SPECTRAL MODULATOR/EDVARD ZAJEC

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SEQUENTIAL EXCHANGES – HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE PROGRAMSlavko Glamočanin, Marko Peljhan, Miha Turšič, Dragan Živadinov

Edvard Zajec appeared on the radars of our generation through research of prima-ry sources on the complex relationship between Art and Technology in the times of New Tendencies. Information about this avantgardist from Trieste was scarce. Supposedly he left for America, returned, worked in the computer centre of the Uni-versity of Trieste with Matjaž Hmeljak, published the mysterious Informatrix and left for the University of Syracuse immediately afterwards to start the Transmedia department there.

Much like the avant-gardist Avgust Černigoj, who was forced to leave Ljubljana and arrived in Trieste through Rome, Zajec left Trieste and Ljubljana and arrived in Syracuse through stops in Ohio and Minnesota.

As was the case with Černigoj, he cast a long and precise shadow. And as was the case with Černigoj, his shadow was almost “removed” from the local cultural hori-zon until the retrospective exhibition in the International Centre for Graphic Arts (MGLC) in 2007, curated by Breda Škrjanec.

Zajec did indeed meet the Computer in Minnesota in 1968, but even a quick look at his opus before that reveals that the Computer waited for him. As he himself wrote, he was engaging in modular repetition, probability and chance. Much like his contemporaries in music and what later became known as computer arts. Ev-erything has its own logic and Zajec immediately understood, that the basic par-

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adigm of the object/subject relationship in the arts has fundamentally changed with the advent of the Computer and its software. Forever. And that completely new avenues and possibilities for pure interaction in real time and almost limitless combinatorics have opened.

And because of this it is also logical, that the first permanent exhibit of Edvard Zajec inhabits currently the most “informatrix” like space of future projection and deep reflection, the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies, KSEVT. And that its title is “SPECTRAL MODULATOR”. Modulation is the key to mastering the electromagnetic spectrum. And the best secrets in that domain can be opened only by the most precise mathematics with the best possible story.

When we discussed the “Treasures of Modernity” and his name was mentioned, it was very clear that this is a project for the future and it was also clear to all of us, that it has to be treated as such. That was the moment when we stopped worrying and started working. What remained was one great love – for modernity!

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PERFORMANCE IN THE THIRD-DIMENSION: EDVARD ZAJEC’S SPECTRAL MODULATORPetja Grafenauer

In 1928 in Berlin engineer Herman Potočnik, a Slovenian specialist in rocket tech-nology, published a book entitled The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor, a fundamental work from the first generation of space explorers. Yet this important fact remained unmentioned, even in obituaries published in national newspapers upon his death in 1929. The local environment was not yet prepared for space.

Nor was it ready for the art of the avant-garde that today we describe as his-toric, as it – save the radical political left – tailored all criteria to the Slovenian artistic community, while local activity lagged well behind what was going on in the centres of power. Having entered the scene at the same time as the historic avant-gardes were flourishing in the major art hubs1, August Černigoj remained outside the domain of art history, and for a long time also beyond the cultural hori-zon, until finally he earned his place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and with it, within the national art canon with the recreation of the Trieste Constructivist Cabinet several years ago.

Two Ljubljana exhibitions later Černigoj was busy devising a third constructivist ex-hibition,2 but was forced to leave the city prematurely. He settled in Trieste where in 1927 he formed the Constructivist Group. Its members included the “young ar-

1 Peter Krečič, »Delo Avgusta Černigoja in slovenske zgodovinske avantgarde v kritiškem zrcalu« (Work of Avgust Černigoj and Slovenian historic avant-garde in the eyes of the critics) , Tank!: slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda: revue internationale de L’Art vivant, Moderna Galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana 1998, p. 59.

