À LA RECHERCHE DE VERA MOLNAR
ARTWORKS BY VERA MOLNAR AND HOMAGES BY INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED ARTISTS
In February 2024, I visited the exhibition titled À la recherche de Vera Molnar at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, the title pays tribute to the artistic legacy of Hungarian artist Vera Molnar（1924-2023),who passed away shortly before her 100™ birthday. From 1968, she was among the first to create artworks using a real computer, and she is still widely regarded as one of the most significant pioneers of computer art. Displaying unique and reproduced graphic series and paintings, the exhibition spans from the late 1960s to the present day, presenting the most significant themes and art groups of this unique body of work, tracing the transformations in Molnar’s line and form systems.
In this exhibition, I see the co-development of the boundaries of art, the progress of technology and the personal growth of human beings. The use of computers has enhanced human senses, bringing about a more detailed and more detached visual representation of ideas, which perhaps laid the groundwork for my later video creations. Vera Molnar’s works are based on programmed algorithms, constructed from basic geometrical forms. In the beginning, she experimented with quite simple algorithms. Her series works arise from small variations of the basic elements, adding what the artist calls “1% disorder.” Discovery and randomness played a significant role in her working method. For Molnar, the randomness generated by the computer revealed the horizon of possibilities, but the decision and choice always remained in the hands of the artist. Balancing on the border between order and disorder, her compositions combine the geometric formal language with playfulness and a personal, unique sensitivity. The works of other artists in this exhibition bring me a similar feeling: they are created by the randomness and organisation of computers, yet they are not at all mechanically cold, but rather relaxed and emotional, and at the same time contain endless patience and humility. I see this as some kind of sensual expression that transcends human rationality, with minimalist, restrained mechanical lines that point directly to the inner journey of the self.
Mark WILSON, HommageMolnar3, taken at Ludwig Museum of contemporary art
Vera Molnar, Tear-offs, taken at Ludwig Museum of contemporary art
Contexts
AZÍJ Kamilla, Unititled No.1, taken at Ludwig Museum of contemporary art
RUDOLF STEINER HOUSE
Were you to visit Rudolf Steiner House for the first time, your first thought might be “what a remarkable building!” and your second thought, “who designed it?” For it is, as Nicholaus Pevsner writes in The Buildings of England (London Vol.2, p353), notable for its 'organic curves'; elsewhere it is described as the only example of 'expressionist' archi- tecture in London. Rudolf Steiner House was built between 1926 and 1937 and designed by the architect Montague Wheeler (1874-1937). I visited it because he is known as the cultural home of The Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain and was curious as to how it offers a range of spiritually orientated activities in what kind of built environment. Rudolf Steiner explains The Anthroposophical Society as ‘an association of people whose will it is to nurture the life of the soul, both in the individual and in human society, on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world.’ As I stepped into the building, my understanding of this passage deepened.
The house was built in stages, starting with the theatre and the ground floor rooms at the back, with other rooms added later, and the movement of my tour was based on the order of construction. The terrazzo floor in the foyer was uncovered and restored, this 'paving' is made of blue and white marble chips set in concrete, the design being based on that of the original pillars set either side of the main doors and it led the audience to the theatre. The main staircase with its flowing forms and feeling of movement and metamorphosis, is a fine example of the expressionist architecture style. The infinite circulation of water, the different shapes of doors and windows, and the gradual change of wall colours (which, upon enquiry, corresponds to the different colours of the 7 chakras of the human body from the bottom to the top) as one ascends the height of the building, make the building full of subtle details and spirituality. When my travelling companion asked me how I felt at the end of the visit, I replied, ‘It was as if my body had been purified, and the building seemed to be a slow-moving, breathing giant that preserved the heart, wisdom, and spirituality of all the people who came here before me.’ I was not sure if this feeling of purification originated from the structure of the building itself, or from the interplay with is the light of the minds of those who came before me embedded in it, a nourishing feeling that pervaded the body and mind. This also opened my mind to a new way of thinking about spiritual learning: that it is not only conveyed by words or images, but can be transferred to a space, an architectural environment, or even an invisible atmosphere. This invisible ‘empty’ field may be dense with much more content than filling it with words.
Montague Wheeler, building Interiors, taken at Rudolf Steiner House
ARTIST TALK： JIAYU LIU
ART IN ACRION—PRACTICAL EXPLORATIONS IN MEDIA ART
Photos from the day of the lecture, taken at Royal College of Art
Known for her immersive and evocative light installations, Jiayu Liu (b. 1990, China) is a media artist based in London and Beijing. Jiayu’s work often recreates and augments the natural world and focuses on relationships between human, nature and the lived environment, exploring human behaviour and response. Using live and static streams of data as well as digital technologies her installations enable new communication nodes with audiences. In her lecture Art in Action-Practical Explorations In Media Art, I got different aspects. She modestly attributes many of her achievements to luck: on the one hand, the emergence of new media art in China ten years ago, and on the other hand, the support of her parents. And I think the most important thing is that she has been creating continuously, devoting her greatest enthusiasm and funding to the implementation of new ideas, before the invitation of her collaborators. With constantly updated technology, she utilises different media, materials and digital techniques, applying the concept of sustainability to her choice of materials, and at the same time, like most people, she is under pressure from time to time to solve new challenges, and this spirit of keeping up with the times and breaking through is affects to me a lot.
I experienced her work streaming stillness at the Venice Biennale 2022, which acts as an immersive portal through which one can move between the superimposed real and virtual, physical and digital, material and immaterial worlds. The audience could find a sense of uncertainty, but it seems like existing in reality. The domain swarming with uncertainties yet appearing sensually real is generated by virtual means. It comes from the real world yet doesn't exist in it. Instead, it's a natural prototype existing beyond human experience and reaches transcendence. In
this work, virtuality is no longer aimless but shakes reality for its approximation to reality. Thus it provides possibilities for revealing the invisible reality. Or it can be called knowing the reality yet sticking to its virtuality. I think this is also the subtlety of her work - she never defines her work as ‘finished’, but through spatial collage and displacement, she triggers behavioural responses and emotional resonance in the viewer, so that her creations are constantly being ‘re-created’ by the viewer.
Talking about the creative process: firstly, two-layered deep machine learning and AI technology were used to formulate several sets of virtual, dynamic 3D graphs based on plenty of China's terrain data. Next, 10,000 Chinese ink-and-wash paintings were learned and trained on the surface of the virtual domain through AI technology. This reminds me of artist tracy hill's research into the perception of perceptions of post-industrial wetlands experienced through walking through sketches, prints and digital translations.The way they created their work got me interested in the use of digital technology, and led directly to my experimentation with AI to recreate my prints at the end of Unit 2, also gave me a whole new perspective on the study of emptiness. In my new understanding, the output of machine learning is an image that minimises human will - just a thought. Virtual learning itself is a kind of emptiness of existence, the best embodiment of randomness and the fluidity of dynamic particles (pixels), and the process of re-creation in printmaking is also a process of transforming the ‘I’ into the ‘nothing’.
Jiayu Liu, Streaming Stillness, 2021, Artificial Intelligence, 3D Print, 3D Projection, Real-time Rendering, Dimension variable