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Janos Sugar
Artist, Professor
of media theory in the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of
Fine Arts.
Between 1980 and 1986 he was actively involved in the exhibitions and
performances of Indigo, an underground interdisciplinary art group led
by Miklуs
Erdaly. Sugar has participated in national and international exhibitions
since 1984 and has also created numerous performances, films, and
videos. Between 1990 and 1995 he was a board member of the Balazs Bala
Film Studio in Budapest. Since 1990, Sugar
has been teaching art and lecturing media theory in the Intermedia
Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 1992 he exhibited
at the documenta IX, Kassel. He completed an Artslink residency at the
Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994, and in 1997/98 a four-month, and in
1999 a three-month fellowship at Experimental Intermedia in New York.
His films were screened in 1998 at the Anthology Film Archives in New
York.
transcriptions from accidentally recorded table conversations
between Janos
Sugar
and Johan Sjerpstra
J. Sugar - ..it's not bad, take the model of the diligent capitalist
small tiger, proven in southeast Asia - and we are all the sudden facing
a new state system: the capitalist dictatorship. The masses aren't too
concerned about the cellars of the secret police, because life
conditions are pleasant: nature, sea, sun, relaxation. As soon as life
conditions somewhere become too pleasant (or too unpleasant?) a dictator
can discipline sleepy citizens having a siesta (or shivering citizens
sitting in an ice-cabin and licking frozen seal fat) with only a police
baton. Now that the global warming is coming, the whole Euramerica will
have a siesta at noon, bringing not the age of global information or
communication society but the first age of air-conditioner. If the
executive offices at IBM, Coca-Cola etc. get warmer the famous
efficiency will end, everything will become sluttish. It will be the age
of half-asleep, dozing policeman, flies buzzing around the servers. And
then the Vikings will appear to take of the command of the sleepy
world.
J. Sjerpstra - Are you familiar with the notion of morphogenesis? Rupert
Sheldrake, outstanding English scholar and plant physiologist, in his
book published in June 1981, outlined a fundamentally new vision of the
world, according to which the universe is not directed by physical laws,
but by the self-governing system. The morphogenetic spaces of past
systems manifest themselves, within similar structures of the future,
via 'morphic resonance', while they do not become significantly
weaker even in case the old and the new systems are isolated in space
and time.
J. Sugar - This means that knowledge is levelled up if all past systems
of a given type have influence on the present, similar systems.
Misinterpretations, gathering around facts as centers of inspiration,
create connection between facts. Thus, any system may be conceived as a
distorted, hypnotic message from a system preceding everything. If it is
conceivable that there existed the single one, of which all
contemporaneous systems are only morphogenetic descendants, then the
present situation would be the unrecognizably distorted symbol of a
certain meaning. Let us try to recognize in everything that element
whose morphic resonance the world could possibly be!
Johan Sjerpstra is a Dutch sociologist (as far as we know)
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