One has to be very careful and avoid overtheorizing. Now, the experience of the viewer is another issue. The phenomenon of experience is undoubtedly temporal. To me the real challenge is in changing things at a physical, material level, because it is there that you change the world itself. So, what I am talking about is that, here, in my holopoetry, the temporality is internal to the artwork itself at the very level of its structural organization — not a metaphor. This kind of radical and literal materiality is intrinsic to my work.

T.H.: Maybe this idea that the temporality of a painting is only metaphorical is a point I cannot completely agree on, but let us again talk about early modernism and an artist whom I think you appreciate: László Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy is very often seen as a founder of early modern aesthetics, he was already part of the Bauhaus in Weimar in the 1920s, but he is also a pioneer of an aesthetic worldview that is very close to yours, I think. Is he not? When I think about his telephone pictures or his writings, or his book Vision in Motion, for example. [3]

E.K.: Moholy was one of those artists that fully understood the time he lived in and worked very coherently and consistently to change it, to make it go in a different direction, sometimes even ahead of himself. You look at the Telephone Pictures, which he made in 1922. In his autobiography, Abstract of an Artist, which is not exactly an autobiography, but as close as he ever got to one, he says that it was like playing chess by correspondence. But then in his most important work, his last book, he does not even mention that work. He was so much ahead of his time and so much ahead of himself that he could no longer see its relevance—perhaps because that work had no continuity. Before his death neither him nor anybody else continued to create works with telecommunications media. There was, perhaps, the impression that it was not important anymore because it did not have a great impact in his own time. And he didn’t go back to it. He went back to a lot of different works of his own, but not to this one. Moholy unfortunately is thought of as a technophile when in reality he considered technology in a very organic way. Recent scholarship by Oliver Botar has shown that Moholy’s was a biocentric constructivism. [4] Moholy was very interested in the biological theories and philosophies of his time and rather than being obsessed by technology, he found in technology the only means through which he could make works that simply could not exist before. The Light-Space Modulator took eight years of work. So what I find interesting in Moholy are not his solutions, not the specificity of this or that work he made, but his attitude of freeing himself from tradition.