2 Ferdo Delak, »Zapiski« (Notes), Mladina, Vol. VII, No.1, Ljubljana 1926, p. 20–23.

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chitect Poljak, now deceased, painter Vlah, also deceased, painter Stepančič, who now lives in Belgrade, and Carmelich, who edited Magazine No. 25 (Revija št. 25), and Bambič.”3 In 1927 the Group was given a special section at an exhibition of fine arts hosted by the Trieste Art Union and with it the opportunity to design it ac-cording to their own vision. What they created was a constructivist cabinet4: “We exhibited several constructions: they were composed of wire and metal, as well as of glass, colours and similar, and of wood or gypsum […]. It gave the impression of something completely new, we created an entirely new ambient environment or rather an entirely new atmosphere…5 Chronologist Willi Nürnberg observed at the time: “For the first time they did not try to exhibit the objects, but let them levitate from the ceiling on thin strings. With this the objects lost their earth-bound gravity and with this, their spiritual moment was heightened.”6

At the end of the 1920s, largely owing to his struggle to make ends meet and provide for his family, Černigoj went back to “classical painting”, later pointing out that in so doing he had given in, “not only to survive. It was because they had been looking down on everything that was new … ”7 At the time, critics had established a view that prevailed for quite some time, which saw constructivism as an entirely false artistic movement, a futile attempt that should be forgotten, and the sooner the better. On the other hand, the critics rather approved of the fact that its topical grip consisted of nothing except for perhaps some themes (Černigoj did introduce

3 Franko Žerjal, »Intervju z Avgustom Černigojem« (Interview with Avgust Černigoj), Radio Trst, Trieste 1972, quoted after: »Spomin na Avgusta Černigoja« (In the memory of Avgust Černigoj), Škrat, Trieste 2005, p. 7. Edvard Stepančič and Milko Bambič died in 1991, Giorgio Carmelich already in1929.

4 August Černigoj, »Umetniška razstava v Trstu« (Art exhibition in Trieste), Učiteljski list (Teacher’s journal), Vol. 7, No. 11, 1 June 1926, p. 87.

5 Franko Žerjal, »Intervju z Avgustom Černigojem«, ibid, p. 8.6 Willi Nürnberg, available at: Dragan Živadinov, »Tržaški konstruktivistični ambient (Vlah, Carmelich,

Stepančič, Černigoj), 1927« (Trieste constructivist cabinet – Vlah, Carmelich, Stepančič, Černigoj), www.ddr.si/umetnina.htm, viewed on 12 October 2014.

7 Matjaž Garzarolli and Vojteh Ravnikar, »August Černigoj; razgovor« (Avgust Černigoj: Conversation), Arhitektov bilten, No. 36/37, Ljubljana 1978, p. 11–12.

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some fresh marine motifs) that would distinctly separate constructivism from contemporary developments in the Slovenian art scene.8

Černigoj, who returned to the avant-garde in its second, neo wave in the 1960s, was a significant figure in Trieste, both as a teacher and supporter of the bolder students, and his presence left a profound mark on them. One of these students was Edvard Zajec, the first Slovenian artist to focus on computer art, paving the way for the ranks of the unknowns, and for new possibilities in the culturalisation of space. Although he was awarded in 1989 for his explorations into temporality in colour at Ars Electronica in Linz,9 he would have been almost entirely forgotten in the local context had it not been for his solo exhibition at the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana nearly a decade ago.

However, it takes more than a single event to become enshrined in the local art-history canon, especially when the artist is so different and so distinctly out-side the visual field of his time, such that the local space doesn’t even possess the tools to evaluate it, having to position him – like Černigoj – well after the fact into the national collections. It wasn’t until 2008, when Zajec was showcased at the International Festival of Computer Arts in Maribor, that he once again found himself, decades later, among his counterparts.

As he is positioned via KSEVT among those deserving of a place in the history of the culturalisation of space it is not enough to simply find a place for his work in the his-torical context. In collaboration with a team consisting of designer, postgravity artist and director of KSEVT Miha Turšič, postgravity artist Dragan Živadinov, program-mer Slavko Glamočanin and artist Marko Peljhan, Zajec developed a work of art for KSEVT that will transform sound into spatially existing light. For Zajec, this project

8 Peter Krečič, Avgust Černigoj, Nova revija, Ljubljana 1999.9 PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA 1989, kategorija COMPUTER ANIMATION za delo: Composition in Red,

Green, Blue

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embodies the wish he had been capable of conceiving decades ago, but which the available technology of the time was unable to bring to life. Initially convinced that he would realise the project on his own, KSEVT and the Project Atol Institute in 2013 gave him the possibility to realise such an enormous project.

