CHASING

︎

Tracking, tracing, chasing ︎ with the double  ︎ of the eyes. ︎rienting perception based on unidentified objects.  ︎ is a variable that could be many things: a circle, a point in a coordinate, a golf ball, a potentiometer, a nucleus, an egg, a germ, a seed, a planet, a white dwarf, a red giant, a zero sign, or simply the hesitant moment before the next vector upsets the stillness of the scene. A cut-section image of an unstable spatial moment, documented by lines and points on the plotting board.

Dragging with us our histories and projecting utopian beams into the future, there are always linear structures dislocating us from the present tense. We are always moving along the channels and pathways like a signal, setting itself to the notion of free movement within a closed system: becoming autonomous despite everything. The interrelating paths cross each other, letting the allegorical ︎-figure of information move along routes not yet discovered, mutating, dividing, corroding throughout the journey. Hooked together by the cables of association, information and disinformation, the pieces refer to a forever changing system, where one can synthesise new realities. In a blink of an eye, this dynamic set of relations, this pseudo-computation of forms is translated into a composition. Something one looks at hoping for a final iteration.

However, the connections seem arbitrary, momentary. Space becomes transposed into image, complex relations are weaved into the fabric of a fictional universe, and the toolkit of art reassembles itself into a cryptic alternative practice, which might turn statements into questions, industrial certainties into ambiguous constellations, lines into vectors, images into shape-shifting elements within a weblike infrastructure. During this procedure,  ︎ – the pointsphere, the golfplanet, the seedzero – becomes relative to the viewpoint, the angle and the viewing distance.  ︎ does not close sentences, but opens them up towards growth, change, transformation, splitting and deconstruction.

What happens when you divide the unknown? For Gábor Kristóf, the brutal / scientific act of splitting up the ball motif –  ︎ – reveals a hidden galaxy that can be understood as the emergence of some kind of seed, which entails the promise of an alternative universe. It is also a moment when the smooth objecthood of the golf ball is bracketed by the concentric tondo, the so far hidden image. The transformation from sphere to circle is complicated by the performative element of the action: the cut, the strike, the invisible – but blinding – behind-the-scenes interplay. The action reveals the flat surface of a radical decision.

︎ : nothing and everything simultaneously. A backyard reprogramming of the world, resulting in an unruly heap of hacked balls. But these decentralised seeds might just grow into the elements of a new world, unbothered by our doubts and agonies. We are drawn into a speculative zone: maybe some die-cut lines will scar the landscape displayed on this circular map, but then again the by-products, the unpicturable weeds of existence, might hide them all.


We never know what happens once  ︎ is evacuated. ︎nce the double  ︎ of attention leaps off the circuit. As our mixed-media reality cannot be interpreted with the help of traditional map-like representations, that can only chart our nostalgic longing towards steadfast ideas, Kristóf searches for new possibilities. The notions of authorship dissolve into the act of mapping this territory between image, interpretation and visualisation of meaning with the help of undeterminable vectors and forces. In the end, the aim is to open up these realms that have been locked tight by a set of cultural and industrial protocols and to find ourselves within ︎, whatever it might stand for.


Patrick Tayler