A career or a period of a career cannot be bounded by a time limit or reduced to a few decades. Many of the artists have already been featured in the previous volume, which covers the 1970s and 1980s, but most of their work extends into the 1990s and beyond. And the beginnings often go back to even earlier decades. The handbooks link the beginning and end of an era to historical or significant stylistic turns. The art of the nineties was influenced by the change of regime in 1989, with avant-garde artists hoping for a clearer path and greater opportunities.
The situation is similar with the period under discussion. While the seventies and eighties were the era of fax, photocopying and photography, among others, which continues today, the nineties were primarily the period of the emergence of computer art in Hungary, and the twenties saw the strengthening of the artistic use of the computer. Although there were those who had worked with computers before, it was not until the early nineties that the domestic possibilities were strengthened. The period covered in this study is from the 2000s to 2025. It discusses the artists who later became members of the Hungarian Electrographic Society, which was founded in 2001.
This binary symbolism is not merely a formal game or a pragmatic taxonomy, but a model for a medial reading that takes into account the technical conditions, interfaces, codification and intermedial relations of the works’ creation. Furthermore, the 11 categories chosen do not represent a hierarchical order, but rather nodes of an intermedial network where works can be grouped according to their use of the medium, their technical specificities and their aesthetic strategies.
The basic ontological framework of digital technoculture is defined by binary logic. The smallest unit of information, the bit, as the discrete opposition of 0 and 1, is the primary organizing principle of any computer system. In this sense, the binary number system is not merely a technical code, but a structural paradigm that defines the medium-specificity of digital art. It is partly coincidental, but perhaps not entirely, the ‘hand’ of the machine that this paper attempts to organise the computer art approaches of MET’s creators into 11 categories in line with this conceptual framework.