On 4 July 2014 the workgroup sent the “first prototype of the spatial installation of the spectral modulator”10 for inspection and consideration – but Zajec wasn’t satisfied. He found that this so promising idea of his was here problematic, and didn’t deliver the “spatially structured colour transparency that was to occur in the reflection between panes.”11 Nevertheless, he was still convinced there were pos-sibilities. He wasn’t alone. Glamočanin was sure of the same, and regular meetings of the team bore fruit. KSEVT presents the spatial installation of the spectral mod-ulator, a work of art resting on a pedestal of invisible layers of historical pleating on which this text attempts to shed some light, and at the same time a contem-porary, audio-visual project that speaks to the visitor in three sensual dimensions.

The idea of computer-generated art gradually took root in the USA and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was described as computer art or computer gener-ated art. This was a very broad term that covered the creative application of com-puters in different artistic genres. The first major exhibitions showcasing authors crucial for the development of new artistic practices were Cybernetic Serendipity in I.C.A. in 1968, Event One Computer Art Society in London in 1969, and Software: information technology: its new meaning for art (Jewish Museum New York, 1970, curator Jack Burnham). As early as 1969 Zagreb hosted Tendencies 4, an event ful-ly dedicated to computer art after these tendencies had begun to bloom at its third such event. This was followed by the exhibitions Komputer Kunst in 1969/1970

10 Email correspondence between Miha Turšič, Edvard Zajec, Petja Grafenauer, Marko Peljhan, Dunja Zupančič, and Dragan Živadinov, 14 July 2014, author’s personal archive.

11 Ibid.

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in Hannover, Munich and Hamburg, and the international colloquium Computers and Visual Research in Zagreb. Simultaneously with developments in Europe new organisations were being formed in the USA that pursued the integration of art and technology. In New York in 1966 Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver or-ganised nine evenings of “technological spectacles” – Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering – and founded the non-profit organisation E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) in 1967, comprised of a group of artists, scientists and engineers.

Edvard Zajec, born in Trieste, was in high school undoubtedly influenced by his teacher August Černigoj. The affinity between the two artists is best reflected in the fact that in the period marked by the 50th anniversary of constructivism, when the desire to revisit and re-evaluate Černigoj’s oeuvre came to the fore, it was above all the artist’s former classmate, architect Boris Podreka12, and painter and originator of computer art in Slovenia, Edvard Zajec13, who advocated these efforts.Zajec reacted to the critical review that literary historian Anton Ocvirk gave to Avgust Černigoj’s work in 1967, in the very year when he, all too late, allowed the publication of poet Kosovel’s Integrals that Kosovel had written in 1925 and 1926. In his accompanying study Ocvirk mentioned Černigoj, noting that “in terms of technique and ideas his works cannot be compared to the works of Grohar or Jakopič.”14 The literary critic and historian was in the wrong and history had yet to be recovered from beneath the many layers piled upon it throughout the centu-ries. Once again, the first impulses for a positive evaluation of Černigoj’s work did

12 Boris Podreka, »Černigoj in patentirani ‘jaz’. Ob umetnikovem jubileju.« (Černigoj and patented ‘ego’. Upon the artist’s anniversary.), Most, No. 20, Trieste 1968, p. 201–205.

13 Edvard Zajec, »Anton Ocvirk, August Černigoj in konstruktivizem« (Anton Ocvirk, Avgust Černigoj and constructivism), Primorski dnevnik, No. 8, 10 January 1970.

14 Anton Ocvirk, »Spremna študija« (Accompanying study), Srečko Kosovel: Integrali, Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana 1967, p. 97. See also: Lado Kralj, »Dvomim, da bi Ocvirkova zgodnejša objava imela večji učinek, Dr. Lado Kralj o Ocvirkovem odlašanju z objavo avantgardistične poezije« (I doubt Ocvirk’s earlier publication would have had a more profound impact, Dr. Lado Kralj on Ocvirk’s delayed publication of avant-garde poetry), Primorske novice, Vol. 20, 22, 16 March 2004, p. 22.

