The exhibition of media art and media history organized by the C³ Foundation attempts to trace the relationship between the visual arts and computers in Hungary over the course of the past fifteen years. To render the formula of the present, we selected a unique viewpoint. Well-known artists with significant oeuvres participate side by side with youths who were applicants and winners of the Freestyle Computing Competition organized by C³. Many things have changed in computer use and the prevalence and application of infoculture in the past decade and a half. The exhibition endeavours to give an unconventional but informative, complex and exciting survey of these changes.

For the past 15 years, the C³ Centre for Culture and Communication Foundation has organized an annual competition encouraging creative computer usage by members of the younger generation. We believe the time has come to examine and present the ways in which the competition has evolved, the people who have participated in the project, what has happened to our more than 100 winners over the years, and how the more than 6,000 submissions created by these young contestants can be viewed and interpreted today.

The operation and use of technical mediums determine our everyday lives in decisive ways, while independent, critical and media-conscious reflection essential to creative use is far from common knowledge or practice. The “digital natives” (people who grew up with computers) think differently about the world than “digital immigrants” (the rest of us, whose familiar lifestyles were disrupted and transformed by the new information society). It remains to be seen how we comprehend one another; what are the optimal forms of familiar and habitual dialogic relationships, for instance education, today, and how might they change? And, of course, how can this be presented in the world of the early 21st century, which is rife with radical transformations? Is it possible to speak in an easily intelligible manner about the present and to the present – especially with the aid of a particular, micro-retrospective approach?

Andrea Sztojánovits

The Instruments of Experience, 2017, installation

Dávid Gutema, Dávid Mikulán

Squirrels, 2008, video

Brigitta Zics

Pachinko machine, 2017

Zsigmond Peternák – Máté Balogh

h.a., 2016, video, 3’40”

Miklós Zsigó

Underwater cyclops, 2017, robot