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George Legrady: Sensing Speaking Space

With a passion for the heady intricacies of interactive art installation and collaborative narrative development, multimedia artist George Legrady has been a central and significant figure on the international media scene for more than a decade as an artist, theorist, and teacher.

Legrady's work runs the media gamut. With Pockets Full of Memories (2000-2001), he created a conceptual online and museum installation that investigates the creation of an archive. With his CD-ROM/installation An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1994), he examines the construction of personal and official narratives in Stalinist Hungary. And with his large-scale interactive installation A Sense of Place (1998), he combined security cameras and large projected images of cities to create a window on the world, but one invariably affected by the presence of the spectator. Legrady's substantial work has earned numerous awards, and the artist is the recipient of several grants, including an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship. His work has shown at prominent galleries and museums across the world, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the ISEA in Nagoya, as well as most recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Legrady began his career working in photography in the 1970s, but shifted in the early 1980s when he started using computers and wanted to find a way to incorporate them into his art practice. "Photographic work tends to be about documenting the world, but at that point my focus shifted towards the examination of the medium itself," he says.

If Legrady's work can be said to have a continuous thread, it is this interest in reflecting on the medium, a reflection that is augmented by projects that necessitate active audience interaction, which, as Legrady points out, encourages a direct investment by the viewer, and indeed, the creation of his/her own narrative interpretation. Legrady also likes to point out that the gallery visitor interacting with an artwork becomes a performer, a fact that he has exacerbated in more recent projects through the incorporation of security cameras and tracking software.

With his latest project, Sensing Speaking Space, Legrady extends his interest in motion sensing interactivity and returns to his mid-1980s interest in the algorithmic generation of images. The project, which is being created in collaboration with Andreas Schlegel and Stephen Travis Pope, uses the movements of visitors in a public space to generate images, sounds, and text that together create an abstract media environment. A prototype version of Sensing Speaking Space was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February 2002 as part of the Activating the Medium festival.

Sensing Speaking Space includes two images; as visitors move in the space, the piece transitions back and forth between them, depending on the energy of their movements. The first image or "state" is "a textured image surface continuously being covered by white visual noise, like film dust, or snow falling on a windshield," explains Legrady. "The noise is made up of ASCII characters that must be wiped away by the spectators' movements to activate further events." When there has been enough action, the piece shifts to the other image or state, which is a green, blurred image; readable bits of text come to the surface, again, based on the movements of visitors. "The audience's movements advance the events from one to the other, evoking metaphorical acts of 'wiping' and 'breaking through' in the white noise screen mode to 'bringing forth' and 'revealing' in the green text screen mode." Legrady notes that he hopes the work will focus on reflection and the realization of one's presence. "It is an abstract work meant to be contemplative, like a Japanese garden."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Installation | History | Language, Linguistics, Literature & Books | California | 2002