The Garden Of Electric Delights

The garden of pleasure and torture that the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch conceived and visualized as a surreal triptych over five centuries ago was given a beautiful title by posterity: “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Billy Roisz has given her latest production a variation on this name, and it is a logical one: her Garden of Electric Delights offers pleasures that seem less earthly than “electric”.

A grey ball of confusion approaches, in which immaterial signals dance a kind of micro-organic spectral tango. Color seeps into the field of vision; the vertically placed red, blue, and green tones are kept in motion by the interference signals from analogue aparatus. A vague division of the field of vision into three parts becomes noticeable. The music oscillates between field recording, vintage electronics, and noise.

Billy Roisz loves the materiality of her art, its synaptic and physical effects. The video signals are precisely interconnected with the audio impulses, and through the complex design of the color surfaces, Roisz penetrates deeply into the virtual fabric of her abstractions, giving them spatial presence. The forms and structures are continuously changing: The Garden of Electric Delights plays a metamorphological game with electrically induced, sensually activating maneuvers.

Behind the aestheticized flickering and twitching of the image lines, a nocturnal animal and plant world soon becomes perceptible, while it remains acoustically artificial. The synthetic chirping of the bird surrogates and the call of the machinic owl resound through a forest illuminated by dim light. The finale belongs to the textures of reptilian horn scales, skin growths, cell division and alien design animations. Rapidly fading natural scenery, lying before us in the pale light between night and day, concludes this journey into the endangered wonder world of color and form diversity. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: John Wojtowicz