Ivó Kovács / LIQUID HORIZONS - The Ontology of Computed Spaces

Ivó Kovács / LIQUID HORIZONS

— The Ontology of Calculated Spaces

A 360° immersive video installation; 17:20 min., loop

Music: József Iszlai

Opening remarks by media artist Andrea Sztojánovits

Liquid Horizons explores the ontology of digital spaces: the state in which the digital environment is no longer a representation of physical reality, but an autonomous, self-generating space. Its panoramic field, constructed from six visual stations and endlessly looped, does not follow a narrative: the digital threshold rife with glitches, the brutalist concrete labyrinth, the biological network generated by artificial intelligence, the pure geometric order, spectral veils, and the synthetic horizon do not surpass one another— they overlap as equal aggregates, arranged into a single continuous event.

At the center of the work lies the question of the dreamlike sublimation of trauma. The brutalist scenes of the film—mirrored concrete staircases, half-finished stadium interiors, corridors leading nowhere— preserve the architectural imprint of contemporary war’s devastation: an algorithmic memorial to a suspended future. Not as documentation, but as a weightless stream of data—the software does not depict the destruction, but dreams of it. Through this digital dreamwork (Traumarbeit), the pulsating network of raw concrete, a pure geometric order, and then sublimates into its data-aesthetics, filled with calculated, majestic light— without the loop offering redemption. The cycle closes.

To use Vilém Flusser’s concept of the technical image: light comes not from sunlight, but from global illumination algorithms; the texture of the canvas is effectively replaced by the texture of the shader code. With Gilles Deleuze’s theory of Le Pli (The Fold): matter is not a static object, but an infinitely modulable event— Brutalist confinement and liquid freedom form a single topological unity. In Marcos Novak’s liquid architecture: digital space breaks with gravity and functionality to become pure mathematics and sensation.

The visuality of the work is defined by the simultaneous presence of three image-generating logics: real-time rendering (Notch), style transfer mediated by artificial intelligence (Stable Diffusion), and digitally processed built environments. There is no sharp boundary between the three layers—and this is the very premise of the work: the distinction between 'manual' and 'automatic' becomes meaningless in the era of the computer-generated image.

Following the model of Marc Augé’s non-places: the projected environment lacks human points of orientation. There are no doors, no paths, no tangible surfaces. The visitor’s own physical body remains the sole subjective fixed point in this amorphous, post-anthropocene data field—whose horizon does not separate the sky from the earth, but unites them as data points.