Monday, November 08, 2004
Dr. Hugo Museums of the Mind
In our minds we have private virtual museums, silent places for our memories, imagination and dreams
Belgian painter, multimedia artist and a theorist of new media. Born in Antwerp, where he lives and works. From his earliest work, Dr. Hugo explored the experience of synesthetic perception, bridging real and virtual space. His art practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, film and digital media. In his online project Museums of the Mind he continues his research, theory and experiments on the telematic future of art, the senses & synesthesia.
Originally, Dr. Hugo opted for a musical education, but transferred to the visual arts. He graduated from the Royal Academy and became a laureate of the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. In addition, he studied nuclear physics during one year at the State Higher Institute for Nuclear Energy in Mol. He received a doctoral degree, PhD in art sciences, magna cum laude, from the Universidad de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife with a thesis on ‘Art & Computers: an exploratory investigation on the digital transformation of art’. In 1995 he coined the terms ‘tele-synaesthesia’ and ‘post-ego’. Since 1993 he is a working member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Brussels. Since 2000, representative of the Belgian Synaesthesia Association. He is currently professor at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts, Antwerp.
During the sixties, Dr. Hugo profiled himself as an avant-garde artist with ‘happenings’ film- and video experiments. In 1970-73 he made a ‘Continental Video & Film Tour’ with his Mobile Museum of Modern Media through Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands. For his ‘Street-life’ paintings, he was elected laureate of the ‘Jeune Peinture Belge’ (1974) at the Palais des Beaux-arts, Brussels. In monumental series on ‘Water’, ‘Light’, ‘Time’, ‘A Vision is Finer than a View’ and ‘New Models of Reality’, Dr. Hugo paints the existentially tension between between ideas and images; an appeal to several senses at once — “I bring the visual and the conceptual, synesthetically closer together”. For Dr. Hugo ideas are tools; his personal approach to surface, texture and colour contributes to the possibilities of painting, and the adventure of the visual arts.
Online since 1995, Dr. Hugo became one of the pioneers in Net.art. He participated in 1988 at the ‘First International Symposium on Electronic Art’ (FISEA) in Utrecht. In the Fuzzy Dreamz series, a work in progress since 1996, he transforms his painting experiences into digital media and vice versa. He took part in various Net.art projects, including the online exhibitions, Digital Studies: Being In Cyberspace ‘ALT-X-site’ (1997) New York and ‘Revelation’ ISEA 2000, Paris. His works have been presented in major international exhibitions ranging from Antwerp, Brussels, Basel, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona and Chicago to the Biennale of Venice.
http://www.doctorhugo.org/index.html