This is a flow of my published and unpublished texts on art&tech and media labs:

/Media Labs and Digital Culture

Attila Nemes

The Media Lab Highway

An Insight into My Study on the Multiple Impact of Media Labs

A video still from an ethnographic research on ‘using technologies’, in a Budapest kindergarten 2010

Having been one member of the founding team and working in Kitchen Budapest since 2007, then founding and directing OS Kantine from 2011 onwards, I have experienced and studied the ever-changing team environments of a lab of this kind. Understanding the impact of a media lab reaches beyond its production and everyday practice. The present summary is a preview into my ongoing research about the socio-economic and cultural impact of media labs by tracking people who have worked there. Kitchen Budapest and OS Kantine are my primary source of information, but I also present other cases, such as media labs that I have visited and collaborated with during these years, as well as some that I have not seen in person.

By defining and identifying the multiple socio-economic and cultural impact of media labs, we can create a clearer picture of the importance of these organizations and the widespread gains of this kind of investment, even if profit is not necessarily collected at the origin. For example, products like Prezi which are associated with media labs are primary and obvious signs of business potential of such environments - but we should look further.

When we talk about media labs in general we refer to a place, an organization, a workshop, or a team dealing with new media, web cultures, media art and all forms of intersections with technologies. Several conference papers and publications have addressed the educational impact of media labs, but the socio-economic and cultural effects of applied methods, as well as the ways of learning in ‘lab’ environments, remain undiscovered.

Some of the output of an ideation workshop at Kitchen Budapest, 2010

My primary goal is to define how knowledge and identity is created and distributed in media labs by conducting interviews with participants and researchers once they have moved on from these labs. By talking to people about their career and the ways they describe the importance of the lab, I expect to trace the impact of these organisations. By following individual careers, I will try to identify the ways they utilised this knowledge.

Most lab people also refer to these institutions as brands. Media labs become brands just like everything else, which is something I learnt during my time as communications manager at Kitchen Budapest from its founding until 2010. Tracing these brands is also an integral part of this project.

Moving on from this, I will identify the direct and indirect profits created through the work of these people by following what they do and create - and at the same time listen to what they emphasize, find important, consider relevant. At the moment I am sending out questionnaires worldwide and collecting data from all kinds of media labs to try and define certain categories by which I can classify my findings. There is also a parallel project that I have started called MAPPA; mapping these organizations by focusing on similarities and differences between their activity.

If interviews cannot provide sufficient data to support my proposed hypothesis, I will need to find further hard data to outline the actual impact of these labs (such as positions taken, successful products, exhibited projects, etc.). In this case the research will have to be extended with further data collection. If my hypothesis is not correct and media labs have no special socio-economic or cultural effects, I will turn to research and provide an explanation for their success and ever growing number in the past two decades. In this latter case, I will need to understand the reason they exist for and the ways they subsist.

Since this study is part of my PhD work at the Institute of Art Theory and Media Studies, ELTE Budapest and is in progress, I invite the reader join the process of understanding by reading and analyzing some of the essays and interviews with me.

Q&As

First, before we dig into the answers of the interviewees, let’s have a look at the questionnaire itself. My first questionnaire was quite long. In my calculation it would have taken two hours to answer all the questions and write two essays - one of them about the past, the other one about the subject’s expectations for the future. There were three groups of questions: group A referred to The Lab, group B referred to The Knowledge, group C for The Track (job and school history since the person left the lab). Out of the 30 proposed participants whom I contacted in the first phase, 20 answered positively and were supportive towards the research and 16 mailed back the answers for all my questions and wrote essays. One person seemed to be enthusiastic but did not have the time to answer. Three others who answered positively and were supportive towards the research were also available for an online interview, but had no time to fill in the answers. Ten people did not respond.

In the first phase of the research, I have collected information from the US, Canada, Hong Kong, The Netherlands, France, Spain and Hungary. Since this is an ongoing project, I have further steps to take and am just about to extend and mail out questionnaires to Australia, China, Japan and the CEE and SEE region. In a further round I will focus on media labs in Africa, Latin-America and India.

