Staff Profile

I'm a part-time (0.25) Lecturer in Moving Image in the Fine Art department. Otherwise, I'm a video artist working with animation and game-like landscapes and structures, often games proper. My practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating 'real' and 'fictional', and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. My research is informed by queer theory, Japanese subcultures, fandom particularly in the context of trans-cultural exchange and collaborative creativity, and the radical potential of animation. I'm always about to talking about animation, Thomas Lamarre and/or trains.

As my background, I hold a BA Fine Art degree from Newcastle University (2013-2017), and following graduation I was a recipient of the MEXT Research Scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture, where I spent two years developing a body of video work while at the University of Tsukuba in Japan (2018-2020). I am now based between NE England and Japan, mostly engaging in artistic activities, but also sometimes pretending to be a curator/writer. I'm the co-author/editor of WEEB THEORY, a book about the overlapping area between artists’ moving image, games and anime (published by Banner Repeater, London 2023). My video and game works are frequentily exhibited across the UK, continental Europe and East-Asia - see the 'Research' tab or my website for up-to-date details.

I speak Hungarian (native), English and Japanese; feel free to approach me in any of these languages.

My research is primarily practice-based, manifesting as video works, installations and/or games. Throughout my practice I use a virtual version of myself as a protagonist under the name of Yourself, who journeys through animatic realms. Yourself explores liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Following along the wobbly edges of memory, lived experience and the virtual, my practice is concerned with the areas where these categories meet and overlap, and the realms of experience that arise at the nexus of a screen and a spectator. In the work, the real and the fictional intersect in various ways: composed from numerous sources including IRL footage, machinima and hand-drawn animation, the imagery/aesthetics centres the precarious borderlands that the work aims to navigate. I am drawn to rail crossings, and similarly liminal spaces – sometimes as simple as a launderette, or as specific as real-life places featured in animated films and serving as anime pilgrimage sites.

These landscapes are made up of multiple layers, depicting realms that resist various supposed dichotomies – real vs not real, academia vs pop culture, here vs there. The camera follows Yourself’s tracks as they step past the limitations of these binary systems, lingering on the narrow space between dimensions that echo the constitutive qualities of animatic worlds – complex landscapes that allow for a distributed sight, drawing the human subject outside of itself. A body tied to animation posits a realm of possibilities: paraphrasing animation scholar Deborah Levitt, rather than inquiring into its relationship to the real, it may be better to ask what new territories may be opened up?

As an example, my most recent video work 'About their distance' (2023) explores the idea of a place that has become obfuscated with overlapping fictional realities, the concept of dreams within a sprawling metropolis, and how the human subject may come into interaction with a time and place that is outside of the "here and now". This artwork was commissioned for the exhibition 'Invisibles in the Neo City' in Tokyo, JP (Dec 2023-Mar 2024); as part of a project conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. You may watch the video HERE (click).

I also have a book! WEEB THEORY is a resource for artists encountering the dreamworlds of Japanese anime, video games, and comic books. It is also, however, a book about the broader conditions of animation and animacy, exploring the relationship between “life” and “image” in a hyper-mediated techno-political milieu. Edited by writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán, and featuring newly commissioned essays, artists’ texts, and interviews with leading practitioners and theorists in the fields of media, philosophy, and anthropology, WEEB THEORY asks:

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What does it mean to share our world so intimately with cartoons?

What kinds of life are made possible by the emergent vitalities of the animatic condition?

How might new considerations of empathy, queer desire, or communal responsibility emerge from our production of, or interaction with, animated entities?

Click here for WEEB THEORY details.

EXHIBITIONS IN RECENT YEARS

2024

都市にひそむミエナイモノ Invisibles in the Neo City, SusHi Tech Square, Tokyo, Japan (15 Dec-10 Mar)

I cried at the end of a manga, École municipale des beaux-arts / Galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, France (18 Jan-16 Mar)

Avatars and Alter Egos: Identities in the electronic realm, M+, Hong Kong (9 Jan-30 Jun)

Y: LAN party, Divadlo X10, Prague, Czechia (3 Feb)

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2023

The House of Plausible, Probable, Possible and Preferable Futures, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia

ZOR, Calm & Punk Gallery, Tokyo, JP

Openings !!! (solo show), Two Queens, Leicester, UK

Player Piano, The Art Station, Saxmundham, UK

The advantages of being boneless and incomplete, Banner Repeater, London, UK 

地平線に目を向ける Eyes on the horizon, The Fifth Floor, Tokyo, Japan

Alternate Presence, Seventeen Gallery, London, UK

クィアな地平線 Queer Horizons, 脱衣所 - (a) place to be naked, Tokyo, Japan

2022

多層世界の歩き方/Random walk on the multilayered world, ICC, Tokyo, Japan

Virtual Landscapes, Senne, Brussels, Belgium

Fission - The New Wave of International Digital Art, Guizhou Provincial Museum, China

How to win at photography, The Photographers’ Gallery, London

生命的なものたち Life/Likeness, NTT InterCommunicationCentre, Tokyo, Japan

Arthouses:REVISIT, Whitley Bay, UK

No Death, Just Respawn; Nitja Senter for Samtidskunst, Lillestrøm

See my website for a longer list.

You can also see a bunch of things written about my work by clicking HERE.

I'm mainly conducting one-on-one tutorial type teaching, and I'm also responsible for the Animation Forum, which combines hands-on workshops and technical instruction with a theoretical approach. I am also known to do talks about various aspects of my research with great enthusiasm.