#technicalmuseum

Missa Echologica (2021) Anna Zilahi & Laura Szári & Varsányi Szirének choir

Video 14:36 min

Booklet A4 52 pages Varsányi Szirének choir: Blanka Bolonyai, Dóra Ferenczy, Bettina Horváth, Dóra Király, Rita Szántó, Laura Szári, Diána Takács, Eszter Tóth, Virág Török, Anna Zilahi. Video: Gergely Ofner Sound: Ferenc Juhász

The echo of Tihany is a sound phenomenon that also has a notable place in Hungarian cultural history. Tracing back centuries, legends of the Echo tell the story of a young girl rejecting the son of the king who fell in love with her and her voice. As revenge, he drowned her and turned her into an echo, cursed to only repeat other people’s voices.

From a critical feminist perspective, this legend is not a tale about a selfish girl who deserves to be punished, but a story of patriarchal retribution, a punishment for a woman saying no.

The echo has faded in recent decades, but it has not entirely disappeared. The change can be linked to the destruction of the ecological environment due to infrastructure and tourism, altering the the sound-environment. 

Ecological destruction and patriarchal oppression are rooted in the same logic of power. Missa Echologica is an ecofeminist appropriation of this legend, a hymn for the liberation of Echo and the suppressed ecological forces of the small fishing village of Tihany. The choir piece is based on catholic liturgical hymns called antiphons. 

The Moons of Pluto (2021) András Cséfalvay & Lukáš Likavčan

Video 7:27 min

​​A collaborative work between visual artist András Cséfalvay and philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, The Moons of Pluto is an audiovisual commentary on the cosmological role of science. In the spirit of writer Sylvia Wynter, it recuperates the notion of the human as a storyteller and myth-maker as it surveys narratives about ancestrality and cosmic origins in the Western scientific-tradition, usually obscured by the modernist insistence on secular rationality. Elements of astronomy, physics, metaphysics and Earth-system sciences are enacted as planetological figures – the five moons of Pluto (Charon, Kerberos, Nyx, Styx, and Hydra) – whose stories weave together a web of associations that reflect on the cosmic background of the Western culture, and that of science as a discipline.

The Flies Hum thy Name (2021) Cătălina Bucos & Ada Kopaz

10:15 min

Trying to reflect on the relationship between body, gender, environment and public space, we began the deconstruction of our own bodies and their limitations, which we then transformed into a poetic video work. The film merges images of Super8 and digital footage with self-written poetry and self-performed choreography. The performers are in an empty, dry swimming pool, and simultaneously in an imaginary space overlapped with projections of water. We witness a sequence of tragic allegories: impossible desires, cyborg bodies, a flooded and polluted environment. The two seek for the public in the private, they are longing for the origins: the watery feel of the womb, for being one with themselves and with nature. Unity is found within the process.

Cătălina Bucos

Coming from the East to the West, I currently study media arts and film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. I was born and grew up in the Republic of Moldova, in the midst of its ever transition from Socialism to Capitalism — an environment that has naturally radicalised me. Starting with producing DIY chic house decorations, performing children ballet or NGO social spots, to creating politically engaged fine art prints, text works, sound installations, performances, protesting flags, bedroom produced experimental videos or fictional films my body of work is a critical-political, chaotic-systematic search for narratives and formats that allow themselves to be angry, joyful or touching.

Ada Kopaz 

Mood Keep (2018) Alice dos Reis

Video 13:51 min Directed and Edited by: Alice dos Reis With: Alice dos Reis, Bin Koh, Danae Io Text and Voice: Alice dos Reis Sound: Emile Frankel Camera: Alice dos Reis, Wyatt Niehaus

Mood Keep focuses on the critically endangered Mexican axolotl, a water creature with regenerative abilities that refuses to metamorphose into maturity. In the film, set in the near future, the world population of captive axolotl has had enough of the aggressive electric lights of their aquariums. Communicating via wireless waves and watching anime telepathically, they decide to develop eyelids to shut their eyes, reclaim the agency of their bodies and encourage empathic communication. 

In charting the connections between the axolotl’s post-colonial history, unique - almost unearthly - biology, and recent online popularity as one of the world’s cutest creatures, the work seeks to trace the prevalence of cute imagery in contemporary semiotics.

The Tent (2021) T(n)C 

Video: 18’53 

Sound: Rojin Sharafi 3D art and animation: Tímea Strott Additional camera: Péter Várnai.

The last drops dried up. The promise of endless growth did not come true. Society evaporated into an endless thirst for self-optimization, youth and immortality. Humans sit in temporary dwellings with chaotic dreams and never-ending anticipation, but it is a dying planet. Two protagonists set out on a quest to break out of this drought. They are like heroes, born in a bleached-out vision of paradise. They seek an invisible place that everyone knows about, yet few have experienced. A physical site that spreads in time and space, one can observe only a piece of it, never the whole. Navigating this unknown, they go through a liberating act of transformation: they pull out everything they know, soak in, and relearn! As humanity’s concerns seem too complex to relate just to the individual, ‘The Tent’ moves through the unconscious and questions common cultural images and symbols. 

Dead Time (2019) Diane Edwards

Video 11:35 min

Sound design: Donna Haringwey

Dead Time probes questions of the contemporary developments of automation, networked society, digital agents and the addictive nature of data-driven applications. We now find ourselves on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution where complex computational systems have become second nature, embedded within all aspects of life. The project draws a parallel between sugar and data/data-driven applications; both being the most valuable commodities of their time along with their shared schizophrenic nature, providing happiness, delight and enjoyment whilst also having darker insidious realities of addiction, power and control, to name a few. We are entranced by our divisive devices, enslaved in invisible labour, stuck within the loop, from individual to integer, repeating our function until we have overindulged in nauseating waves of informatic eye candy.