State of Images

Der Stand der Bilder The Media Pioneers Zbigniew Rybczynski and Gabor Body We have grown accustomed to the idea that the first techno avantgarde in the arts came from western Europe and North America. However, nearly all the basic elements for the development of electronic worlds of picture and sound have been discovered and invented in the East. In Zbigniew Rybczynżski and Gábor Bódy, the publication introduces two media pioneers from Poland and Hungary who evolved in the tradition of the first European avantgarde artists. Both from the early 1970s tackled the challenge to the arts thrown up by the new media technologies head-on; first as experimental filmmakers, later in the context of video. The actions of the two here are very different: Rybczynżski is the Constructivist painter, drawer and engineer of the new image time spaces that he creates. Bódy on the other hand is the poet, linguist and semiotician, the playwright. Unrivalled by his contemporaries, he explores the quality of a new, a private, intimate public, which for him is associated with the medium of video, its perceptions and distribution channels. The two artists have never met. Their confrontation in the book is their first 'meeting'.