Transient Passages: The Work of Peter Horvath

Abstract

Peter Horvath produces non-interactive, cinematic Internet art works which explore conditions of agency, mobility, and continuous flow, traversing and arguably collapsing notions of the micro and macro, near and far. The idea that this sense of movement is random is deemed important here and coalesces I argue, with the Situationist International (SI) concept of the dérive, ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences’ and an idea closely associated with pyschogeographies. Implied within this process is a ‘drift’ which mediates social, creative and conceptual boundaries between the specific locality of the user, the presence of urban markers within the works and the mapless topography of the medium itself.