TOBIAS PUTRIH
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TOBIAS PUTRIH
To rethink utopia means to push a medium back into the territory of the intimacy, to make it transparent and to present it as pure personal phantasm. In my case it is the possibility to work on transforming a classical object to the model which could potentially pass to electronic media. Mainly there are two basic lines within the references I work with. The first line is the thinking and investigation of structure, which links A. G. Bell´s kite-like airplanes directly to Buckminster Fuller´s geodesic revolution and to a very influential theoretical biological study from 1920s on the structure of living organisms by Thompson d´Arby. The second line follows the investigations of visual perception and owes a lot to the inventions connected to photography and film. Edison´s Black Maria studio could be linked to Friedrich Kiesler´s experiments on the Vision Machine at Columbia University in the 1930s. Close parallels are the heritage of Bauhaus, which continues with Moholy-Nagy and Bayer to American corporate design. What both lines have in common besides their paired character scientific vs. artistic, rational vs. phantasmagoric, organic vs. geometric is the recognition of autonomy and inner consistency of their structure and perception systems. Finally and most vividly both lines meet in the virtual reality of the computer animation where mathematical structure becomes the way of visual perception, where each surface, everything visible is defined by three points in the space. Studies based on Buckminster Fuller´s “Cloud Nine Project” were a kind of final conclusion of the project. It contains the idea of a perfectly closed social enviroment, an airborne city. In the 60ies it was nothing but one of Fuller´s many ideas, and I had to try to rationalize the whole concept. And it took me quite a while to realize its importance, because in many aspects it is an ultimate utopic concept. Tobias Putrih Excerpts from an interview with Lívia Páldi. |