Mengyán, András

Artist, designer, professor


“VISUAL SPACE POLYPHONY.”

 1. Introduction.

I know that many of us acquainted with the town Budapest. However I warmly intend to invite you for a short imaginary walk into the town. Lets begin our walk from the headquarter of the Academy of Hungarian Artists where the symposium takes place. We walk down to the Bécsi street than we cross the Margaret bridge enjoying the stream of Danube and the panorama. Continuing our walking we pass the Parliament while we reach the city centre. - During our short walk we experienced innumerable things simultaneously (at the same time) and thereafter. Cars, busses rumble, people passes us, pigeons and sparrows flying, we feel outflow good smell from the bakery shop, make us crazy of the grind of the gears while we nibble a croissant. As we walking on the streets varieties of impulses influence us. Those who lives here in the town and the tourists tell about Budapest that it is one of the most beautiful town of the world in spite of that it is dirty, many houses are warned and lot of homeless people situated on the streets. We can say that all of these notes are general clichés about a town.
To seeing this two questions formulated in me:
How could we formulate general images from something what we have never seen all together? What kind of mechanisms generates this unity and identity? If I answer superficially for the questions than I can say that our brain integrates the experiences and the information sequences and it creates image about the town tailed to our individuality.
- Dreaming a bit further on and we imagine (today is just a fiction, but we have evidences) that the whole town and all of the situations in there are transparent.
Transparent like let say a CT or a PAT/CT instrument generated images. The results what we perceive looks chaotic, and unpredictable, however we can bear on those more or less. We can say that to comprehend select and organise of the matters is the ingenuity of our brains.

2. Polyphonic Visual Space.

Similar waking mentioned above motivated me to attempt to find the answers to three questions:

  1. How is it possible (if it is possible at all) to comprehend at simultaneously the multifaceted nature and qualitative changes and aspects of a perceived environment? -  and
  2. Whether there is any means of visually expressing this simultaneous perception? 

- Whether our three dimensional base is adequate to comprehend al of these?

Let me turn back to our imaginary walk and investigate how we can perceive our environment. It is always doubtful where our perception ends and this is the reason that many concept exist.
I take our perception as a complex process, which is active, kinaesthetic and occur by the internal and external stimulus in our central nerve system.
In my view is that during our walk all of our sensors are active and register the events surround us at the same time. Since the events are continuously changing and we are in motion, we perceive only the stimulus by sequences. However during our walk we perceive large number of sequenced stimulus. It means that we perceive our surrounding holistically and by sequences and our brain integrates and supplements the missing information. For that that we overlook the town we need thousand and million sequences, where our motion is a natural part of it. This supposes vision in motion and multiple-view-points of vision.
Examples and our experiences showing that our biological apparatus are capable to apprehend and understand the changes of the events happen in space and time simultaneously and one after the other.

Preliminary, I would like to say that I investigate the topic according to our human visual perception and for the reason to avoid the misunderstandings I intend to clarify the term mentioned in the title of the article. For this reason let me introduce the terms.
 
The term of  Polyphony in general  is well known and it  means the same for all of us. (It is particularly well know in music not like that in visual profession). Polyphony means to me from visual point of view: interaction of the related elements and events at the same time and/or after another.

The term of Space in my approach means: finite and infinite “stage”, where things happen and where space itself is a performer.

Visual means: internal and external stimulus what are perceived in visual.

The time and the light connected to the previous terms, since they have key rolls to understand the theme.
The time provide answer for the question “when things happen” and the light which is one of the the fundamental source of our visual perception.

 

Given that the greatest variety of things happens simultaneously in time and space and these continually change, the approach I take for taking into account the relation of the parts in time and space - that is thinking in terms of relationships and alternatives - is predestined.

The weighing up of the possibilities of providing an answer led me to a sort of solution, which in short I refer to as:

“Polyphonic Visual Space  (“Simultaneous Spatial-View“) “

For me, “polyphonic visual space” means the harmonisation, both simultaneously and one after the other, of the events taking place in a space independently of each other. In order to express visually this polyphony, I had to search for terms, which would help me in providing an answer.
Since during our walk we experience various things in space and time which are continuously under changes, this predestined and predestine in my works that approach, that I take consideration the relations of the parts in space and time and think according to relations and alternatives.
For the reason to demonstrate the thoughts mention above lets go back to our imaginary walk where I try to make abstract concerning our experiences than we arrive such terms of course without promising completeness such as: Stereo-metria, polyphony, simultaneity, segmentation, multidimensionality, multiple viewpoints, and layering.
These terms and their visual projections are present in all of my work either individually or together. As philosophical thinking is characteristic of me, I use for the most part the language of geometric forms to make my ideas reality. However, this does not exclude the possibility of my using on occasion a thematic (descriptive) language according to the aim and the place.

In brief:
I build my work on thoughts and their appropriated underlying principles. The search for and understanding of thoughts and underlying principles are my primary concern, because this provides the possibility of giving a personal visual answer and of extending and enriching visual presentation. In my reading, this means that underlying principles can be built into any thought and can be expressed in any formal language..

3. Presentation of motion images.

I would like to present some short motion images about my exhibitions. The films will not reflect the atmosphere, the place and time what has happened than and there. It would be another time-space and another time-stream but I do hope that it gives a sensory what I have been talking now and here.

06. 02. 2008. Budapest

mengyan