SNAPSHOT
MEDIA ART 2005
magyar verzió
Balázs Beöthy /
Zsolt Mesterházy /
Roland Pereszlényi

Péter Forgács
Éva Kozma /
Szabolcs Géza Veres

Róbert Langh
Ádám Lendvai
Jenő Lévay
Erik Mátrai
Nextlab
Antal Örkényi
András Ravasz
János Sugár
Pál Szacsva y
Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák /
Márton Fernezelyi

András Szőnyi
Szilvi Tóth /
Gáspár Benedek

Júlia Vécsei




 
Ádám Lendvai:
High Speed Shutter
4-camera game – Real-time media-sport

Four players take part in the contest. Each player has a camera in her/his hand, which continuously records for the entire duration of the game. The task of the players is to film as many opponents, for as long as possible. One point is awarded for every single frame in which one of the opponents is visible. The winner is the one who has the most points at the end of the game. The best strategy, then, is if we try to continually keep our opponents in the picture field of our camera.
The viewers can follow the contest in the present time on the projectors, from the constantly changing viewpoints of the players. The players do not have a view over the labyrinthine visual system combined in the film – though it is they who generate it – while subjectively, but following the simple, clear-cut rules of the game, they scan the entire three-dimensional space. They appear sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere, within the four simultaneous recordings, then lose the relationships and visual connections, as a kind of living network of locations. The visual design evokes the split-screen visual reports of news television, and the recordings of cameramen covering war-zones and fleeing from enemy fire. The game exchanges the weapons that embody direct aggression for cameras, albeit the camera, beyond the fact that it immediately reports from the front line of battle (without the constant interventions of special sport mediating cameramen), also becomes a weapon itself. The camera as a weapon is not an unprecedented phenomenon, as we can experience in countless cases someone’s repudiation of the camera turned on her/him (we have only to think here of the vehement opposition to photography and image of various cultures, to portraits, to mapping, or simply of children running away from the camera in the case of family videos).
And finally, those who have a more active imagination might imagine the camera game, in the not too distant future – as a media-sport – introduced as an Olympic category.

 
NKA / NKÖM / IHM / C3 / Budapest Kunsthalle / House of Future