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not come from Ljubljana, but from northern Primorska, a region whose artistic community worked differently than that in central Slovenia, primarily because of its ties with the Italian community. Even in 1970, Peter Krečič maintained that Černigoj’s oeuvre wasn’t of much consequence15, but soon decided to revisit the episode of Černigoj’s first avant-garde, with the first prominent attempt being the exhibition in Idrija of 1978. At the same time, the oeuvre of another avant-garde artist from Trieste, Edvard Stepančič, was coming to be recognised as both out-standing and important.

The one artist who had faith in the outstanding Edvard Zajec stood out himself. He initially refused to join the art academy with its intimidating conservative profes-sional narrow-mindedness. Instead, he chose to study architecture in Ljubljana, but soon after enrolling moved with his family to the USA. When Trieste came un-der Italian rule Zajec’s father, who had been teaching at the Slovenian professional school in Trieste, lost his job due to insufficient resources, which forced him, like so many others, to look for a better life overseas.Having arrived in the USA Zajec got a job, but didn’t feel good in Cleveland. He refused and decided to continue with his studies. He enrolled in the Cooper School of Art and already as a student joined an advertising office, firmly determined to intervene in societal reality and leave a mark on people with his visual insights. This wish was shattered when it collided with the American market efficiency that sought to subject artistic endeavour to profit. But the artist stood up to this pressure as well. University studies in America were expensive, so he returned to Europe “knowing that I can study here for free.”16

He enrolled at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and enjoyed, under the tutorship

15 Peter Krečič, »Umetnost na Primorskem v prvih letih tik po 1. svetovni vojni v luči slovenske likovne kritike« (Art in Primorska in the first years following WWI in view of Slovenian literary criticism), Jadranski Koledar, Trst 1972, p. 138–147.

16 Ibid.

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of painter Gabrijel Stupica “balance and solid practice.”17 […] “I studied with Boris Jesih, Bogoslav Kalaš and Lado Pengov … our teachers were Gabrijel Stupica and Marij Pregelj, and Pengov’s father Slavko taught small nude. One of our fellow students was the Albanian painter Xhevdet Xhafa.”18 Zajec craved the strictness and order of the academy, but returned to America soon after graduating. It was time to provide for his family and such opportunities were nowhere to be found in either Trieste or Ljubljana. With a diploma in his pocket, he got a position as teach-ing assistant at Ohio University.He took up painting, which began as a dialogue with the great Slovenian painter Stupica and acknowledging minimalism, and continued with increased enthusiasm for the seriality that he had already felt in Jasper Johns. This led to the paintings and graphics of 1966, in which the plane was dominated by a single element that oc-curred in series. Zajec started to observe its behaviour, its disorderliness and order-liness in serial compositions on a painting panel, and increasingly often on a graphic panel. Independently, he started to explore the programming of the relationships between elements and the formulation of compositions with a tool – the computer.Once Zajec had resettled in the USA, he served for a year as acting dean at the prestigious University of Minnesota and after the expiry of this contract transferred to the neighbouring faculty where he also taught painting and small nude. Howev-er, the homesick family decided to return to Trieste once again. Unemployed for a while, Zajec provided for his family by teaching at the Trieste college until he set his sights on finding new employment in the USA. This time it was the right one. He was accepted at Syracuse University as the only foreign candidate among 16 serious contenders for the position. At that time, his biography already featured the interactive book Informatrix (1979), as well as participation at the New Tendencies in Zagreb. Those who knew anything about new media endorsed his references:

17 Breda Škrjanec, »Intervju z Edvardom Zajcem« (Interview with Edvard Zajec), Edvard Zajec. Umetnost in računalnik: od začetkov do sedanjosti, MGLC, Ljubljana 2007, p. 9.

