Just a quick minisite release for the upcoming (Liquid-horizons) exhibition at f|x|r gallery:
(3d teaser)
and a new article at kultura.hu
f|x|r 3D-Gallery-view
What Does It Mean to Be Inside an Image?
On immersion, presence, and why the frame had to disappear
Ivรณ Kovรกcsย ยทย ivo3d.com
From 19th-century panoramas to architectural video mapping: media artist Ivo Kovรกcs traces the history and theory of immersion and spatial presence.
I have spent the better part of two decades projecting light onto surfaces that were never designed to receive it โ cathedral facades, purpose-built sculptural objects, civic walls in the middle of the night. What keeps drawing me back to this practice is a question I have never fully resolved: at what point does a viewer stop looking at an image and start being inside one?
This is not a new question. It is, in fact, one of the oldest ambitions in the history of art.
Long before digital projectors existed, panorama painters in 19th-century London and Paris were building circular rotundas designed to suppress the edge of the canvas entirely. Visitors descended into a darkened room and found themselves, apparently, standing on a hilltop overlooking a battlefield or a city skyline. The frame had disappeared. What remained was the sensation of being there. We call this immersion โ and its logic has not fundamentally changed in two hundred years, even as its technical means have transformed beyond recognition.
What has changed is the relationship between the image and time. The painted panorama was static; you could look, but you could not influence what you saw. Contemporary immersive environments โ responsive, generative, computationally alive โ are constituted by the viewer’s presence within them. The work does not exist in a fixed state. It becomes itself through the body moving through it.
This shift carries theoretical weight. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the body does not observe space but inhabits it, he was describing something that immersive art now literalises: the dissolution of the distance between perceiver and perceived. Scale, acoustic depth, responsive light โ these are not decorative tools. They are the architecture of a different kind of attention.
Over the years I have tried to map this territory through my own practice โ at competition facades, at medieval churches, at purpose-built installations โ and through the theoretical frameworks that help me understand what I am actually doing when I ask a viewer to surrender their sensory horizon.
The Q&A below is an attempt to make that map legible.
โย Read: The Architecture of Experience โ 10 Questions on Immersion
LIQUID HORIZONS – 05.08.2026 @ f|x|r
text, video: Ivรณ Kovรกcs
music: Jรณzsef Iszlai
Essay about the upcoming immersive video-installation at gallery f|x|r
Synthetic Horizons โ On the Ontology of Computed Space
Liquid Horizons investigates the ontology of computed space: the condition in which a digital environment is no longer a representation of physical reality but an autonomous, self-generating field. Its looped panoramic field โ built from six visual stations โ follows no narrative. The glitch-laden digital threshold, the brutalist concrete labyrinth, the AI-generated biological vascular network, the pure geometric order, the spectral veils and the synthetic horizon do not supersede one another: they coexist as equal aggregates, folding into a single continuous event.
At the centre of the work stands the question of the oneiric sublimation of trauma. The brutalist scenes of the projection โ mirrored concrete stairwells, unfinished stadium interiors, corridors that lead nowhere โ carry the architectural imprint of contemporary wartime destruction: an algorithmic monument to the suspended future. Not as documentation but as weightless data-flow โ the software does not depict the destruction; it dreams it. Through this digital Traumarbeit, raw concrete is transmuted into a pulsating network, then into pure geometric order, and finally sublimated into the light-saturated data-aesthetics of the computational sublime โ without the loop offering redemption. The cycle closes on itself.
In Vilรฉm Flusserโs terms of the technical image: the light here does not arrive from sunlight but from global illumination algorithms; the texture of the canvas is definitively replaced by the texture of shader code. Through Gilles Deleuzeโs Le Pli (The Fold): matter is not a static object but an infinitely modulable event โ brutalist enclosure and liquid freedom constitute a single topological unity. In Marcos Novakโs liquid architecture: digital space severs its relationship with gravity and function to become pure mathematics and sensation.
The workโs visual register is determined by three distinct image-making logics in simultaneous operation: real-time rendering (NotchVFX), AI-mediated style transfer (Stable Diffusion), and digitally processed built spaces. There is no sharp boundary between the three layers โ and this is itself the workโs argument: in the era of the computed image, the distinction between โmanualโ and โautomaticโ image-making ceases to hold.
After the model of Marc Augรฉโs non-places: the projected environment withholds every conventional marker of human orientation. There is no door, no path, no graspable surface. The visitorโs own body remains the sole subjective fixed point within this amorphous, post-anthropocentric data-landscape โ whose horizon does not separate sky from earth but unifies them as a data-plane.
360ยฐ immersive video installation โ 17สน 20สบ videoloop, โ f|x|r galรฉria โ 05.08.2026 โ location: Vรกr u. 17., Veszprรฉm, Hungary, Europe
Inventions (Rubik’s cube)
Inventions โ Stories of Hungarian Genius
Location: CODE Center of Digital Experiences, Veszprรฉm, Hungary
Opening: February 20, 2026
The screening, which combines the work of several creators, features five Hungarian inventors and scientists: Ernล Rubik, รnyos Jedlik, Albert Szent-Gyรถrgyi, Katalin Karikรณ, and Jรกnos Neumann.
At the request of Centrum + Colloc Production, I created the section presenting Ernล Rubik’s most famous invention (Rubik’s cube).
Director, art director: Dรกniel Besnyล, Mรกtyรกs Kรกlmรกn
Editor: Gรกbor Tarcsay
Music: รron Pfitzner
Narration text: Krisztiรกn Nyรกry
Narrator: Norbert Tuza
