The Adventures of Tom Tomiczky in the Realm of Machinic Vision and Bodily Engagement

Tamas Waliczky’s creative tool is the computer, and his preferred medium of expression is animation. The subject of his projects is in one sense the dynamics of the digital interface, how the computer “sees”—and how the technology’s default capabilities can be modified to produce forms of vision that are distinctly different from the normal visual perception of human beings, and representations that generate alternatives to linear perspective. His artworks require, in addition to a visual encounter, a bodily engagement with perspectival universes deliberately configured to contradict our normal understandings of space and time. Waliczky’s recent work, The Adventures of Tom Tomiczky (2011) is superficially more immediately approachable and apprehensible than are many of Waliczky’s previous projects, in that it encourages a more conventionally cinematic form of engagement. This essay situates Tom Tomiczky in relation to Waliczky’s previous work, and considers the film’s status within contemporary experimental computer animation.