Transient Passages: The Work of Peter Horvath

2008, Celina Jeffery, Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and New Screen, Eds. Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, Stefan Muller Arison, Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/7, Zurich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada: Springer, pp. 143-152.

Abstract

Peter Horvath produces non-interactive, cinematic Internet art works which explore conditions of agency, mobility, and continuous flow, traversing and arguably collapsing notions of the micro and macro, near and far. The idea that this sense of movement is random is deemed important here and coalesces I argue, with the Situationist International (SI) concept of the dérive, ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences’ and an idea closely associated with pyschogeographies.1 Implied within this process is a ‘drift’ which mediates social, creative and conceptual boundaries between the specific locality of the user, the presence of urban markers within the works and the mapless topogra-phy of the medium itself.