Buzzing collaboration

One of my basic questions was What was your role in the medialab? Most of the people replied very briefly (researcher, collaborator, etc) but some of the answers showed how complex it is to define an individual’s role in these extremely flat organizations. For example Jara Rocha, a brilliant cultural mediator from Madrid, writes

I started working at Medialab-Prado with an internship from the university, being a cultural mediator there for around 2 years. Soon my list of tasks became longer, and I assumed the role of coordinator in some concrete projects (Viernes Openlab, Gender and Technology Group, and the LabToLab network). Later on, our collaboration took the shape of concrete collaboration related to identifiable projects (given the unsustainability and precarity of maintaining the internship relation any longer). Hence, at the moment my relation to the project is based one side on the coordination of a monographic publication -within an academic magazine on digital culture and social movements- on the Commons Laboratories, and on the other side the eventual continuation of the Gender and Technology research group.

In close relation to the question above, the next one was: What is the most important method you have experienced?

Most of the answers to this question relate to collaboration, sharing and the restructuring of learning. Some answers gave insight into details - the ways workshops organized, executed, etc - but in general ‘collaboration’ was the key term. What collaboration means exactly? How can we describe methods around this buzzword that we have all used so often in the last decade? Let’s see some of the answers that went into detail to define what collaboration means in a media lab.

Hands-on collaborative activity with my students from the university, in Kitchen Budapest 2011

For example Nerea Calvillo, London-based experimental artist and architect specialising in new technologies and design tools, writes the following about her experience with methodologies in Medialab Prado:

First I would say that anything that I learnt in Medialab Prado was exactly a method, because the basis of the place, desired/designed or not, is in general based in un-structuredness (the rules of the game are hardly set up). From a curatorial and institutional perspective, I think they have developed a very "efficient" production workshop "methodology". They have developed the tools to gather people and allow them to work collaboratively and get certain outcomes. But it is a structure that can be repeated only under certain conditions and from my perspective there are still many aspects that would require to be defined and made explicit for this methodology to become a method.

She refers to the method as a “structure that can be repeated only under certain conditions” and “undefined”, yet “efficient” production workshop methodology, where they gather people and let them share knowledge and create.

When we talk to people working in media labs we often meet this kind of uncertainty. Unlike those in academic knowledge or industrial production, methods are not defined precisely in media labs. By visiting many of this organisations, one can easily discern similar yet-undefined methods based on collaborative / knowledge sharing ideas. By conducting interviews and collecting texts I will attempt to define the most important methods remembered and described by the respondents. I will also record whether these methods were used by the respondents in their further practice. This definitions can help us to build a transparent view and understand the effects of such labs on individual creative practices and work environments as well.

Ideation workshop in Kitchen Budapest, 2010

Let’s see what writer Catherine Lenoble says about her experiences with collaboration in PING, Nantes:

Working in a collaborative and networked environment means : 1/ there was no director, we were all contributing to orientate the projects and the organization 2/ I was working in an office with a team but always had the feeling to have also “colleagues” elsewhere through various ongoing collaborations in France and abroad 3/ I had the chance to write and launch projects following my intuition, experiment and learn a lot from that.

By using myself free software tools that I was not completely familiar with at the beginning, I had discover a “culture” on which my values are now based and that connects me to peers, not to say a “family”.

Reading through all the answers, my first impression was that collaboration in media labs should be understood as a flat, very loosely structured platform where knowledge can be acquired by sharing with others. Unlike traditional education where knowledge should be learnt “by the book” or from a professor in an auditorium where one speaks and many listen, knowledge in a media lab situation is treated like lego bricks: groups are working/learning around large tables seemingly unstructured, often involving virtual presence of people elsewhere. This also results in a huge variety of new combinations of knowledges and interests, since all can share and exchange with everyone else. For example, some can form a team and focus on programming, pets and writing, while others can combine programming with cooking, etc.

Using yogurt to describe ideas with my students from BUTE, in Kitchen Budapest, 2009-2010

In relation to methods and collaboration, my next question was aimed at identifying achievements (his/her or of the team he/she were involved in) which they considered very important / important / less important.

