Posted By
Luca
on 2021-11-27
09:03:16
 |  Tamás Waliczky's Manifesto of Computer Art
As usual, I wasted some time to update Plus/4 World with new and old stuff. Today was the right time to preserve the Hungarian magazine Bit-Let, when suddenly I've been caught in the middle shocked by an unexpected revelation.
Bit-Let 41 includes an interesting article about "DIGITART I.", the very first exposition of Tamás Waliczky, held in 1986 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. On his personal homepage, you can read the Manifesto of Computer Art he drew up on the occasion of the "DIGITART II." exposition (1989), and under this aspect the parallelism between his art as described in that article, and the two C16 demos (called actually DEMOS there!) referred to two other authors should give a notable triangulation of concepts which unfortunately I can't catch due the Hungarian language.
What hit me the most is that: he actually foresees the Demoscene, and in particular the Retroscene! And all this takes place the 15th of January in 1989! Everything was envisaged before, and now I know that there's a clear answer to the questions about why we spend a certain slice of our time in optimising C16 code or painting on a C64. I always spreadt that answer...but I can formulate it because I'm into that and now, whereas Tamás Waliczky caught the same answer in a time when...nobody had those question yet!
Reading the Manifesto is up to you, but please allow me to report few significative sentences from that revelatory act of political and artistic stance:
"...The computer was not invented for us, artists.. The computer was made for military purposes, then it served and continues to serve scientific purposes, and when a flicker of hope for artistic use appeared for the first time, it fell prey straight away to advertising and commercial filmmaking. In order to create art with the computer, we have to cast off all clichés of present commercial forms..."
"...Why should we think that better equipment will make better works? Good equipment is by all means justified, but is only secondary to the force and clarity of concept. ..."
"..Imposed limitations, such as picture resolution and colour, can inspire innovation. These limitations can help us to recognise what advantages brevity of expression can have, how few elements can be used to construct the visual, and what simple means are enough to make a picture..."
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