Syndicate: ARTMargins: Kovács on Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák

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

ARTMargins (16 April 1999)
http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/artmargins/eview/kovacs1.shtml


Cryptogram and Demedusator: Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák
by Agnes Veronika Kovács 

The objective of this essay is to introduce the leading Hungarian media
artist, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, through his latest two web projects dealing
with cryptography (Cryptogram) and virtual reality (Demedusator). Zoltán
Szegedy-Maszák is an associate professor at the Intermedia Department at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest where he teaches interactive computer
art. He is also a researcher for the Center for Culture and Communication. 

In Hungary, there are more and more visual artists dealing with the new
media, even though there are not many institutions where they could either
educate themselves or present their media art work. It was the internet
that made it possible for these artists, for the first time, to present
their work without any kind of administrative or institutional control.
Instead of doing fancy multimedia work, Hungarian artists have started to
produce web-pieces which use the internet in a creative way.

Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák graduated as a painter from the Hungarian Academy of
Fine Arts. Perhaps because of this, his observations as a visual artist are
mostly focused on images, the digital pictures and renderings displayed by
analog devices such as monitors, printers, and projectors. At the Academy,
Szegedy-Maszák gradually gave up painting and started to work with media
technology, especially photography, video and the computer. His interest in
media technology manifested itself also in his installations and
performances. The expressionistic way in which Szegedy-Maszák pointed to
the image-destroying capability of video was likely a continuation of his
early painting experiments. In his first computer-related installations he
turned to the formal logic of digital imaging. 
                     
After graduating from the painting department at the Academy,
Szegedy-Maszák continued his studies at the Intermedia Department and
started to deal with computer images. His habit of using cheap computer
games which had to be programmed by using very low level (assembly or
machine code) languages seemed to mandate that his interests would
eventually turn to the visualization of formal algorithms. Through his work
with the computer, Szegedy-Maszák has always been familiar with the idea of
interactivity. Therefore, when the internet and the world wide web
appeared, they presented obvious challenges for him and he started to
create artworks especially for the web. His first completed project was
Cryptogram (www.c3.hu/cryptogram), which has been exhibited many times in
different versions of networked installations. 

Cryptogram is partly the result of Szegedy-Maszák's experiments with
"creative misinterpretation," with which it also deals on a systematic
level. Since digital data structures are "compatible with one another" ­
images can be converted to sound and vice versa, using exact formal logic ­
why not create an encryption system which converts text into virtual
sculptures, and back? 

The first version of Cryptogram was shown at the "Butterfly Effect"
exhibition in Budapest in 1996. The installation invited visitors to type
into three dimensional space, creating a communal Cryptogram as a kind of
encrypted guest book that could be accessed through a simple virtual
reality system. The encryption was made using one common key object: a
draft model of a rearing horse built after Leonardo's sketches for his huge
"Cavallo", which was never realized. The choice was symbolic and practical:
Szegedy-Maszák's aim was to emphasize the immateriality of the cryptograms
in contrast to the uncast, destroyed clay colossus of Leonardo, as well as
fulfill the need for an organic figure to provide a mysterious spectacle
that would be independent of the texts typed by the visitors. 

One of the reasons why Szegedy-Maszák developed a web-version of Cryptogram
was that at the time (January 1996), issues such as cryptography, privacy,
free speech, and censorship were hot topics among the rapidly growing net
community. It was the time when hackers demonstratively cracked the
Netscape browser's security system, and when Philip Zimmermann (author of
PGP, the most popular encrypting system used in email) was under
investigation by the US Government for his alleged violation of export
regulations for cryptographic products. 

The internet version of Cryptogram represented an artistic response to
these discussions and activities. Cryptogram makes it easy to see what is
missing from other cryptographic methods: namely that the evidence of
communication remains hidden as the avatar of the encoded message changes
from text to virtual sculpture. Communicating through cryptograms has not
only the advantage of encryption; apart from cryptography (the art of
cryptic symbolization), it also encourages steganography (the art of hidden
communication). The exchange of messages through virtual sculptures
encrypts the very fact of the exchange, especially since to unsuspecting
outsiders the sculptures appear to be artworks carrying aesthetic values
rather than practical information. 

The Cryptogram-initiated acquire the skill, after some practice, of
understanding the most common encrypted messages in the form of
"sculptures" without decrypting the latter. In this way, the community
possesses its own virtual world, leading to the paradox that in a
progressive, typographic culture, a close connection is established between
the elements of a language and the indicated virtual objects, similar to
the language of pre-typographic communication. 

Before describing Szegedy-Maszák's next important net project, the
Demedusator, I should point out that in the rapidly changing world of
software and hardware, it is impossible to dismiss a piece of webart by
declaring it "finished." Any website that wants to maintain its interest to
surfers has to be changed often in order to provide something "new". At the
same time, the rapid technological development of the internet constantly
forces the net artist to be in a state of flux, testing out new software in
this continuously shifting environment where the emergence of new
technologies and software can lead to surprising results. 

With Cryptogram, Szegedy-Maszák began to use VRML just before it became a
standard application. The knowledge of VRML also led him, in cooperation
with Márton Fernezelyi, to create the Demedusator (mediated media) project
(demedusator.c3.hu). The Demedusator is a shared virtual world that is
essentially developed by its visitors. Any (creative) participant can
"publish" his or her creations, complete with sound, streaming images, and
pictures, by placing them in a 3D world that can be explored by every
surfer on the web. Visitors can reflect upon the content of their creation
by uploading something close to them, or they can create "a village of
their own" by uploading its parts as contents placed in the same 3D area. 

In 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush published an essay entitled "As We May
Think", in which he described in great detail a machine (The Memex) that is
generally regarded as the literal blueprint for the net and the world wide
web. The "infostructure" Bush sketched out ­ including a proposal for what
is now known as hypertext ­ was destined to become reality in what we know
now as the internet. But the vision Bush described is far more
sophisticated than what we refer to today as the "web": Memex, Bush's
virtual computer, is a container that can handle any kind of information
("multimedia data") by providing a complex, customizable "linking system"
with various "trails" that are created by its users. The browsers of the
1990s lack many of the linking features of Memex, such as the open and
customizable "trails" that are virtually impossible to implement in basic
HTML. 

Szegedy-Maszák's Demedusator recirculates the questions posed by Bush's
Memex. Szegedy-Maszák's explorable 3D world is based on a database which
keeps track of all uploaded files, their locations, links, trails and
attributes. The VRML file received by the visitors is generated on the
basis of this well-organized data, offering the possibility of downloading
subsets of the entire world. Objects far from each other in their 3D
locations but connected by links/trails can thus be embedded in a
"subset-world" where the related pieces of information are located next to
each other. 

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

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