MA Course: ‘Theory and practice of digital media’

I am leading a course as guest lecturer this spring at MOKK Centre for Media Research and Education of Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

The master students, mainly with a major in communication and media studies, will join and assist in the research of The Format Project.

In the first lecture I touched upon the socio-political relevance of collaboration and cooperation methodologies. I highlighted that we need social systems that make people feel engaged and motivated to contribute to common good. Such systems have to be designed, often from scratch, and technology has both an inspiring and an enabling role in this process. Thus, experimentation with collaboration methodologies is extremely important as they model new ways of social co-existence, cooperation and collaboration.

Air Project on [THE NEXT IDEA] blog

Since last year we started working on a speculative art installation which was just featured on Ars Electronica’s [THE NEXT IDEA] blog.

Air Project takes air as a metaphor for access to resources and reflects on a future in which fresh air has become extremely rare and valuable. The project addresses issues of ownership and access to the most basic of human needs in relation to our co-existence and puts visitors in a position in which they reflect upon these from a surprisingly intimate experience.

This project is not about air quality as such. It is about quality of access. The project addresses issues of owner-ship and access to the most basic of human needs in relation to co-existence.

It is an ongoing artistic research project developed by four of us: Jop Japenga, Melinda Sipos and Zoltán Csík-Kovács former colleagues at Kitchen Budapest and myself. ​​Our team is looking for partners and exhibition opportunities to present and further develop the project. So if you know any such opportunity, let me know.

Find out more about the Air Project website.

SubMap featured in Visual Simplexity

SubMap × UrbanCyclr project we did in a collaboration of Kitchen Budapest and UrbanCyclr was featured in a Visual Simplexity, a freshly released German-only book about visualizing big data.

 

UrbanIxD workshop in Split, Croatia

Last week I was invited to participate the UrbanIxD Advisory Board Workshop that run parallel to UrbanIxD Summer School. With talks of Liam Young lecturer at Princeton and AA, Susa Pop director of Media Facades Festival 2010, Andrew Shoben and Platforma 9,81’s Dinko Peračić, the event was a good opportunity to meet and network with people interested in the field of urban interaction design.

Why I particularly enjoyed being present at the event is that urban interaction design  concerns interaction between people and urban technologies, to which, in my interpretation, politics and social decision making processes and more broadly social co-existence and collaboration belong.

I made some notes of the event here, I published them below so you can take a look if interested.

Interviewed for D-News

I was interviewed, in relation to my lecture in Zagreb, by D-News, a paper published on the occasion of D-Day. As the questions by Bojan Kristofic asked about my professional background and main points of interest it made me reflect upon my work and activities.

While I was always obsessed with contemporary architecture my main point of interest has slowly shifted towards the digital world. It was during my studies when I started to recognize that my relation to the Internet is more than just an addiction. Slowly I got more and more interested in how the new digital dimension is affecting our everyday life and how it keeps increasingly shape our future.

Also I touched upon the new research project I work on.

The focus of my current research is about contemporary ‘formats’ in knowledge production and distribution, defining collaborative practices and working methodologies. These formats all imply a simple set of rules that help guiding and organizing the contribution of the many so that it takes a clear shape and becomes meaningful and valuable. I realized that some of these formats can be replicated very easily by adoption. And if we can use existing or invent new formats that spread not only internationally but domestically, among different disciplines and diverse cultures, than we can use this as a strategy to enhance discourse and collaboration on the societal level.

Read the full interview here.

Open Knowledge Festival, Helsinki

I am looking forward to join Open Knowledge Festival next week as I expect it to be this year’s flagship event and celebration of open culture. It is already heartwarming that the festival was organized by a set of communities around the world. I wanted to propose a topic stream – that of the issue of openness in architecture and urban design – but couldn’t make it to the deadline in June.

Anyway, I will be in Helsinki, from September 17th to 22nd, 2012 and look forward to meet like minded people, talk about our ongoing Remix Architecture project, and discuss the different layers of openness that occurs in everyday work. Drop me a line if you are in town.