18 Edvard Zajec, (unpublished interview), ibid.

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“In this period, there were two international reference centres for computer art: the first was the London I.C.A. and the second was the Zagreb New Tendencies.”19

The first New Tendencies, a festival of new visual art, was organised in Zagreb in 1961 – the year of the first non-aligned nations summit in Belgrade. Organ-isers believed in a new, contemporary vision of the world, in progress, innovation, experiment and activism, while at the same time maintaining a critical view of society and its dominant structures. The contexts devised by the group active in the Gallery of Contemporary Art provided a meeting point for the young, as yet un-established and explorative artists from several European countries. It was a place where the visual, kinetic, programming, optical, gestalt and computer art, neocon-structivism and neoconcretism met. The second edition launched New Tendencies as both a festival and a wider, international spiritual movement.By the third edition of New Tendencies (1965) the festival had expanded con-siderably, with new participants arriving from West Germany, Italy, the USA and the Soviet Union. Yet democratisation had lost its footing through expansion and substance suffered from hyper-production. Several days after the opening of the festival’s third edition a working meeting took place in Brezovica at Zagreb to crit-ically analyse the movement. Disillusioned participants who questioned whether the notion of art as research can transcend the traditional understanding of art, and whether the new works could resist the market-oriented tendency of the art world, were offered a way out of this crisis by Abraham A. Moles, professor at the University of Strasbourg and an advocate of information aesthetics, whose paper Cybernetics and the Work of Art was published in the exhibition catalogue. Only through working with a machine (the ingenious imbecile), by appropriating it, by learning the language of the machine, will an artist rediscover his own freedom, but only in the context of a “micro-environment, as separate from mass society.”20

19 Ibid.20 Abraham A. Moles, »Kibernetika i umjetničko djelo«, Nova tendencija 3, Galerija suvremene

umjetnosti, Zagreb 1965, p. 92.

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Moles noted that machines would help artists to realise ideas that surpass the ability of the human spirit; in addition, they would open new domains and forms of creativity that would result from the symbiosis of the artist and the machine. This set the course for the fourth edition of Tendencies.In 1969 Edvard Zajec showed his first computer graphics at this key computer art event. He met the organisers and Croatian art historian and critic Boris Kelemen invited him to participate in the Fourth Belgrade Triennial of Yugoslavian Art in Belgrade (1970).

Like other artists in the region, Zajec wanted to develop ways of programming a machine, ways that would lead to a new art, something that several other artists had been doing independently in their own regions. The early period of computer art saw as the most important the work of Croatian artist Vladimir Bonačić, who in 1964 worked under the Ruđer Bošković Institute, programming with a computer and self-made electronics. Like Zajec, he showcased his works at New Tendencies and in 1969, with the support of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, he set up, in a public space, the computer-controlled light object GF 100, followed by several other projects, including DIN.PR18, on the façade of the NAMA department store on Kvaternik Square in Zagreb.

A former member of the constructivist group, Edvard Stepančič, who had left Tri-este for Belgrade as early as in 1929 under political pressure, was preoccupied with similar issues of computer-aided visualisation. In the 1960s, like August Černigoj, he returned to research from the avant-garde stage, while building upon it with programmed visualisations. In 1983 he presented some of his works in an animated video at the first video festival C.D. ‘83 in Ljubljana, but which became known to the public only after his death, namely with an exhibition in 2006, when his work was reviewed by Peter Krečič and Nina Pirnat Spahić.

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What Edvard Zajec liked about computers was the possibility of their culturalisa-tion, a possibility as young then as space travel is today. He saw the computer as a creation of man, offering much more than the mere communication interface it is generally seen as and used today. He was interested in randomness and its pro-grammed oppositions. Incessantly designing new programmes he began in 1970 to collaborate with Matjaž Hmeljak, systems analyst at the computer centre of the University in Trieste, which helped facilitate his research. With the involvement of the public Zajec programmed an interactive catalogue for one of the exhibitions. In 1979 in Trieste he published an interactive book Informatrix that offered, unlike the interactive books we know today, communication rather than the one-way transmission of information. The interactive book preoccupied him for the better part of the 1970s and between 1995 and 1996 Zajec released it into its natural medium – the worldwide web – where communication thrived far better than on still paper pages.It was around this time that the artist became interested in colour and its tem-porality. He surrendered partial control to the machine, but allowed for no pure coincidence; the play of chance and control was built into the process of the for-mation of an artistic object. This too was losing relevance in Zajec’s oeuvre and at the exhibition in Palazzo Constanza organised in 1971 by the then director of Museo Revoltella, Giulio Montenero, he distributed 600 chance compositions on paper among the audience as a token of the democratisaton of art that was still lingering in the international arts arena at the time. The exhibition was interesting also because Zajec played a film recording depicting “deliberate explicit presen-tations of the creative process and collaboration with engineer Matjaž Hmeljak in the Trieste Computer Centre, an establishment that enables or at least tries to meet his ambitions and goals.”21

