Photo of the Day (narrative version)
video
30:07 minutes
Since the parliamentary elections of 2010, Hungary has an autocratic
government which spends considerable money on the construction of its
own image: kind of a rosy picture about Hungary’s glorious days enjoyed
by its citizens, under their brave government’s rule. One example of
this is the website called “Hungary Matters”,, an online media channel of the
highly centralized Hungarian Public Service Media, written in English.
Here „Hungarian reality” is expressed through articles and photographs
published day by day, accompanied by English captions.
Each picture is called: “Photo of the Day”.
Szacsva y Pal, a Hungarian artist group picks up some of these photos
(„of the day”) and transforms them with a
sometimes corrective, other times deconstructive or even vandalizing
intention, using a method called ‘perinarrative retouch’, specifically
developed by themselves for this purpose. Every single detail of the
manipulative process is recorded with a screen capture software,
resulting thus a moving image. Szacsva and Pal (the two members of the group)
called their own artistic project on the same title: „Photo of the Day” (PhD) and asked other artists to create sound tracks for the moving graphic images.
Collaborating artists: Balázs Beöthy, Lőrinc Borsos, Roland Farkas,
Judit Fischer, János Fodor, Ferenc Gróf, Nándor Hevesi, Tibor Horváth, Zsolt Keserue, Tamás Komoróczky, Mike Nylons, György Orbán, András
Ravasz, Andrea Schneemeier, Kornél Szilágyi
One version of the artistic project: Photo of the Day
is part of Off Biennial Budapest . It was created as a response to the initiative of Eszter Lázár and Edina Nagy, curators of the „When the art(ist) speaks” project.
The first work in the series of Photo of the Day, called „Horribile pictu 1”
was first published as part of „Enhenced Vision”,
an online exhibition on ACM SIGGRAPH's website.
