Syndicate: ARTMargins: Kovács on Róza El-Hassan

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

[Hi, I am sending two texts/reviews by Agnes Veronika Kovács on Róza
El-Hassan and Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák which were published in ARTMargins. The
next mikro.lounge (#17, Saturday, 28 August 1999, WMF Berlin) will be
dealing with "Intermedia Culture in Hungary". Our guests will be: Róza
El-Hassan, Miklos Peternak, Tamas Szentjóby aka Tamás St.Auby/IPUT, János
Sugár, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák. <http://www.mikro.org> -- greetings, Inke]

---------------------------------------------

ARTMargins (12 May 1999)
http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/artmargins/review/kovacs2.shtml

Image Engine
by Agnes Veronika Kovács 

Róza El-Hassan. Image Engine.
Budapest Ludwig Museum Budapest Museum of Contemporary Art 

Róza El-Hassan is one of the great hopes among the younger generation of
Hungarian artists. Since 1990 she has continuously participated in
international exhibitions. In 1991, at the invitation of Kaspar König, she
received a scholarship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 1993, her stone
and wall objects were exhibited at the Venice Aperto Exhibition, and, in
1997, she was one of the official artists of the Hungarian Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale. 

This time, the Ludwig Museum at the Budapest Ludwig Museum Budapest-Museum
of Contemporary Art has opened its "Project Room" with an exhibition  by
Róza El-Hassan. Under this program, the Ludwig Museum invites Hungarian and
international artists to install their works in the "Project Room." The
latter has a relatively separate position in the museum building, which is
why the curators decided to use the space exclusively for site-specific
projects. 

At this exhibition, Róza El-Hassan presents her work Image Engine for the
first time in Hungary. She habitually creates objects and installations but
in the last few years she has also begun to collect images. In this
installation, there are two projectors throwing images on two adjacent
walls. These images were collected from the infinite arsenal of the
internet. Róza El-Hassan found her images--with the help of the
images-search option featured by common net searching programs--by entering
every single word of a specific text into the computer (in this case the
short text "Small Talk" by Luchezar Boyadijev). The images from her CD-Rom
are projected in a random order, so that what we see is one or a couple of
words followed by all kinds of images which have, in all appearance,
nothing whatever to do with each other. 

Before starting to work on the Image Engine, El-Hassan dealt primarily with
a certain inconsistency that is typical of electronic media. For we call
these media audio-visual despite the fact that the only possibility to
retrieve information from them is via text-string designations. In other
words, the sole access we have to the expanding universe of image-archives
is offered by a system based on means that are more reminiscent of the
traditional library. El-Hassan started by examining the existing image
search systems that are offered by commercial search engines. Many of them
have such image search features (e.g., Lycos, AltaVista Photofinder), but
there is also independent search software (Image Wolf, Gif Runner) that was
developed specifically for the purpose of searching the internet for image
files (e.g., jpeg, gif, animated formats, etc.). When El-Hassan fed these
programs with a single word, expression, or sequence of words, she received
a steady flow of downloaded images, in fact thousands of images for one
single word, all of them completely stripped of their context. This gave
her the idea to use this tool as a kind of Platonic "browser of ideas."
After obtaining hundreds of pictures for the words "chair" or "table", any
expectation that one might be able to limit or control the results appeared
to her terribly naïve. 

At about that time, Róza El-Hassan started to correspond via e-mail with
Luchezar Boyadjiev. When he sent her his concept for a group show entitled
Small Talk, to be presented in Skopje (Macedonia), El-Hassan had the idea
of applying the Image Engine to a fragment of his text, assigning pictures
retrieved from the internet to different parts of his narrative. She used
the search engines for finding images for the most characteristic words in
Bojadjiev's text and, at the same time, she created a database where these
images were located in separate files attached to the respective words. A
special program runs Boyadjiev's text, choosing images randomly from the
database and projecting them on the wall. While the system gives the
appearance that what it shows comes directly from the internet, in fact, it
is presented from a CD-Rom. Fragments of Boyadjiev's text can be heard
within the darkened exhibition space, while the image-search programs
accompany the text with projected images from very different contexts, such
as logos, emblems, sketches, paintings, old photographs, documentary
photos, comic-strip figures, short gif-animations, industrial drawings,
bookcovers, even stolen family portraits. 

When one watches this chaotic flood of images, one might well question the
originality of the idea behind El-Hassan's work. After all, we all know the
worldwide web, we know the fact that a hypertext link can point to any kind
of subject matter, be it personal or public, local or global, fragmented or
integrated. El-Hassan nevertheless poses some interesting questions. One of
them is related to the dominance of English on the net. If the short text
that was entered into the search engines had been in a language other than
English, there would have been far fewer results, not to mention the fact
that the images would have been different ones as well. Another question
El-Hassan asks concerns the activity of associating objects or qualities
with each other. This is something the brain is relatively good at, whereas
computers-­despite the existing random programs and hyperlinks?seem a
little inept in this regard. The series of images El-Hassan projects on the
walls is an attempt to imitate the brain's ability to associate random
objects with each other, as well as an ironic criticism of the received
wisdom that the computer is able to store random associations between
disparate things. For even though it is true that both HyperText Markup
Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were created at the
begining of the 90's to fulfill this dream, and even though it is
technically possible to create a connection between different ideas, these
connections (links) nevertheless remain artifical, resembling footnotes or
annotations more closely than "associations." 

The last issue raised by the Image Engine is a philosophical one. Róza's
searching for images on the basis of words recalls the long discussion
between Socrates and Cratyl concerning the need to bring order into the
dense fabric of names and essences. They argue about the correctness of
names and the connection between these names and what they name. Perhaps
Róza El-Hassan is driven by a similar intention--trying to grasp the
original meaning, the essence of the words--by means of a kind of
ready-made laboratory (the worldwide web) which is in a state of continuous
change. Again one feels reminded of Plato's dialogue, his assertion that
those who created the names did so on the assumption that everything is in
a state of continuous flux.

According to the original program, in the first room of the exhibition
space, Róza El-Hassan was to present her hand-made albums, complete with a
collection of her paintings and drawings. Yet during the organization of
the exhibition, Nato began its air strikes against Yugoslavia and El-Hassan 
decided to leave the entire room empty, merely putting up a photocopied
leaflet denouncing the logic of war. 

©ARTMARGINS 1999 
http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/artmargins/

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