish, while in Tuning, niches replace the screen. In line with the very nature of the genre of videoinstallation, the themes of the works are essentially topical: Németh's video exudes the air of music channels (pop music, techno images, slow camera movement, shocking cuts and shifts of sounds and images); while Eike juggles with merging real and virtual space (a living sculpture-like figure fading in the blue-box background). Gyula Várnai is up-to-date in another way: he focuses on the questions of epistemology. In the exhibition in Győr we can see one of his most popular works, The Shadow of the Moon. A wooden chair's shadow, formed of dominoes, remains invisible for the closed circuit camera. The philosophical duality of the objective and the subjecitve is being questioned here by way of replacing it with something else - in a very attractive way. (...)

László Hemrik
Új Művészet, Budapest, May 2001

(Short) story-telling – or: we are outdoors if the weather is great

(...) EIKE shows a really new possibility of story-telling in his short video loop The Corner in My Mind (2000). The visiter stands in the middle of the room, two monitors are placed in two corners of the room. On each the same enterieur is shown, that is taken by a continously revolving camera, played with a small time delay. A man and a woman "intercourse", maintain in relation to each other". Our glance snap from one camera to the other without volition. It seems like the film surrounds us, and this in a very sensible way.