Since it is useful to see the interrelations of the answers to this question, I quote Catherine Lenoble again

To have raised awareness on digital culture / free culture at a local-regional level through projects developed locally and internationally; few years ago, it was hard to explain what we were doing (!) it seems that now people understand, follow and wish to contribute, collaborate and last but not least, support.

To have now a team of 6 full time employees, an active community taking part in the organization, some of them even having direct benefit (network, jobs, trainings, etc) ; when it started with 2 persons in 2004...

To have a solid network of partners developed and collaborators at a local and international level ; when the organization started initially with local-regional actions and a small network of peers-organizations in France - now there's solidarity and support as well as recognition coming from an extended network.

To have projects developed that are sustainable in terms of network, community, economy while the organization was always experimenting new ways of doing and new grounds : project in new territory, with new partners, on new subjects testing new technological devices and facing current political and societal matters.

All those achievements have been possible thanks to a free space of experimentation allowed in the organization for each one of the team and based on personality, intuition and motivation.

This text is a sneak preview from my research, so I cannot show correlations in detail, but I quote another answer here on the described impact of collaborative methods from Loes Bogers, ‘concept developer and communicator with a knack for managing interdisciplinary collaborative processes and (arts) education design’. She describes herself as a ‘pracademic in the field(s) of new media, e-culture, media arts and education’. I had the chance to work with Loes some time ago, and was impressed by her talent and knowledge in working with young people.

By answering the most important achievements of her/team, similar to most respondents, she refers to the success of collaborative methods, and the new ways of learning and creating by knowledge sharing described above. In her own words

very important:

Changing the mindset of a team of 8 arts teachers (from different disciplines) and coach them in such a way that they feel comfortable experimenting with strange technologies, to make them their own and use them in their own non-expert ways.

important:

Having two 15 year old boys organize their own robotics course and contest and making my organization realize that not all kids and teens need experts or teachers to learn things from. It can be upside down bottom-up inside out and a bit scary, but it doesn’t mean it won’t work.

less important:

Slowly gaining terrain when it comes to organizing the work- and development process. Learning to communicate with efficiency advocates about a project that is fundamentally open-ended and develops organically rather than systematically. This is difficult in a business environment where all systems seem to be geared towards efficiency. But I can now work in my own way. Even though colleagues don’t always understand how I do it or why it is the most productive, I seem to have gained enough trust and respect to not let this difference become a paralyzing problem in terms of management issues.

Again, an excellent example for the loosely defined methods is Loes’s description: ‘colleagues don’t always understand how I do it’. I should also highlight the way the notion of efficiency is used in the answer in relation to systematic vs. open-ended, organic.

I must remark that 90% of the answers for this question about achievements refer to the methods of sharing knowledge, community work experiences, the rewards of seeing others acquire new knowledge, eg. disciplines of technology, programming, etc. that are traditionally considered hard to learn by most of us.

Sound workshop in Nantes, 2011 (Part of the program organized by PING @ Lab2Lab)

I have to add that people with projects of business potential, had also answered similarly and many times ranked their business perspectives less important than experiencing the “societal effects” of their products. For this we should study further the notion of business, efficiency, product, etc in this context.

Cool places are hot! The lab as reference

In the first part of the questionnaire (part A The Lab) I also had questions referring to the use of the media lab as reference in one’s career such as Have you used the medialab as reference in your further job or other opportunity applications? If yes, would you mind sharing the relevant part of your CV, cover letter, resumé with me? Have you got any questions at the job / fellowship interview related to the media lab in question? If yes, please recall what seemed to be important information for the interviewee? or questions like this If hired / granted have you got any questions from colleagues / fellows related to your medialab history? If yes please recall what seemed to be interesting for them.

Out of 16 respondents of the first phase 14 answered positively about using the media lab as reference, one answered no, and one person gave an ambiguous answer to the question.

Compared to what I have mentioned and quoted above about collaboration, it is interesting that more than half of the relevant CVs show that people refer to their media lab work by market expectations and corresponding language without emphasizing collaboration or experiences with new methods. In the provided CVs I have found terms like:

Head of Software Development

Production coordinator

Production Assistant

Beyond Data workshop I. in Budapest, organized by Baltan Laboratories and Kitchen Budapest, 2011-12

Unlike CV fragments, extra information provided alongside the answers suggest that the media lab experience is considered as important and they tend to emphasize it in detail. The relatively poor and formal terminology of CVs leaves these experiences undefined. This reflects to a problem that can be read in the answers given to the question Have you got any questions at the job / fellowship interview related to the media lab in question? If yes, please recall what seemed to be important information for the interviewee?

