Media art from Arad/Romania

[abroeck@v2.nl (Andreas Broeckmann)]

abroeck writes:
I was recently given some material from Arad/Romania:


Intermedia 10/96, CD-ROM

The Romanian journal, Intermedia, has recently published its no. 10/96 as
an 'electronic edition' on CD-ROM, edited by the Museum Arad and Kinema
Ikon. (for the Windows95 platform)

(Programming: Caius Grozav; Computer Design: Calin Man; Sound: Ioan Ciorba;
Camera: Florin Hornoiu; Mastering: Mihai Iacobina)

It contains projects by:

George Sabau: Ecran/Screen
Peter Huegel: Historia Rerum
Romulus Bucur: Cintecel
Judit Angel: Art Museum Arad
Mitzi Kapture: Domotique
Calin Man: reVoltaire's...
Liliana Trandabur: Pataphysique
Caius Grozav: Hymera
Kinema Ikon: [various project documentations]

The contact address for the CD-ROM is:

Museum Arad
Piata Enescu 1
Arad 2900
Romania


[abroeck adds: A copy of the CD-ROM was given to me by Calin Dan who
brought it to Amsterdam from Arad in January 97. I had only one brief
opportunity to look at the projects on the volume and got the impression
that it is quite promising. The texture of movies, sounds and designs is
rather grainy and partly has that 'multi-media' feel to it, with a rather
straightforward and functional interface connecting the different projects,
and relative homogeneity in the design of the interfaces for each
individual project. Yet, some of the projects looked very original and had
a good sense of humour. There is a mix of medium-specific projects,
experiments with texts, sounds and videos, and some animation work. As I
say, I cannot comment on the precise content at this moment, but if
anything, the CD-ROM shows that there is a group of people working in Arad
now that is able to produce potentially interesting media art projects. The
support of the Arad Museum seems to instrumental in this development.]


Secondly, I was given a small catalogue of some recent work of the
Arad-based artist Sandor Bartha (*1962). It contains b/w and colour
photographs of the installations:
- Respiratie/Breath, 1994
- Casa Grabner/Grabner House, 1995
- Sarcophagus 1, 1995
- Sarcophagus 2, 1996
- Vice Versa, 1996

and texts by Alexandra Titu and Judit Angel (in Romanian, Hungarian and
English).

Judit Angel writes about Bartha's work:
The creation of paradoxical situations, the setting of perceptual traps,
the activation of closed mechanisms in order to question seemingly immanent
systemic principles, the practice of reversability with a view to the
dissolution of concepts considered to be antagonistic - these all
characterize the reductive-extensive artistic approach of Sandor Bartha.
Self-referentiality and contextuality, the fusion between the reflection on
an artistic act and direct experience of it, all agree with a relativistic
standpoint which deals with the relationship reality-art in terms of
transgressiveness. The perception of art as an event, action, process has
as its basic principle the participatory integration of the spectator. The
space of the works is activated by the presence of the spectator, the
latter being a necessary and at the same time inevitable premise of the
artistic mechanism. In most cases, the meaning of this mechanism remains
hidden at first glance, its revealing being equal either with the
deconspiration of traps set for the visitor, or with a definition of
differences between pretexts and motifs. [...]