Milan Guštar´s intervention at the Holešovice railway station is visually very simple. Twenty-four half-white and half-black cylinders, originally used for train timetables, have been displayed in their original position at the beginning of the insttallation and changed through the interference of visitors (what is there, where we cannot see?) into a dynamic visual system with an endless number of variants of actual ratios of black and white surfaces.
If we apprehend intervention purely optically, it may remind us, for instance, of the kinetic reliefs by the Czech sculptor Radek Kratina, where the viewers also create an actual appearance of the visual system (but in Kratina´s work, unlike in the work by Guštar, the sensual part dominates over the conceptual part, we shall not find any symbolic layers which are surprisingly so frequently present in Guštar´s work.) Should we seek for more sophisticated comparisons let´s mention some concepts of American minimalist sculpture – e.g. Sol LeWitt´s Incomplete Open Cubes. However, Guštar´s installation includes a complete account of states of an enclosed system only latently, in the viewer´s mind, while the chain of realized possibilities is unique and unpredictable. Instead of following variants of visual appearance, Guštar´s Fuzzy Logic leads us to a complex image of a causal chain within the framework of an enclosed system. The focal point of the viewer´s experience (in Guštar´s work often the listener´s experience) is based on the confrontation of the integral idea of the process, whose visual or acoustic part is just one of its many possible demonstrations, with the actual state of the installation. The artist´s main means of expression are music and sound, and in this intervention he handles the visual environment in a similar way.
The states between two extreme variants (totally black and purely white), which at first the viewers tend to feel as chaos, are links of a logical chain (if there was a camera recording the gallery, we would get a fixed trajectory of changes), whose variants, with view to their endless number, have a zero probability of occurence – and yet they occur. The changeable installation is a visual presence of the principle of fuzzy logics, which unlike the classical sentential logic, works with only two values –true and false, in written form usually seen as 1 and 0 (in the installation black and white evaluate propositions according to their truth and may work with all values of the interval 〈0; 1〉 (all the black – white interstates of the installation).
Milan Guštar is an organologist, music composer, programmer and he makes electronic and electroacoustic devices. He is concerned with interdisciplinary research bordering on science, technology and art.
