Herczka, who attended the presentation, received four thousand euros for his production, which was established exactly one year ago. Then the artist charted Eindhoven, invited thereto by MAD Emergent Art Centre, which organizes Image Radio Festival every year. The artist toured the city on foot with a stabilized camera and filmed buildings, people, streets and houses. “I did not know Eindhoven, so I just followed my nose. In a way, the city guided me. Still, it is not just a matter of coincidence. I do know precisely what I want and what I get when I am filming.”

He captured the images with a so-called ‘slit scan’. This is a technique whereby images are built up with delayed shutter times. As a result you get a striking time difference between the beginning and the end point of the image. It is an application that is sometimes used in photography, but whereas an ordinary photo has two dimensions -height and width-, the slit scan has only one spatial dimension, which is height. The other dimension, time, becomes visible because it is rearranged according to a spatial dimension. A digital slit scan may be compared to a photo with just one row of pixels. Pictures are recorded in rapid succession and the rows of pixels are placed next to each other until an image is formed. In practice this results in wavy, undulating city images that are compressed or elongated. The alienating effect is somewhat comparable to the convex and concave distorting mirrors in amusement parks.

In the artist’s opinion, recognition is an important aspect of ‘Eindhoven’. City dwellers see their own living environment again from an entirely different angle. Places that people walk by unthinkingly every day suddenly acquire significance. New information is presented, a different perception is offered. According to Herczka, reactions from spectators demonstrate that the film is also interesting to see for outsiders. “You get a totally different sensation of time. It has a meditative effect.” (FvO)/.