2014 Summer Session Review: Máté Pacsika and the Vertigo System 

About the Artist 

Máté Pacsika was born in Budapest and obtained his MA in Media Design from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest. In 2012 his graduation project Floatomat and its underlying theoretical research investigated the various layers of the relationship between attraction and narrative in media art. After graduation he moved to Rotterdam to work for V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and went on with his next research about experience based art education.
http://kupiczacola.com

About the Vertigo System by Máté Pacsika

Vertigo System is the work created by Máté Pacsika during his 2014 summer  residency at Chronus Art Center.It is based on the automatization of a cinematographic technique called Dolly Zoom, also known as Vertigo Effect named after Hitchcocks movie from 1958. Vertigo effect is an in-camera effect based on a really simple optical game. It’s a highly unsettling effect with strong emotional impact, often used to emphasize dramatic events in the storyline. The goal of the Vertigo System is to build a fantastic video archive of tons of frightened faces.

In the show, audiences are trying the Vertigo System and experiencing the Vertigo Effect in an automatic real time process where one suddenly finds oneself in a frightfully different reality -- the background becomes a variable surroundings, an all-relative universe where one can experience an elementary feeling of subconscious distress. “I am interested in how and why situations like this would effect human perception in such a powerful way,” says the artist.