21 Aleksander Bassin, »Comp 3 v Trstu« (Comp 3 in Trieste), Naši razgledi, Ljubljana, Vol. 21, No. 24 (479), p. 741.

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In the 1970s Zajec held several exhibitions in Slovenia, but never received recogni-tion for his work. In 1971 he saw his computer graphics accepted to the 9th Bien-nial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, something that has not been repeated since. After he participated in the fifth edition of New Tendencies he got a new opportunity, this time from Syracuse University in New York. They were about to set up a new, transmedia department and were looking for a lecturer on computer art. Edvard Zajec was finally given the freedom to develop his practice for the next 30 years and could communicate his knowledge without limitations and hindrances, if only there were enough students. They offered me an opportunity and allowed me the autonomy I needed, just as KSEVT has offered me one now.”22

For Zajec, the opportunity of academic engagement meant new possibilities for research while he continued to maintain his prowess and ties with his colleagues from as far back as New Tendencies. His work in USA allowed him to maintain these ties, but in Trieste he was an artist with no one to talk to. Despite the move, says Zajec, “the course of my research never became more prominent or recognis-able; it kept to the sidelines of the mainstream interest of visual art.”23

It was the computer that allowed Zajec to capture light in duration, similarly to the way sound lasts in music. He designed programmes for colour based on musical compositions, while the music also became the substance of the visible. It was the beginning of visualisation in music – like the one that starts in Windows Media Player with a click. Zajec had done it before its commercialisation at the end of 1980s, when this became a field of experiment for a large number of users.

If prior projects had been designed as static images that materialised for the view-er as computer graphics, Zajec, between 1984 and 1987, translated colour into time with four compositions in the framework of the Chromas project: “ [...] to

22 Edvard Zajec, (unpublished interview), ibid.23 Edvard Zajec, (unpublished interview), ibid.

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animate means to orchestrate the flow of colour passages in time, rather than to choreograph the motion of objects in space.”24 Static visual composition allowed him to concentrate on the dynamic part in which a composition is performed in a complexity of colour changes.In 1987 he once again blended images with music in a successful presentation at the Trieste music festival Trieste Prima. The unfolding of the images was based on the serial Seconda Sonata by the contemporary composer Giampaolo Coral, which blended with Zajec’s programmatic articulation. Computer notes in the projected video ran in parallel with the sounds of the piece. Zajec based his animation pro-gramme on the music of dodecaphonic compositions. Until 1990, his works were “based on a triangular or rectangular mesh, until he became interested in the plan-ning of a temporally structured colour theory within a composition system based on space and shapes.”25

Upon its transition into the third dimension Zajec’s project changes also in terms of its media and historical definitions. Prior to that, art historians would define his projects in terms of visual music, abstract film, visions in motion, audio-kinetic art, colour music, digital harmony or abstract dynamic visual art. None of these con-vinced the artist who instead preferred to call his creative research Orphics, having in mind the shaping of time and the formulation of a new language of light and sound.Zajec wanted complex harmonies for his programmes. He found them in contem-porary classical music that was nearing dodecaphony and allowed for complex compositions. With the new millennium he finally turned away from musical com-position, which was replaced by an independent composition of time-based co-lours and images.In 2013 he began to return to his former ideas, now made possible through new technologies. His art lived to see the computer it had been waiting for. The visible,

24 Brian Evans, »Elemental Counterpoint with Digital Imagery«, Leonardo Music Journal, MIT Press 1992, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 13-18.

