Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Institut für Musik­wissen­schaft und Medien­wissen­schaft | Medienwissenschaft |  ↳ Medientheorien | Kolloquium | Zsofia Valyi-Nagy: Reprogramming Vera Molnar's Plotter Drawings: Media Archaeology in Art History.

Zsofia Valyi-Nagy: Reprogramming Vera Molnar's Plotter Drawings: Media Archaeology in Art History.

  • Wann 29.06.2022 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo Medientheater, Raum 0.01, Georgenstraße 47, 10117 Berlin Online via Zoom
  • Name des Kontakts
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Abstract:

This presentation – part talk, part demo – shares the project I have been working on this semester as a DAAD visiting doctoral student at the Signallabor, under the guidance of Dr. Dr. Stefan Höltgen and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst. I will discuss the use of media archaeological methods in my doctoral dissertation in art history, which focuses on the 'computer-aided painting' process of Vera Molnar (b.1924), a Hungarian-French pioneer of digital and generative art. My focus this week will be a series of Molnar's plotter 'drawings' titled Lettres de ma mère (Briefe meiner Mutter or My Mother's Letters) (1981-1991), which I have been re-programming with the help of Dr. Dr. Höltgen using retrocomputing machines and strategies. With very little documentation about Molnar's original program(s), the reenactment entails 'reverse engineering' a program from Molnar's drawings – the only extant material traces of this highly dynamic, conversational process.

While Molnar calls them 'simulations' of her mother's handwriting, the Lettres are more like abstract interpretations of the weekly letters her mother mailed her from Budapest to Paris, of the dying art of gothic script 'drawn' at a moment when handwritten letters were slowly becoming obsolete. While this work was programmed in BASIC on French clones of the Apple II and an IBM PC, I will use an even earlier machine in my demo: a working Tektronix 4052, the same machine that Molnar used in the late 1970s at the Centre Pompidou's ARTA computer lab. I thus suggest that the strategies Molnar harnessed to program this work were ones she had been honing for at least a decade. By sharing this work in progress and discussing how these media archaeological methods inform my understanding of collaboration, interactivity, recursively, and temporality in my writing about Molnar's work and Cold War era computer graphics more broadly, I aim to open conversations about how art history might learn from media archaeology, and vice versa.

 

Bitte beachten! Trotz bundesweiter Lockerungen bitten wir darum, während der Präsenzveranstaltungen selbstständig eine Maske zu tragen und die 3G-Regeln einzuhalten.

Wir bitten um eine kurze Rückmeldung, damit wir die ungefähre Anzahl an Teilnehmenden einschätzen können.

Zusätzlich bieten wir auch eine Teilnahme via Zoom an. Bitte wählen Sie sich dafür ab 17:50 Uhr ein. Den Link erhalten Sie auf Nachfrage von Raphael Tostlebe.