Peter Horvath Retrospective :: September 3 - November 23, 2008 :: Opening Reception: September 3; 8:00 pm :: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi s/n Bosque de Chapultepec, México, 11580.

Over the past ten years, Peter Horvath has experimented with new Internet-based forms of cinematic narrative. His work is known for its pioneering exploration of video in the context of the Internet, combining hypertext with sound and Web programming.

His first piece, The Guide (1995), established a link between two mass media: the Web and television. Still in its infancy, the Web demonstrated its interactive possibilities at a time when television was a more prevalent medium, but one that permitted only limited interaction insofar as viewers could select their programming. At that time, this piece questioned the medium’s relevance, granting its users an appropriate significance in relation to it. In his first works, Horvath combined photographs, texts, graphics and animation to create lyrical, a-temporal fragments. Over time, the artist’s aesthetic focused increasingly on film as he used video as a composition tool to render pared-down and yet detailed moving images in his framing and presentation of particular situations. By using pop-up windows (an endemic feature of the Internet’s multi-layered environment), Horvath emphasizes the narrative functionality of instruments specific to the Web. In his continual explorations, the artist depicts the expressive capacities of Net Cinema in works that examine substantially diverse human conditions such as displacement, envy, loneliness, love, seduction, innocence, fear, individuality and identity. His works are constructed in a medium that represents an ideal setting, associated with certain thought structures that allow him to establish a dialogue with these relatively subjective experiences.

Taking into account that the development of film over the twentieth century has given us a certain sense of increased self-perception, Horvath transfers this discourse to the complex world of the Web. He also addresses the topicality of the Web 2.0 as a social networking tool. The works presented in this retrospective at the Museo Tamayo include Boulevard (2007), Tenderly Yours (2005), Intervals (2004), The Presence of Absence (2003) and Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects (2003).

Peter Horvath works in video, sound, photography and new media. At the age of twenty, he began exploring the concept of time-based art, which led him to co-found www.6168.org, making Net Art as the Web became a social network. His work has shown at institutions and festivals such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport); 18 Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart; FILE Electronic Language International Festival, São Paulo; Videozone-International Video-Art Biennial, Tel Aviv; the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Québec City; as well as at galleries in New York, Tokyo and London. He has been the recipient of commissions from Rhizome.org at The New Museum, New York (2005) and Turbulence.org / New Radio and Performing Arts, New York (2004).

Arcangel Constantini
Curator