We found that the job interviewee was interested and wanted to learn more about the subject in only one case, where the CV describes the media lab experience in detail. In cases where the CV referred to the position in the media lab the most formal ways - like project management - there were no questions from the interviewee - no wonder! For me, as someone involved and working in such organisations for a long time, this has been an important observation. There is no well defined terminology of what we do, and in such cases, for instance in the CVs mentioned above, this valuable information is hidden. Instead of formalizing the knowledge represented by these people there should be a wider understanding of these new forms of collaborative work.

It is important to mention the one case where information on prior media lab experience had been hidden deliberately in the CV and from the job interviewee. Why? In this case the subject was interviewing for a position in a startup company, a place where most of the people have some image of a media lab. The person wanted to hide this information and rather emphasize his programming and coding skills because he was afraid to be considered “arty” and “flaky” by being connected to this type of organisation. This points to another important issue, which will be studied in the second phase of my research project: How do media labs and new economies of the same root refer to and understand each other’s work?

Working on the project Based-on-Pig at OS Kantine

Knowledge in & out

In the second part of the questionnaire (Part B: The Knowledge), I was focusing on specific skills carried, learnt and distributed by these people. I wanted to collect information and have an insight into their personal development during the years they have spent in such organisations. I had questions referring to three specific moments: the time they arrived to the lab, the time they have left the lab, and the period of their subsequent career.

What knowledge you have brought into the media lab’s community when arrived?

Was this knowledge useful for the team? What knowledges / skills have you collected there? Please consider ranking them: very important skills I have collected are,

important skills I have collected are, less important skills I have collected are. Have you used this skills in your further studies / professional career? If yes please specify which skills you have used since?

Almost in every case respondents have listed a few very specific fields of knowledge and skills for the time they arrived in the lab, such as

film and video production,

physical computing

pcb design

data analytics

However, when answering for the question about the time they were leaving the lab, most people gave longer description of what they have learnt. Instead of specific and well-delineated skills, we find more references to knowledge as a general outlook or framework

open mind for design and social aspects of my projects

teamwork, brainstorming

I learned about cultural projects, digital media, startup companies, coworking spaces, or art'n tech projects, user-focused view on products.

coordinating teams and streamlining processes, thinking in action/thinking on my feet (acting upon situations as they happen)

working in the lab environment itself - discovering what a lab is and how it functions; the mentality, I learned how to assist with artistic research, production and co production of the lab's events, I acquired a different and more professional attitude towards colleagues, artists, workshop participants and students.

networked and collaborative work / sociology of organizations / free software culture / digital art history / animation and pedagogy / innovation and digital cultural policy / local development / cultural economy / editorial coordination

how to mediate within a very heterogeneous community. Use of tools to work on different layers of editable contents and processes. Wider notion and applications of F/LOSS, from software to cultural practices in general.

Next to the practical skills from soldering to a bit of programming, the most important knowledge I collected was that I learned a lot about myself…how I work in a team, how I deal with challenges and solve problems, or how I collaborate or react on different situations. A more ‘holistic’ result…, I can’t really separate into parts.

creative research approach

low-level hardware coding, building "stuff", interaction design theory, Arduino, processing, electronics, social studies, gender studies, documenting projects, cooking and music related skills.

working together with people in different disciplines. Sharing. Giving credit. Deal with artists :)

collaborative research method, open sourcing, project coordinating, software tools

The next step in the research project will focus on this specific question by conducting interviews with people about the knowledge they have acquired in these labs. As we can already see from these few answers above, these labs provide an environment for contemporary interdisciplinary learning. A major task here will be to outline the possible forms of collaboration between traditional forms of education and media labs. Most of these organisations have experience in collaboration with universities, high-schools, etc, which should be also studied and analysed.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

The third part of the questions (Part C: The Track) were focusing on the career of the subjects once they have left the media lab. I had questions like

Please list the schools / institutions / jobs you have been enrolled / joined / taken since?

