Maya
Video installation, 2002

Is there anybody who does not remember watching a film as a child, gazing in wonder at the tires of a car, or cart, spin in the opposite direction than the car was moving to? This phenomenon of visual perception has been my point of departure in Maya. What you see is a paradoxical process: the drapery that fills the picture does not let you see what makes it flutter. Only now and then, as it flutters aside, the secret behind the waving drapery is revealed. What you can see there, however, is different than reality: it is motionless. The fan’s number of revolutions per minute and the video’s frame frequency are synchronized so that the fan’s impeller, which in reality spins fast and makes the curtain flutter, appears irresolutely motionless on the screen. Consequently, Maya, albeit utilizing live video frames, gives rise to doubt about the truthfulness of vision and representation. You realize that even the world you manage to see behind the curtain is not real: it is generated by an endless tunnel of veils within our conscious visual perception. It is neither the real world, nor the electronic motion picture, nor the viewer’s relationship to the former, but the “situation as a semiotic psychodrama” that encompasses all these three constituents in a single dynamic system by means of the external world revealing itself from a different point of view – the Archimedean point of the segment of reality outside, behind the gallery’s window.

Szabolcs KissPál