András Blazsek

United States (residence), Slovakia (citizenship)
research interests: Environment, Sculpture, sound art, soundscape, sound architecture, media archaeology, sonification
en

András Blazsek (b. 1984, Dunajska Streda, Czechoslovakia) is a Slovak-Hungarian media artist who works in sound, sculpture, installation and environment. He works with media archaeology, and conducted a long-term research project on the instruments of scientist Royal R. Rife. His work currently focuses on sonification and reverse sonification, more specifically, the translation of sound into architectural environments.

               Blazsek studied sculpture at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and did postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He is a founding member of the artist collective Besorolás Alatt (Unrated) with whom he organized and co-curated the +3dB Contemporary Sound Art Festival in Budapest in 2009 and 2010. He has been hosted as artist-in-residence at Futura (Prague), Residency Unlimited (New York), and the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart). He has participated in exhibitions internationally, including shows at LACE Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Budapest, Media Park Cologne, KIT Düsseldorf and Školská 28 Gallery Prague. He has been funded by TMU New York, CEC Artslink, International Visegrad Fund and the Slovak Arts Council and was awarded the Baker Tilly Künstler-Stipendium 2020. From 2019 to 2021, he taught at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. He has recently joined the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo to work on a practice-based PhD and is developing research in sonification.

research

research expositions

  • ∂ Topological Landscapes (2021) author(s): András Blazsek published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    ∂ Topological Landscapes (2015–ongoing) is a multisensory environment that comprises three projects, all based on research into the controversial healing instruments designed by Southern California inventor Royal Raymond Rife (Nebraska, 1888–California, 1971). Rife’s early twentieth-century scientific work involved light microscopy, frequency theory, and the concept of pleomorphism, which he applied to study formal differentiation in viral cells. One of Rife’s aims was to develop methods and mechanisms that would allow him to use frequencies to kill viruses. ∂ (curly d) is the symbol for ‘boundary’ in general topology. In this research, it is employed as a mathematical symbol that links the study of shifting material surfaces with an inquiry into the fluctuating borders between art and science. It posits that abandoned possibilities in scientific error and failed experiments may harbour other futures. In its three projects, ∂ Topological Landscapes works with different technologies of reproduction using 3D animation, 3D printed sculpture, sonification, and prototype-making to explore findings from various attempts to replicate Rife’s instruments. The necessary information for creating these replications was gathered from the object archive of the Science Museum of London and from the two former sites of the inventor’s research: the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, San Diego, and the Linda Vista Hospital in Los Angeles.
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