István László
István László
Bio: István László is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sculpture, extended reality (XR), and archival data. His practice examines how digital objects, once embedded in networks of extraction, infrastructure, and computation, can be reconfigured as sites of reflection and public engagement. Through 3D modelling, game engines, and participatory interfaces, he creates data-driven artworks that translate environmental processes into spatial and embodied experiences. Rather than presenting data as abstract information, he treats it as material: sculptural, relational, and responsive. Biodiversity records, atmospheric measurements, and ecological signals become dynamic forms that unfold through proximity, interaction, and temporal change.
Artwork Description and Title of Work: Bedeguar
Bedeguar completes Signal Ecologies, a three-year investigation that uses insects as models for thinking about technological power. The series moved from parasitism (Ormyrus nitidulus, 2024), the one-sided taking that mirrors how platforms extract value from the people who supply it, through mutualism (Osmia caerulescens, 2025), an exchange that benefits both sides, to this generative case: the encounter between a gall wasp, Diplolepis rosae, and a branch of wild rose.
The work is a six-minute video and an augmented reality sculpture, shown together. In the video, the camera circles a rose branch with the slow attention of a researcher at a bench. The wasp arrives, settles, and begins an exchange with the plant whose chemistry neither organism controls alone. Out of it grows the bedeguar gall, a mossy, improbable structure that is part wound and part architecture, a habitat in its own right. Throughout, the image carries environmental and observation data, magnification and specimen identifiers among them: the instruments through which living things are turned into knowledge.
When the gall completes, the screen offers a code. Scanning it lifts the gall into the room at the scale of a monument, animated and walkable, so that the visitor has to move around it to see it. The act of looking changes hands: the visitor takes up the scientist's posture, but to wonder rather than to verify. Against a technological culture organised around extraction and control, Bedeguar holds up a relation that produces something new precisely because no single party commands it.
Website: istvanlaszlo.com
Instagram: @istvan__laszlo
Image credits: István László
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