Fröccs app available for iPhone and Android

We developed a tiny-shiny mobile app in honor of fröccs, the popular drink in Hungary. Wine spritzer, that’s what fröccs translates to, comes in different mixing ratios and there has always been a confusion in people’s mind about all the names and cultural stories linked to them.

In the past years fröccs has become trendier than ever. In a recent blog post by Dining Guide it was also called ‘the offline Facebook’ as it triggers social interaction e.g. a quick chat. The app is available for iPhone and for Android in Hungarian only. We are working on other features in the near future, including English language support. Stay tuned!

SubMap workshop at Science Gallery, Dublin

Kitchen Budapest will hold two 1-day workshops on 23-24 June 2012 (Saturday, Sunday, 12:00 – 18:00) at the Hack the City festival at Science Gallery, Dublin. At our workshop, participants will be able to create their own subjective maps of Dublin.

We are very pleased having been invited to Science Gallery’s flagship exhibition in 2012 among artists like Mark Separd, Julian Oliver or Evan Roth.

If you are around, make sure to come by, and say hello to my colleagues, or even participate. To learn more about SubMap, visit SubMap website.

Essay: Data Embodiment as a Strategy for Citizen Engagement

I was asked to write an essay for the upcoming publication ‘Beyond Data‘, co-published by Baltan Laboratories (NL) and Kitchen Budapest (HU).

In the essay I refer to the underlying politics of data visualizations, explore the meaning of sensuality and metaphors in physical data embodiment projects and their possible link with citizen engagement. I feature three great artworks as example projects, namely: the Soil Library project by Koichi Kurita; Murmur Study by Christopher Baker and  Márton András Juhász; Memorial for the Victims of 25 October 1956 Massacre by Ferenc Callmeyer and József Kampfl.

‘…in the example projects described above, there is an indexical-iconic relationship between the form of representation and the represented data. Soil samples physically represent soil colours, tweets are represented as if they are stored on paper in an archive, and bronze balls are embedded in walls as if they are the physical traces of the bullets fired in 1956.’

 

‘Their shared quality is that they not only appeal to the cognitive but also the sensual parts of our minds.’

 

‘While ‘traditional’ data visualisations emphasise the effectiveness of building understanding, physical data visualisations focus on the power of personal experience in the perceiver. Both are aimed at attracting attention but physical engagement also has the potential to trigger multiple senses in the perceiver, thereby making it an individual experience.’

The book, edited by Angela Plohman and Melinda Sipos, focuses on the recent collaboration between the two labs: a series of workshops in which Dutch and Hungarian artists and designers explored new ways of embodying digital data.

The book will be launched at Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) 2012, on 18 May 2012. More info. Don’t miss the panel discussion on lab collaborations just before the book launch.

 

 

SubMap x UrbanCyclr visualization launched

After meeting UrbanCyclr developers at last year’s Beyond Data workshop at Kitchen Budapest, we decided to collaborate on visualizing urban biking patterns in Budapest. Urban biking in my home city is becoming more and more popular every year and  I am happy to be part of this growing community.

Kitchen Budapest and UrbanCyclr teamed up to untangle the invisible pattern of bike traffic in Budapest. 100.000 kilometers of biking routes collected from individual bikers are overlaid on the city map. All distortions of the map reflect higher biking activity in the respective area of the city. 24h map animation reveals the daily biking patterns of a growing community of urban bikers in Budpest.

Urbancyclr application allows bikers to track their biking routes in the city. The individual routes are added to an aggregated map of the bikers’ community. 100.000 kilometers of biking routes have been collected from individual bikers since the launch of the app in 2011.

Submap is a unique tool to visualize geographic and time-based data on distorted maps. It has a huge potential in coping with data from a physically distributed network of independent sensors.

Credits:
Kitchen Budapest | Bujdosó Attila, Feles Dániel, Gergely Krisztián, Kiss László
UrbanCyclr | Füredi Gábor, Megyer László, Véhmann Ferenc
Music | Kiss László