How can we capture life? How can we represent the volatile boundary that separates the living from the inanimate? What does it mean for the living to be present, thereby inscribing itself into the presence of many other living beings? What kind of interconnection exists between them? How do they perceive each other, how do they interact? What can humans perceive, for example, from a plant? And what can plants perceive from humans? How does their entanglement become a liveliness in which life itself is revealed (Michel Henry)? But can we record life, can we grasp it without immediately rectifying it, turning it into a corpse; and without cutting up the pulsating continuity into lifeless fragments?
The exhibition entitled (a)live seeks not to capture, but to convey and involve into the experience of perception and interpenetration in the language of the mediatized world: through photographs, videos, and live broadcasts. It also raises the question of how the tools of participatory, installation-based video art can be used to distinguish between what is alive and what only appears to be so; between what is truly organic and what only appears to be organized and structured; between mechanistic randomness and connections that create something new in a truly autonomous way.
Despite the inherent objectifying gesture of mediation and representation, the live stream of a plant at the exhibition attempts to show something alive: the life of a plant. The plant, equipped with sensors and installed in the artists’ own home, will do a “livestream” throughout the exhibition: a video of it will be streamed into the FUGA space, along with the music track it has co-created as a live performer. With the help of a webcam (whose data is not recorded!), signals will be transmitted in the other direction during the exhibition, from FUGA to the sensor-equipped plant at home. But real, breathing living things (plants, fungi) will also be included in the exhibition space, in a diorama, among “dead objects” – thus creating a complex system of connections between life and lifelessness.
The exhibition space, furnished with multimedia installations, is full of folds: various media, tools, signs, and signal (processing) systems are layered on top of each other, thus becoming hyperbolic. There is no logical, temporal, or spatial coherence between the scenes organized from momentary impressions, memories, and sensations, only spontaneous parallels, analogies, and associations. Even within a single image, we see proliferation, the excesses of intertwining (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) – nothing can be taken out, yet it is so pulsating and lifelike!
At the current exhibition by blanche the vidiot – Szabina Péter and Kristóf Bodnár – in addition to videos and live streams, we also find objects, found objects and photographs, which the artists place in a different context, animate, and set in motion. In addition to creating visual totality, they also place emphasis on music: the sounds generated by synthesizers are not intended to illustrate the created world, but rather to draw the viewer into a meditative state of presence.
The exhibition entitled (a)live offers philosophical and ecological ideas that are not abstract but can be experienced sensually, seeking above all an answer to the ethically motivated question of what it means to consider plants, and indeed the living world, at all.
Gerda Széplaky