Lev Manovich

The Camera and the World: New Works by Tamás Waliczky

Tamás Waliczky is among the few artists who have been working with and 
thinking about the computer for many years, long before it became 
fashionable -- and this depth of involvement can be clearly seen in his works. 
In the new pieces -- "Landscape," "Sculptures" and "Focus" -- the strategies 
which were already central to "The Garden" (1992), "The Forest" (1993) and 
"The Way" (1994) are further developed and the new ones are being deployed, 
yet, taken together, these six works look like different experiments 
undertaken within a single research paradigm. That is to say, all of Waliczky 
works are the result of a single aesthetic investigation systematically being 
pursued by the artist. 
        Computer forces us to re-invent every one of the traditional aesthetic 
concepts, forms and techniques. What used to be a well-mapped territory now 
became one big white spot. Image and viewer, narrative and montage, 
illusion and representation, space and time -- everything needs to be re-
defined again. In his works Waliczky systematically maps out an important 
part of the new post-computer aesthetic space. It is the part where new ways to 
structure the world and new ways to see it meet. The interactions between the 
virtual camera and the virtual world -- this is the main subject of Waliczky's 
aesthetic research. 
        Waliczky thus is neither a virtual filmmaker who works only with 
images nor an virtual architect who works only with space. Rather, he can be 
described as a maker of virtual documentaries. In every one of his works, he 
creates a world structured in a unique way; and than he documents it for us. 
In "Landscape," it is the world where the time was frozen. In "Sculptures," it 
is the world consisting from three-dimensional time-sculptures. In "Focus," it 
is the world whose ontology was derived from the basic quality of a digital 
image -- its organization as a number of layers.    
        In his concern with ordering every world according to its principle, 
Waliczky can be also compared to ancient cosmologists. Each of his worlds 
establishes a cosmology of its own, a unique logical system which governs all 
of the world's elements. For instance, if in "The Forest" the world is like a 
mechanical clock or a system of planets, with all the elements continuously 
moving according to a complex set of rules, in "Focus" the world is immobile, 
the spatial relationships between all the elements being fixed once and for all. 
Therefore, although all of Waliczky's works are concerned with the same 
aesthetic problematic, they are also fundamentally different from each other, 
because each world is organized according to its own unique principle. 
        One of the trajectories in computerization of culture involves gradual 
translation of elements and techniques of cinematic perception and language 
into a decontextualized set of tools to be used as an interface to any data. For 
instance, in the last decade the camera model derived from cinema became as 
much of an interface convention as scrollable windows or cut and paste 
function. It became an accepted way for interacting with any data which is 
represented in three dimensions -- which, in a computer culture, means 
literally anything and everything: the results of a physical simulation, an 
architectural site, design of a new molecule, financial data, the structure of a 
computer network and so on. As computer culture is gradually spatializing 
all representations and experiences, they become subjected to the camera's 
particular grammar of data access: zoom, tilt, pan and track. 
        In the process of this translation, cinematic perception is divorced from 
its original material embodiment (camera, film stock), as well as from the 
historical contexts of its formation. If in cinema the camera functioned as a 
material object, co-existing, spatially and temporally, with the world it was 
showing us, it has now become a set of abstract operations. Waliczky's works 
refuse this separation of cinematic vision from the material world. They 
reunite perception and material reality by treating the camera and the world 
as parts of a single system. 
        In Waliczky's earlier films, rather than simply subjecting the virtual 
worlds to different types of perspectival projection, the artist modified the 
spatial structure of the worlds themselves. In "The Garden," a child playing 
in a garden becomes the center of the world; as he moves around, the actual 
geometry of all the objects around him is transformed, with objects getting 
bigger as he gets close to him. To create "The Forest," a number of cylinders 
were placed inside each other, each cylinder mapped with a picture of a tree, 
repeated a number of times. In the film, we see a camera moving through 
this endless static forest in a complex spatial trajectory -- but this is an 
illusion. In reality, the camera does move, but the architecture of the world is 
constantly changing as well, because each cylinder is rotating at its own speed. 
As a result, the world and its perception are fused together.  
        In each of the new works, the camera and the world similarly function as 
parts of a single gestalt, creating an effect which is larger than the sum of the 
individual parts. And even more than before, Walitczky's virtual camera 
operating not only as a tool of perception but also as a tool of epistemology, 
putting its author within a modern artistic tradition which includes such 
filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. In fact, without the 
operations of the camera, the structure of the world would remain hidden for 
us. Thus, Walitczky's cosmologies are distinctly post-cinematic: their 
structure can only be revealed by actions of a virtual camera. In "Landscape," 
without camera's movement we would not be able to discover that when 
time is stopped, the result is not simply an interruption in the familiar 
structure of our world but a creation of a new one, distinctly different. In 
"Sculptures," the camera passes through time-sculptures at different speeds 
and angles, revealing new time and space relationships which otherwise 
would remain invisible. And finally, in "Focus," we ourselves are handed 
over camera's controls (focus and depth of field) to uncover the space whose 
topology corresponds to a network of human relations.  In Walitczky's 
aesthetic universe, the camera and the world can't exist without each other, 
and their interactions always result in new and surprising discoveries.