m. city - M. VÁROS

m.city [meta-, multi-, memory-, modular-] – polycentric city

Peter Kozma's light art installation at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Roosevelt Square, between 20th December 2007. and 1st January 2008.

Kozma Péter fényművészeti installációja a Magyar Tudományos Akadémiánál, Budapest, Roosevelt tér, 2007. december 20 és 2008. január 1. között.

The project's microsite: https://lightartinstallationweb.fly.dev/mcity/en

The project's flickr gallery: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mvaros/

m.city [meta-, multi-, memory-, modular-] – polycentric city

With the expansion of a media and information based society in the past decade, the notions of disappearing, disorientation and dislocation have found their way into the vocabulary we use to describe both in art and common urban phenomena, calling gradually for the redefinition of the city itself.

While we have conquered distance many years ago with the help of communication networks and infrastructure (postal services, telephone, logistics and transportations systems) we have given little attention to how the increase of mobility changes the way in which cities are perceived. One gets a different perspective of the city from the window of a car, a train or an airplane - buildings and locations that are too remote to have any kind of connection from a pedestrian's view, now show themselves in yet unknown spacial connections. The popularity of informational devices not only transform our personal spaces (the email written to the neighbor gets routed through a satellite link), but electronic displays of various informational or cultural content are becoming integrated parts of the urban landscape. Meanwhile, our sight is becoming more prosthetic, indirect, assisted by electronic devices. Our perception of urban spaces is acquired through terminals, webcams and video displays. How does a simultaneous, repeated, indirect sensorial perception, the navigation through a complex informational texture, impact our image of the city? Our mental map of the city does not reflect the real proportions of the urban space. Modern urban structures are no longer represented by panoramic view, but by informational topographies.

Peter Kozma's m.city light art installation brings a new perspective on the relationships of the city and art. Transgressing the first social utopias that accompanied the emergence of digital cultures, i.e. digital darwinism, Kozma tries to investigate how the network culture changed our spatial perceptions. His experiment, the light installation projected onto the facade of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, on Roosevelt square [now Széchenyi István tér], by the bank of the Danube, is an attempt to visualize the meta-, multi-, micro- and memory-networks invisibly connecting the city.

The american sociologist and economist Saskia Sassen wrote that to fully understand the impact of digitalization and globalization, we need to suspend the category of 'city'. Rather, we need to construct a more abstract category of centrality and of places of centrality, that, ironically could allow us to recover the city in the end, albeit a recovery is just one instance within a much broader set of issues.

Peter Kozma's m.city light art installation is challenging such an act of suspension, right in the center of the city, transforming one of the best known sites of Budapest. The experiment, founded on both artistic and architectural techniques for shaping spaces, will be a projection onto the facade of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, on Roosevelt square and by the bank of the river Danube. The 12000 square meter image offers visitors a direct experience, a moment to reevaluate their relationship to the urban space they inhabit.

According to Marshall McLuhan, the content of a new medium is the media that preceded it: as drawings and paintings did to photography, still pictures and theater to cinema, narrative and concerts to radio. From a media-archeological point of view, the precedents of Peter Kozma's light paintings would be found in the space- and light-modulators of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Like the light experiments of Moholy-Nagy, the purpose of optical distortion in Peter Kozma's installation is to create a new architectural and spacial experience. Although the installation fits the architectural elements and the lighting builds a precise sensorial envelope around the three dimensional mass of the buildings, it twists the structures from the known points of reference and perspectives using the visual devices of projection, including slowing, montage, blending, and camouflage. The light effects, the intensity of coloring are not meant to serve a naturalistic representation, rather to achieve a structural and optical continuity. Unfolding the landscape of the Danube's bank, revealing a new face of the familiar view, will hopefully not only reflect a new technical environment, but will result in a new spiritual perspective as well.

Mária Nagy