Please specify the role / status of yours. Have you created any projects with an academic significance or business potential or cultural relevance? Please list all successful projects, works, studies you have created, being part of, contributed since.

Can you name any projects relates to you (your team) with a business potential? If yes please specify.

If you have created any projects with a business potential can you estimate the size of the business in 2 years? After leaving, have you provided your lab with any project opportunities? Have you received any awards, have been nominated, have been chosen to take part in a decision making board or any form of professional power?

What is your estimated annual income? What do you consider the most important / powerful / successful achievement of yours? How many times do you travel more than 500 miles for academic / business reasons? How many publications you have submitted since you have left the lab? and so on ...

Besides income and success, I also included questions about everyday life, as well as basic information about social background and standards of living, for instance What is your current place of stay? Do you live alone / family or with fellow students / colleagues? etc.

As the data thus far collated is not yet sufficient to support overarching conclusions, on the basis of the information presently available I can indicate the outcome of Part C through providing ballpark figures without comments:

In general, all of the respondents are in a higher position, better funded, and better equipped since they left the lab (average time since leaving the lab is 2 years). The smallest yearly income is c.14 000 Euros, the highest is c.120 000 Euros, the general yearly income is around 35 000 Euros (the respondents are average 25 years old). Half of the respondents live on their own, some of them with partners, some of them with fellow students/colleagues. Most of them travel 5-10 time a year more than 500 miles for academic or business reasons.

The essays

Finally, I asked all subjects to write two essays, one in a retrospective manner on their career in the lab [A], the other one more about expectations, future plans [B].

In the following, I will introduce this essays and give insight into two specific methods out of the many I used in this analysis. Instead of comments, I will highlight facts and ideas that I am going to study further.

I categorised and numbered all the texts and I refer to the essays by numbers. The full essays can be found in the last section of my article. The names of the respondents are listed at the very end of my text. The ones allowed their name to be published appear with the number of the related text (in brackets), others remain anonymous.

Due to limitation of space and the research being presently in progress, I selected only essays referring to European labs. A large number of answers are grouped around Kitchen Budapest (Budapest, HU), MediaLab Prado (Madrid, ES), and some individual answers refer to PING (Nantes, FR), Medialab Amsterdam (Amsterdam, NL), Digital Art Lab (Zoetermeer, NL), Baltan Laboratories (Eindhoven, NL), The Patching Zone (Rotterdam, NL). My further study will include publishing similar texts about labs on all continents.

I have analysed the essays from different perspectives. Here, I will emphasize the correlations between the retrospective essay [A] and the writings on future expectations [B] in terms of lab identity - the notion of how the media lab is contextualized and shaped. I will also give an insight into these writings through the titles I have used to characterise them.

What do we call a “media lab”?

The notion of media lab outlined in the essays were written in answer to the following questions: Please write a short essay (300 words max.) on the role of the media lab in your career and Please write a few sentences (100 words max.) on your future plans (related to profession or academic career or both). I was also able to connect relevant answers from the questionnaire (see above: A The Lab, B The Knowledge, C The Track). In the following I will display the results and explain my first analytical method.

I collated adjectival constructions for each respondent, i.e. sentences referring to the notion of the media lab in his/her future plans [B] and in his/her experiences in the past [A].

I also checked the answers from A,B,C categories of the questionnaire and add relevant lines to the list. Where future plans [B] were in contradiction to the retrospective essay [A] or to the answers given in in categories A, B or C, I used the notions of the stronger argument. I have used the list of all collected referential sentences to create a Wordle cloud. The four major words in the cloud characterizes the type / notion of the lab. In case (1) it is

transdisciplinary - social - collaborative - research

I continued in the same manner in all cases. Here are some different types of findings:

transdisciplinary - social - collaborative - research

transdisciplinary - innovative - artistic - inspiring

products - programmers - develop(er) - idea

products - programmers - online - business

problems - knowledge - people - solve - skills

art - network - bridge - participate

writing - publishing - novel - digital

research - technologies - experience - ideas

cultural - ecosystem - research - mediating

creation - projects - world

people - freedom

Ideation process in the kitchen of Kitchen Budapest, 2009

People in the labs

A large number of essays (altogether apx. 200-300) need to be classified before any comparative analysis. I also analysed and categorized the texts by ‘imaginary titles’ referring to the professions characterized in the essays. I categorised each text by the most significant role the respondent characterizes his/her work with, both in the lab and in the anticipated future.

