Attila Csorgo

Interview by Zoë Irvine

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

Zoë Irvine: I’m here in the Hungarian Pavilion with Attila Csorgo from Budapest. You have three pieces here, am I right?

Attila Csorgo: No four pieces, but there was an accident with the fourth piece but now it’s working. I make machines or mobile sculptures and these machines are low tech. One of the pieces is a big aluminium vat filled with oil, motor oil, and it is mounted to a rotating disc and the rotation makes the surface of the oil curve. Because oil in a big volume is dark, it cannot reflect, you can see how the mirror images on the surface of the oil are changing. The second work is a game played with two geometrical solids, a hedron and a dodecahedron.

ZI: So we’re standing now in front of an amazingly elaborate low-tech machine.

AC: This is the dodecahedron phase, and it will be transformed to another solid which is called an icosahedron and I did it by simple means, with ropes and strings and a very simple mechanism.

ZI: You just described what I’m looking at.

AC: Two of the so-called five platonic solids, and there are only five such solids which have this regularity, most solids have the same amount of edges. There is a contradiction within the pureness or high regularity of these solids, and it’s very low-tech.

ZI: Watching this shape change between two of the platonic solids, is almost like puppetry, isn’t it? How do you come to make this work?

AC: Generally I work a lot with geometry and I also worked before with solids but in a different way. I knew that they had the same number of edges and that I could transform them into each other. But there are just so many possibilities. In the beginning I made sketches to show how I could transform them and the next phase was when I tried to move them with strings.

ZI: So you constructed this in the space?

AC: Yes I reconstructed it here.

ZI: Let’s go and look at other pieces. Can you describe what we’re looking at?

AC: This is a dark space and I use light as a material and a hemisphere and that is the title, ‘Hemisphere’. There is a rotating heavy disc mounted on a metal rod with two pipes and this rotates at a 45° angle to the floor. This work operates with the collaboration of two rotations that are in different planes. In this way you can see a spiral motion.

ZI: I like the fact that you reveal the low-tech. We are now in a darkened room, it’s utterly mysterious.

AC: Yes, more dark would be better. People don’t like it when they can’t see the mechanisms, but the effect is better in a completely dark room.

ZI: What is the name of this piece?

AC: It’s A Solid Work for Revolution: Glass and a Table, and into the table I mounted a fan motor and to this fan I mounted two long screws and this is illuminated by a spotlight. The motor automatically switches on and off and when it’s on you see a kind of glass.

ZI: Yes, an illusion of a glass.

AC: Yes, and of course the tension is better. It is like an everyday situation, everybody knows that there is a table and on the table there is a glass.

ZI: In both of these pieces you allow us to understand the mystery. It becomes more magical because we know how simple it is.

AC: I try to avoid using high tech because it would make a void between the viewers and the work.

ZI: With this work you come and you see the magic and then it is reduced to its base elements, which is a very beautiful inversion. The other is a kind of faith.

AC: Because the geometry has a magical aspect there are two ways open. One is this magical way and another one is the scientific way, but I don’t want to separate them so both are included.