Vákuum Tv

Vákuum Tv was not a television channel in the traditional sense, but a live show that ran in Budapest between March 1994 and December 1995 at Budapest's influential subcultural nightclub of the 1990s, Tilos az Á. Although pigeonholing the show into genres (i.e. interactive theatre, video cabaret, live TV) is somewhat pointless, it can be said that Vákuum Tv was a modern cabaret that mixed theatre with video, performance with television, games with art. Vákuum Tv transformed the solitary, home-bound ritual of watching television into interactive community television, setting the stage inside a giant TV set. It was an original and pioneering blend of entertainment that remains innovative today. László Kistamás' idea came to life in 1994 when he and Dóra Csernátony began production, and were soon joined by the other founding members. The core members of the group, Dóra Csernátony, Kristóf Forgács, Donáta Gajzágó, Dániel Garas, László Kistamás and Attila Till created more than 50 performances in total. Later Géza Fekete, Gyula Gulyás, Eszter Gyalog and in the last phase Ferenc Gróf and András Medvegy joined the group. Vákuum Tv later participated in several festivals abroad, including Next 5 Minutes, a tactical media conference in Amsterdam, the Fleche d'Or Café in Paris, and the U2 event series in Vienna. In the summer of 2000, Vákuum Tv staged two full evenings of entertainment, science and theatre on the terrace of the City Park Ice Rink. Transposing the concept of the Uránia Science Theater of 100 years ago into the present, the project presented the latest technical innovations and problems of our time in a novel, entertaining, theatrical form. Vákuum Tv opened the way to a new kind of intellectual journey. (Source)

From March of 1994, Vákuum Tv worked on a weekly basis in Budapest at the alternative entertainment venue, Tilos az Á, exploring cultural phenomena of the period from after the 1989 regime change, in which the transformation processes of everyday life, television and the quality of culture manifested in the form of an event-based, interactive art project. The crew worked with a mixture of moving image, sound and theatrical action, fusing them into theatre, cabaret, performance, revue and television genres. What emerged was more a live show, a montage of interactive performance mixed with video. The interplay of the genres in the context of the huge TV frame-display provided an opportunity to evoke and caricature the absurdity of the most influential medium of the time, television. Vákuum Tv events took place on Monday nights, a reference to the fact that until 1 January 1989, the state TV channel did not broadcast on this night. This created an empty evening, a vacuum in the entertainment of the country’s population.

The audience for the shows was made up of young intellectuals keen to embrace and shape the liberating atmosphere of the regime change, but foreigners open to developments in Eastern Europe at the time also joined the camp of interested viewers. The relationship between the audience and the creative community was characterised by how, in the flow of interactive performances, the consumer guest sometimes became a performer. Sudden self-organising processes, not only on stage but also in the auditorium, influenced the course of the pre-planned show. These situations forced the participants to improvise, to be alert and to interact in a concentrated and engaged way. Alongside their planned segments, the group reflected on the social and artistic transformations of the early 1990s through informal improvisational situations, mixing play and humour.

The existence of Tilos as Á was a constant subject of debate. Conflicts of interest arising from a series of public complaints, but even more so from the political lobbying of the district by rival restaurateurs, eventually made the club’s existence impossible. Tilos az Á, which opened at the dawn of the regime change on New Year’s Eve 1989, closed in 1995. As the ongoing event-based artistic activity of the Vákuum Tv group was closely intertwined with the Tilos az Á environment, the closure of the club also marked the end of the most productive period of cooperation of the Vákuum Tv project, a period of about two years, which had generated at least 44 individual, unique programs. After that, in 1996, the group performed twice more abroad, at the Next 5 Minutes, tactical media conference in Amsterdam, and at the La Flèche d’Or nightclub in Paris during the Hungarian Parallel Cultural Week. Subsequently, László Kistamás put Vákuum Tv on occasionally at various venues with a different line-up of performers for another two years, creating four independent shows for locations such at the 1997 U2 event series in Vienna, and the Budapest French Institute, as well as the Media Modell exhibition in 2000 on the Varosliget ice rink terrace, where the group presented two evening shows. (2022).

Publications

• Kristóf Forgács, A Vákuum Tv: intermediális performansz-kabaré 1994‒95 közötti időszaka, Budapest, 2022, 173 pp. PhD thesis. English summary. (Hungarian)

Links

• Website
• Youtube
• Vákuum Tv in NetArtDotHu archive