MONA BIRKÁS
Mona Birkás was born in 1992 in Karcag and lives and works in Budapest. She graduated from the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2017. She is currently a student at the Doctoral School of the University of Pécs, her research topic is the role of augmented reality in fine arts. In her work, she examines the relationship between the digital and physical world, focusing on the user experience.
BUSY
2022
1:50
Augmented reality
The artwork called “Busy” is an augmented reality filter that can be accessed via Instagram. It was inspired by the loading icon of the Windows operating system, the hourglass. The hourglass, which was originally a physical object, entered the digital world, and since then it has embodied the waiting for background processes. The artist used 3D modeling and animation to put the hourglass into an augmented reality, which mixes the real and the digital world. The completed 3D model has both digital and physical properties and aesthetics. The created hourglass can be placed by users in any context in their own environment, so each appearance, each photo and video taken with it will be different.
The basic idea of Mona’s work comes with a Windows update, when suddenly an hourglass icon that she knew from her childhood reappeared. Mona tells the story: “I started using a computer when I was 5-6 years old and my favorite software was Paint. When I saw it again I started to think about how much my own perception of time has changed on the one hand, and how much the world has sped up on the other hand, largely thanks to technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years, however, my experience is that we are always waiting for something.
We are always waiting for something. We are waiting for the program we work with to open, we are waiting for dinner, the weekend, vacation, new opportunities, new excitement. We are waiting for our own avatar to load. We are getting busier and busier, we use efficiency-enhancing applications, we try to optimize everything, including ourselves. We live in symbiosis with digital technology and cannot exist without it. The line between reality and virtuality blurs and becomes irrelevant. Our thoughts, desires and actions fall apart into bits and get mixed up with other people’s, feeding databases, getting into an endless cycle, optimizing and speeding up our lives. But we still have a little time to enjoy the loading screen while the machine calculates in the background.”
