tamás waliczky - landscape
Landscape, 1997
3D computer animation displayed as single-channel DVD on plasma screen; stereo audio
3 mins; b&w
Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Courtesy: the artist
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
Tamás Waliczky started working with early PC technology in 1983. Since then, he has created a large body of work that uses computer animation to explore the ways in which space and perception can be re-imagined within a digital landscape. In the remarkable Landscape, Waliczky uses Softimage - a 3D animation software co-developed by Canadian artist Char Davies - to create a vision of a German village in which time stops during a rainstorm. Raindrops glitter suspended in the air, and the only living thing is the roving eye of a virtual camera moving through this frozen moment of time.
In Landscape, Waliczky acknowledges that environments constructed through digital technology are liberated from the constraints of the physical world. For this reason, the physical forces that create a sense of 'reality' - gravity, momentum and the velocity of human motion - must be artificially constructed. And while in contemporary cinema, huge teams of digital animators work together to construct this 'reality', Waliczky evades it and embraces the inherently abstract nature of digital space, using technology to explore new ways of moving through, understanding and inhabiting the spaces around us. In Waliczky's work, as in the time slice experiments of Tim McMillan, time can be stopped and space divided, allowing the viewer to escape linear motion through time and space, and instead enter a new realm of physical presence in the landscape.
Through the creation of virtual worlds 'within' the computer - which the viewer can experience and meditate upon - the artist opens up a dialogue whereby the viewer becomes hyper-aware of their own body sitting in front of the projection screen or computer interface. In Landscape, it is time that captivates us as we watch this work. Waliczky shows us a virtual realm in which we are able to step outside of the flow of time and explore the secret landscapes concealed within every passing moment. What becomes clear as we glide effortlessly through this small village, passing through the beautiful organic structures of the rain, is that hidden beneath the surface of the world are endless possibilities for new experiences of physical space. This, rather than a replication of reality, is what Waliczky seeks to explore.
Waliczky sees in digital technology a simple, transformative elegance that many digital artists overlook in favour of visual excess. Modest human landscapes - a village, a forest, a pasture, a town square - become the site for distinctly non-human experiences. The modesty of this exploration conceals the impact of his work. Our first rainstorm after experiencing Landscape becomes a site of imagined possibility in which our mind's eye transforms the limitations of our body, and, like Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye, creates an altogether new mode of perception made possible through the moving image. Waliczky offers a new sight, new landscapes and new perspectives on the way we inhabit space, the way we move, and the endless ways we can reinvent our presence in the world.
1959 - Born in Budapest, Hungary; lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Budapest, Hungary
Born in 1959, Hungarian artist Tamás Waliczky began working with computers in 1983. Since then, he has worked prolifically in developing new technical and aesthetic approaches to exploring space, perspective and human motion within digital animation. His early works - using Atari computers and early PC software - earned Waliczky many awards, and in 1992 he was invited to be artist-in-residence at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany.
Following his term in a permanent research position with ZKM, he became guest professor at the HBK Saar in Saarbrucken from 1997-2002. During this time, he completed Landscape and a number of other works that screened widely and won prizes from festivals including Ars Electronica, Linz, and Mediawave, Györ. In 1998-99, Waliczky held the position of artist-in-residence at IAMAS in Gifu, Japan, while continuing to exhibit worldwide - including at the Multimediale in Karlsruhe, the Lyon Biennale, the ICC Gallery in Tokyo and on the Burning the Interface: International Artists' CD-ROM, MCA, Sydney. In 2002, Waliczky completed a number of online animated works before undertaking a professorship at IMG, Fachhochschule Mainz. A number of his works are held in the ACMI Exhibition Collection as well as in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Oppenheimer Collection.
Website link
http://www.waliczky.net
This 3D computer animation was originally designed to an opera piece. The main question of the opera was how we perceive time. The animation is about a small German village in a rainy day, and visualises the miraculous moment when all of a sudden time has been stopped. Therefore all the raindrops are frozen in the air, generating an organic, 3-dimensional grid of the space. The only living element in the animation is the virtual camera, which one moves through the village.
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