TRANSPARENT SOUND 2025 | Filmclub - Infermental and audiovisual and spatial acoustic experiments from the 1980s

27 January 2025. 6:00 pm
Budapest Music Center - Library
1093 Budapest, Mátyás utca 8.

(Hungarian language program.)

As its subtitle proudly proclaimed (The First International Magazine on Videocassettes), Infermental was the world’s first—and one might add, only—international audiovisual periodical distributed on videocassettes, published between 1981 and 1991. This cultural and technological experiment, with its unconventional format, remains a unique phenomenon, apart from a few other, mostly non-international, attempts. Defining Infermental’s exact format is not a straightforward task. The magazine, in the 1980s, simultaneously operated as an information service, a communication channel among alternative media institutions, groups, and scenes worldwide, a snapshot (“encyclopedia”) of the contemporary global audiovisual culture’s artistic and alternative trends, an alternative transnational economic and distribution model, and a cultural movement, network, and media-technology phenomenon with its own unique “hype.” Retrospectively, Infermental can be seen as a kind of pre-internet video-sharing platform, blending elements of publishing and video/film distribution practices of its time.

The Hungarian significance of Infermental lies in two key aspects. Gábor Bódy, a pivotal figure in Hungarian avant-garde film, was its principal initiator, and his then-wife, Dr. Vera Bódy (Baksa-Soós Veronika), later became the magazine’s chief organizer. This connection led to Hungarian submissions being disproportionately represented in the 10+1 issues of Infermental compared to the actual scale of Hungary’s late-Kádár-era alternative media culture and video art scene. Within the framework of the Átlátszó Hang New Music Festival, Infermental gains historical relevance as its issues served as platforms for numerous audiovisual and spatial-acoustic technological experiments, as well as music videos from alternative bands. From today’s perspective, the Infermental videocassettes stand as valuable archival records of the era.

As part of the Átlátszó Hang New Music Festival’s film club, András Keskeny will give a lecture and screening about Infermental. Keskeny studied film studies at ELTE, artistic photography at MOME, and cultural studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Between 2015 and 2018, he was a collaborator on the interdisciplinary cultural studies research project Photo-Objects at the Berlin State Museums, and from 2017 to 2019, he taught at Humboldt University’s Institute of Cultural Studies. Between 2022 and 2024, he has been lecturing across multiple departments at ELTE and at the Eötvös József Collegium’s Social Science Workshop. From 2024, he will pursue a PhD jointly at Bielefeld University and Szeged University, focusing on the cultural history of Infermental as his dissertation topic. His broader research interests include the alternative media practices of the 1970s and 1980s, music video culture from the 1980s to today, and the cultural studies aesthetics of contemporary audiovisual culture.

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