Garden of Communication
Anna Bálint

(1998.04.23.) 

Artpool Art Research Center web site
<http://www.artpool.hu>

Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, Hungary, is one of the best known alternative art and publishing centres in East Europe. After 20 years of more-or-less tolerated activity, organising, archiving and publishing contemporary art, it was eventually officially recognised following the political changes of 1989. In 1992 it was established as an institution open to the public, and since then Artpool has continued to organise new media exhibitions and art events including intermedia, network, performance, installation works and related art activities such as fluxus, happenings, mail art, and video. At the same time they have continued to add to their collection of avant-garde and marginal artworks of the 1970s and 1980s of both Hungarian and international origin.

As Artpool has always been specifically concerned with mixed genres and new technology, it was natural for it to join the net, and once it could lease an internet line in January 1996, it started to build a home page containing information, documents and artworks for public access. As a tool for self-expression and self-construction, the web site mirrors the institution itself, and its past and present activities define the content, basic structure and visual appearance of the pages. Great care and attention has been given to the position and connective value of the pages. There is hardly any independent, ‘floating’ information, and every component is connected with another at one or more levels and the pages are nested within internal and external links. Each element of the content is reinforced by others which transforms the mass of information into a consistent value system, offering multiple interpretative possibilities for the user.

The key role of Artpool in organising and documenting artistic activities both in the past and the present is evident on the web site through the short history of the institution (since 1979), the list of related publications and the description of its collections. Artpool’s wider aim is to focus / collect texts and links related to experimental art, and the ground-braking artistic movements of this century – promote research on experimental art, on the ground-breaking artistic movements of this century – Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationist International, Concept Art, Pop Art, Fluxus, Mail Art, Neoism, Computer Art and Installations[1].

The close relationship between the content and the design metaphors is evident from the first encounter with the web site. The ‘home page’ acts as a visual trademark, incorporating the main features of the institution. Artpool's first two self-memorial artistamp images guide the user to links related to Artpool's activities, signifying the connections and relationships of the institution, and at the same time referring to one of the special collections of the Artpool Archives, the Artistamp Museum. This collection, consisting of about 20,000 items, comprises the material of both the World Art Post exhibition (1982) and Mike Bidner's collection devised for Artpool (1990).

The current events pages list the exhibitions and projects arranged by Artpool since 1992 and contains some on-line artworks. For instance the Networker Bridge[2]is a web adaptation of a bookwork published by Artpool in 1994, consisting of 64 Tarot cards with motifs by 64 artists. There is also the web version of the UNI/vers, the Peacedream project 1988 by Guillermo Deisler[3] and the Bookworks of Barbara Rosenthal.[4] Other artworks were adapted for the on-line medium specifically to illustrate lectures held at the Center. See, for instance, Tomas Konart's T3[5], published on-line for an exhibition and a lecture given by Piotr Rypson on Polish avant-garde books. Also worth looking at are the pages of Correspondence Art of Ray Johnson based on a show held at the Ernst Museum in Budapest and the Dadaist Picture poems by Lajos Kassák (1920-1922) on-line following the dadaist visual poetry open air exhibition at the Liszt Ferenc Square in Budapest (both held in Autumn 1997).

The Ray Johnson site[6] offers various sources related to the artist: the Ray Johnson Chro No Logy, biography and a bibliography, a chronology of the New York Correspondence School, the Budapest story of Ray Johnson (1982-1994) which describes the Buda Ray University project, Artpool's Ray Johnson Space, all illustrated with copies of Johnson's correspondence art and memorial pieces made after his death. In addition, on-line theoretical texts and critiques about Johnson's correspondence art are collected to help research, together with material from the Artpool archives, which they provide an easily accessible way of exploring mail art culture and its context.

In 1994 some of the work of outstanding Hungarian artists from the 1970s and 1980s was exhibited at Artpool. Given special prominance was [Miklós Erdély, one of the most inspiring figures in the Hungarian avant-garde art scene, whose manuscripts, video and][7] sound documents had finally become available. This provided the opportunity to put some of the sources and related texts, formerly published in the Alternative/Actual Letter of Artpool, onto the net – currently only in Hungarian.[8] Appropriately, Erdély’s text about conceptual and formal auto-poetic systems could stand as metaphor for Artpool's way of constructing their web site.

For, in contrast to the widely used and well-worn urban net-metaphors (digital city, café, saloon, electronic agora), the Artpool site employs a variety of fresh, open metaphors. For instance on the main page the two main entrances have images representing night and day which guide the user into the spiritual world of the institution, suggestive of the ways of access to transcendentality known in gnostic tradition. Elsewhere, as part of the Ray Johnson web-pages, the conceiver and designer of the site György Galántai explains his use of an organic interface symbol in a manifesto entitled The Garden of Correspondence Art. The synergy of media and the instantaneous connectivity of each manifold reference and link is expressed in the interface metaphor of the garden. The metaphor redefines the linguistic, symbolic and aesthetic perception of the Johnson narrative. It charges the context of the visual and textual data enriching the amount of information so that effectively avoiding authoritarian display, the site retains its informative status.

The layout of the pages often metaphorically refers to their content and the analogy of the material world is counterbalanced by the immateriality of the digital media. For example the page showing Artpool's location in Budapest places the image of the building against the background of Spring – the icon of nature is a subjective allusion to avant-garde. Similarly the materiality of a noticeboard is recreated on the page listing recent events ‘pinned’ with virtual drawing pins. Appropriately for an art research centre with its constantly changing exhibitions and events, the site is also continually changing, unfolding and assembling.   This is symbolised through the recurring icon of a man digging the garden.

NOTES

1. In a research site linked to the main web site. The research site is in Hungarian. [https://www.artpool.hu/Research/kutatolap.html]
2. Networker Bridge <https://artpool.hu/bookwork/bridge/bridge.html> [22 April 1998].
3. UNI/vers, <https://www.artpool.hu/univers/uni.html> [22 April 1998].
4. Bookworks of Barbara Rosenthal <https://www.artpool.hu/Rosenthal/RosBooks.html> [22 April 1998].
5.  Tomas Konart T3 <https://artpool.hu/bookwork/T3/1.html> [22 April 1998]
6. The Ray Johnson site <https://www.artpool.hu/RayJohnson.html> [22 April 1998].
7. In the original printed article, this paragraph was typeset incorrectly. We have added the missing portion in square brackets.
8. Miklós Erdély <https://www.artpol.hu/Erdely/EMcontenthu.html> [22 April 1998]. See for instance the lecture Self-Assembling Afternoons which recalls his memory.