Peter Horvath: Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance

Peter Horvath, screenshots from Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance, web-based generative video, 2006.

© Peter Horvath

Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance is a generative, video-based triptych that explores the three dynamics of motion, stillness and resistance. There is no audio component. Each panel of Triptych focuses on one dynamic and uses it as visual metaphor for universal emotive and cognitive states taken from and reflecting my personal experiences. In the piece, three separate video streams run simultaneously in three panels. These videos are randomly chosen from a central database of stored footage associated with each individual panel. Triptych is self-structuring and generative; each viewing is unique.

My work mirrors my individual attempt to deal with history, which is at once intimate and far-reaching, through the use of personal archives that reflect my own history and life experiences. I work from the premise that, regardless of their geographic and cultural identity, people have fundamentally the same emotional experiences (i.e. grief, joy, love, fear, jealousy). In the creation of my work, I aspire to universality in both the materials I collect and the subjects they reference. In my examination of the human experience, ideas concerning perceptions of the self, identity and how we relate to others and our environment are of prime importance. The urban environment, with its frenzied pace and complexity, often forces us to move, or better, dance—physically, intellectually, emotionally—in directions we may or may not be prepared for. The experience of Triptych is multifaceted and dreamlike; it may be thought of as an odyssey that examines how we assemble states of consciousness, how we "dance" through life.