Synthetic Reverb, 2018-2025

Mixed-media video installation, (oil on canvas, digital graphic and photography, glitch animation, screen-based work) – Painting: 500 x 400 mm; Video: variable duration (1–6 min), HD, 16:9 / 4:3

Bónyai Barbara’s Synthetic Reverb is a multilayered, intermedial work that engages with themes of memory, identity, and the existential anxieties of the digital age. At its core lies a classically rendered oil painting of an elderly man, executed in a style evocative of Renaissance portraiture. Yet this traditional image is only the starting point for a process-based transformation: the stages of the painting’s creation were meticulously documented, then animated and subjected to glitch-based digital manipulation, resulting in a video installation that traces both the emergence and disintegration of the figure.

The work exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach, merging painting, photographic documentation, digital animation, and conceptual installation. The sitter’s clothing – notably a knitted sweater reminiscent of late-socialist Hungarian fashion – introduces a deliberate temporal dissonance within the Renaissance setting, bridging personal memory with historical layering. Through this juxtaposition, Bónyai transforms the idealised past into a digitally fragmented present, using glitch aesthetics as both visual device and symbolic gesture.

Here, glitch is not merely an effect but a narrative strategy: the final collapse of the portrait serves as a meditation on the fragility of human memory, the instability of digital representation, and the liminal space between life, death, and remembrance. The piece powerfully evokes the transformation of the analogue real – the person, the painting – into a digital artefact, and reflects on how these artefacts mutate, decay, or re-emerge with altered significance.

The backstory behind the work adds an intimate, ritualistic dimension: the painting was commissioned by the daughter of the deceased man portrayed, as a means of preserving his presence. In this context, the image functions not only as representation but as a vessel of invocation – a private tool of mourning that becomes, through its digital metamorphosis, a public reflection on loss, presence, and transformation.

Synthetic Reverb straddles boundaries between genres, media, and modes of address. It combines conceptual clarity with emotional resonance, technical experimentation with poetic subtlety. The animation acts as a performative gesture: the viewer is not only presented with a final image but is invited to witness its gradual construction, dissolution, and transcendence. As such, the work offers a temporally expanded viewing experience – one that situates itself at the intersection of traditional and digital media, and redefines the visual language of remembrance.