The Camera and the World
Excerpt:
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 a 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 then 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.