“Round-table Discussions”

“Round-table Discussions”

When cameras became easily accessible at the end of the last and beginning of this century, photographers of various kinds used, among others, the rather simple trick of taking pictures of themselves through mirrors placed at rectangles in order to appear severally in one photo, this produced the impression that the same person was seated at the same table a number of times over.
Photographs are seen from certain distance and they fill only a portion of our field of vision. The spectacle seen through the equipment of virtual reality makes use of the whole field of our vision: there we are inside the picture. A great dream of mankind was realized when he could enter the space of the picture. Virtual reality offers boundless possibilities for comprehending pre-fabricated worlds.
In the matterless world of the computer, you can produce images that question your very own existence and that reveal the impossible with the realistic faithfulness of the photo. The viewer faces an absurd spectacle, he may feel unable to defend himself and deprived of his common sense judgement, and he is forced to question the very authenticity of his perception.
With the help of a computer, I myself made up a picture like that, the only difference being that the figure is represented in various positions but bears the mood of end of the nineteenth century. This impossible state of affairs prompted me to make a video installation simulating a round-table discussion. Its theme is virtual reality, and the text is taken from an interview in which Miklós Peternák plied Vilém Flusser with his questions on, among other issues, virtual reality.
Genuine space is mingled with an absurd situation here, since the same figure appears around the same table four times over; the figures converse with each other as though they were actually four people. As though they were not willing to reveal their identities and were wearing the one face as a mask. That one can set free from his body and be in another world through his emotions may bring about a relation to his own body that is wholly surprising for his experiences. Just as the relation to their body changed in the case of people who were capacitated to live their daily lives with the help of technology. These people developed an aesthetics, too, that is characteristic only of them and is rather odd. An aesthetics came into being that could be called functional aesthetics because, for the person wearing an artificial hand, it is not its beauty but its usefulness that counts. This is a totally unusual way of thinking about the human body. One can develop this same sort of thinking concerning his biological constitution in virtual reality, but not only there, as all technical images bear witness.