START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

A performer, designer and artist working with an arsenal of interactive software, Ondrej Vozárik started to create his very videos at the age of thirteen. He later purchased a professional video camera which he used to help him get into the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. He views himself as a 3D artist focused not only on the moving picture, but on a broader range of production including performance, interactive productions and sculpture. The installation of his graduate project, which connects the object with the moving picture and sound, testifies to this. Employing ingenious technology, he places the voices of individual members of his family – recordings from conversations over Sunday roast – into the pots on the stove, which the viewer can hear after lifting the lids. The picture, as an accessory authentic scene, is simultaneously projected onto the head-up display on the oven window. The viewer unwittingly becomes a witness and member of an intimate family situation, familiar, yet distinctive and irreproducible; the family dinner table experience somehow remains impossible to communicate. The installation formed an all-embracing environment composed of several interactive objects that react to the spectator's interaction. The thesis author's great passion, cooking, is a remarkable and attractive aspect of the project. The graduate project, which contains a number coded, primarily and secondarily more or less clear messages, is devoid of prose and sends signals of honest creative interest to the spectator. (Lucia Gavulová)