25 Breda Škrjanec, ibid, p. 17.

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computer-generated by the composition of contemporary classical music, brings the third dimension to KSEVT, entering space from the surface.The project can be described as programmed lumino-kinetic art that harks back to Kazimir Malevich in his final stage of suprematism, where colour disappears in pure white light, passing into space. Between 1923 and 1927, in Malevich painting is re-placed with architectural plans – planites – and three-dimensional models – archi-tectones. In Zajec, however, painting is replaced by space, time and spectral light.

Just a little later, in 1930, the father of lumino-kinetics, László Moholy-Nagy, with the help of Hungarian architect Istvan Seboek, made a Light-Space Modulator for the exhibition of the German Werkbund in Paris, a kinetic sculpture also called the Light Prop for an Electric Stage. The Moholy-Nagy modulator, never actually used in theatre, with its glass and metal discs, a rotating glass spiral and a sliding ball created the effect of photograms in motion.26

Frank Popper views lumino-kinetic art as a historical term in the context of ki-netic art, claiming that there is no kinetic art after the early 1970s; it stands as a precursor to other contemporary cybernetic, robotic, new-media-based arts and is as such part of the New Tendencies movement.27 Just as Moholy-Nagy created the effect of photograms in motion, Zajec now releases the language of light into motion and space, underscored by contemporary classical music.Based on the five-tone scale, five spectral colours enter Zajec’s instrument – the spectral modulator. Screens and panes provide for the materialisation of colour planes and surfaces that don’t blend with each other. The music is modulated into light through a real-time programme. For Zajec it is not about music animation, it’s about creating a new language that would integrate music and colour.

26 With the help of a modulator, Moholy-Nagy made a film Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiss-Grau in 1930, a film primarily envisaged as the last, sixth part of an unrealized project for a “new space-time”.

27 Dubravka Djurić, Miško Šuvaković, Impossible histories: historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991. MIT Press 2003.

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Like in other, earlier programmes that he had designed, Zajec once again decid-ed to articulate a language based on musical harmony: “There will be only panes and light, something never seen before,” he says. “Social media today is the most prominent result of the development of new technologies,” he adds, “but their domination has turned the computer into mere background, whereas in reality this machine is something we should understand first and foremost emotionally and in all other possible dimensions. The complexity of the machine we have made is so enormous that we shall need another few decades before we can understand it. Never before have we had the technology that would provide for so much. So I’m really happy that we have made this machine in all its complexity, that the team and I have realised the idea that I was planning for decades.”28

Dr. Petja Grafenauer (1976) is a freelance curator, writer and lecturer on contemporary art. Her main interest lies in contemporary painting and its integration with other dis-courses, as well as the history of the construction of regional artistic discourses of the 20th and 21st century. Since 2005 she has been lecturing on the history of contem-porary art at the School of Arts of the University of Nova Gorica. The editor of Likovne Besede journal since 2009, she has been writing critical, expert and original scientific papers for national and international media since 2001. She has been a curator in a number of group- and independent exhibition projects of contemporary artists and tak-en part in retrospective exhibitions in historic contexts. In 2013/14 she was employed as a curator at the City Museum MGML, Ljubljana.

28 Edvard Zajec, (unpublished interview), ibid.

SPECTRAL MODULATOR/ EDVARD ZAJEC | 1969 - 2014 | Treasures of Modernity collection | Author: EDVARD ZAJEC | Spatial hologram: MIHA TURŠIČ | Program-mer: SLAVKO GLAMOČANIN | Conceptualisation: DRAGAN ŽIVADINOV, MARKO PELJHAN | Contextualisation: PETJA GRAFENAUER | Producer: UROŠ VEBER |

Co-worker: BLAŽ ŠEF | Production: KSEVT, ZAVOD PROJEKT ATOL | Project sup-ported by: MINISTRSTVO ZA KULTURO REPUBLIKE SLOVENIJE, OBČINA VITANJE | More at: WWW.KSEVT.EU/ZAJEC