Fugue Opus 1 in Black, White, and Gray

Fugue Opus 1 in Black, White, and Gray (A Tribute to Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Norman McLaren) is a digital animation conceived as a contemporary reactivation of a seminal moment in the history of visual and computer-based art. Created for the Wi-Fi Gallery Grey Area in 2026, the work revisits and extends the conceptual and formal investigations initiated in the early 1970s through the series Hommages à Khlebnikov.

The series, begun in 1971, consists of thirty original prints on listing paper conceived as scores,  both visual and procedural. These works functioned as generative documents, serving as the basis for compositions realized across various media between 1972 and 1985, characterized by sharply contrasting chromatic structures and systematic variation.

Central to the animation is the reconstruction of a graphic produced in 1972 using the silkscreen technique, widely regarded as one of the earliest visual artifacts derived from the transformation of literary text into digital binary code. The original paper-based record consists exclusively of ones and zeros, black squares on a white ground, arranged in a 36 × 44 grid corresponding to a 6-bit digital structure. This matrix translates language into a modular visual system, positioning the poetic text as both source material and algorithmic substrate.

The work draws on the poem Conjuration by Laughter by the Russian Cubo-Futurist poet and theorist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), inventor of the Zaum transrational language, here mediated through the 1967 French translation by Luda Schnitzer. By subjecting Khlebnikov’s linguistic experimentation to early computational logic, the work establishes a dialogue between avant-garde poetics, postwar abstraction, and the emergence of digital aesthetics.

The Hommages à Khlebnikov series was exhibited in 1973 at Tendencies 5 in Zagreb, within the section Computers and Visual Research, situating it firmly within the critical framework of the New Tendencies network. Fugue Opus 1 in Black, White, and Gray rearticulates this historical lineage in the present, foregrounding questions of notation, translation, and temporal displacement, while reaffirming the enduring relevance of early experiments at the intersection of art, language, and computation.

The exhibition can be accessed through personal mobile devices at Korčula’s St. Mark's Square. This digital art presentation format is organized by the grey) (area and realized in cooperation with the Korčula Town Museum and Format C. The Wi-Fi Gallery grey) (area has been set up on Pivilion, a free and open operating system developed by Dina and Vedran Gligo of Format C. The wireless local area network (WLAN) is freely available and introduces digital artwork automatically, without a password or further action, to anyone connecting with the Wi-Fi network.