Greetings from 3021, 2021
Title: Greetings from 3021 / Üdvözlet 3021-ből
HD digital video, digital graphics, animation – 1280 × 720 px, duration: 0’59”
Greetings from 3021 is a one-minute video piece that unfolds as a complex audiovisual composition, weaving together the visual imaginary of the present and a distant future (the year 3021) through an idealized, utopian sequence of digitally animated landscapes and sound-based montage. At its core lies a liminal space in which the natural and built environments, human presence, and ecological balance coexist in harmony, not in conflict – each complementing the other within an organically integrated system.
The work is anchored in the artist’s personal connection to place: the present-day landscapes depict the periphery of Budajenő, the artist’s native village – an archetypal rural Hungarian settlement nestled among wooded hills, with small farmhouses, a modest church, and old vineyards. The future iterations of the same scene envision a radically transformed yet surprisingly human-scaled environment. The futuristic structures function as self-sustaining, energy-generating residential colonies, whose forms evoke the aesthetic of mud architecture and Antoni Gaudí’s organic designs. Yet these architectural visions are not born solely from stylistic or historical references; they emerge from a performative method of randomized generation. During a period of street living in Barcelona in the mid-1990s, the artist mapped the nodal coordinates of imagined buildings using playing cards, allowing the logic of chance to shape the architecture of a speculative future.
The video adopts the form of a digital postcard: the animated paintings appear as greetings sent from both the present and the imagined future. The vision it conveys is not a technocratic utopia, but rather a restrained, gentle world built on mutual respect between human and nature – an optimistic scenario in which ecological awareness and technological advancement are not mutually exclusive.
The soundscape reinforces this ethos through a subtle and immersive atmosphere. Field recordings of native animal voices – inhabitants of the actual landscape – serve to bridge the gap between the digital and the organic, the imagined and the real. Hovering in the sky are planetary bodies modeled after the Spidron, a spatial geometric structure invented by Hungarian designer Dániel Erdély. These symbolic Spidron-planets reflect the artist’s commitment to scientific and interdisciplinary creativity as a foundation for future resilience. As a recurring motif, the Spidron signifies not only innovation, but also intellectual autonomy – both of which are central to the aesthetic and critical horizon of the work.
Greetings from 3021 is a sensitive yet conceptually robust reflection on the future as possibility. It is not an escapist gesture, but a critique of the present and a proposal for its transcendence – articulated through a visual language that is at once deeply personal, technologically informed, and ecologically attuned. The work draws upon play, chance, marginal experience, and the enduring hope for a post-industrial future. And it does so while reminding us: even utopias are houses of cards, easily swept away by nature’s slightest breath – unless we choose to care for both our dreams and the Earth that sustains them.
Click to watch the audiovisual work in full