The Lab Creator (1)

The Teacher (1)(5)(6)(8)

The Visionary (1)(7)(8)(10)(12)

The Hacker (2)

The Businessman (2)(3)(4)(9)(13)(14)

The Student (2)(3)(6)(8)(12)(15)

The Academic (5)(14)

The Activist (11)

The numbers in brackets refer to the identification number of the texts below. Each text separated into two parts, the first is the retrospective essay [A], the second part is about future expectations [B]. Some essays were categorised under two or three titles because of their mixed character. This also helped to reveal correlations between seemingly contradictory characters. For example someone who emphasised his hacker identity in the past “became” a businessman in the future. Since the answers to the questionnaire and the two essays refer to three different periods in time (the time of arriving to a media lab environment, the time of leaving and the time passed since) it is possible to compare the change / similarity of identities through related descriptions.

In addition to the professions specified directly I took into account the cross-references of the essays and the answers to the questionnaire too. This aggregation helped to draw large circles or areas where further exploration will be necessary. Each title covers a whole set of ideas, visions and actions. The following essays are perhaps best understood through these sets of categories .

For example, in The Businessman category we find hints for new business models, new attitude, new ways of understanding production and profit, visions of future markets or new business management ideas.

A future set of interviews with representatives of each category is necessary to gain deeper understanding of statements, such as

to build great businesses and world-changing products

building an online product from there that addresses the worldwide market but uses the local talent pool

and be an entrepreneur with interesting and cool projects

Continue developing my business as both a creator of progressive content as well as strategic consultant of how to use that content for commercial purposes.

build a company that will help people sell their stuff online from their phone

What is next?

By giving an insight into my research I hope I was able to illustrate the potential impact, which should be studied further. I have been focusing on media lab practice for years and started this research in 2011 but I still meet undiscovered areas. I have a growing to-do-list for the next few years and hope I will be able to understand the complex socio-economic and cultural impact of media labs.

Essays:

(1)[A] I became first fascinated by media labs when returning from my internship from Philips Design, The Netherlands. As a product designer interested in experimental design and design research, I realized how important it is to mix disciplines in order to come up with playful and critical innovation that can be tested within the lab and then in public. Also I realized how much a transdisciplinary lab helps to bring these innovations on a higher, conceptual or academic level later on. During Kitchen Budapest I learnt to work with people sharing thoughts, motivation and workspace, in order to tackle societal phenomenons in a collaborative, bottom up way. By traveling and meeting other labs such as MediaLab Prado and Baltan Laboratories through KiBU helped me to define my own design career and studio in 2012.

[B] My future plans - As product designer and researcher I plan to develop critical scenarios and methods to explore social structures and identities. I will do this with a focus on cultural content and initiating transdisciplinary collaborations as design researcher and concept developer. Recently I started to teach design research as a guest lecturer at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Department Product Design. There I am motivating students to share their thoughts, research questions and research fields with active brainstorm setups. In a few years, my plan is to operate as a mobile lab that is both busy with initiating projects, collaborating with like minded professional and provides knowledge through teaching.

(2)[A] I joined KIBU as a junior colleague (21 years old), so most of the role it had in my career was exploring and learning about various areas and possibilities that I can use my profession for. I had a chance to be a web developer, a significant idea maker and manager of small products, a hacker who operates things like painting colors on the huge facade of the Palace of Arts. And the many interesting conversations with other hackers, design students, programmers, artists, business guys, curators helped me form a way of thinking about my profession and choose my goals.

[B] Disclaimer: you never know what'll happen, but I have the following possibilities in my mind for the next few years:

- to become a truly senior engineer and product guy and using that to build great businesses and world-changing products.

- cooperating internationally a lot

- starting MA in a different area to broaden my horizon and develop as a person. Or learn in any other ways.

(3)[A] The major plan is to make my company successful and growing in the coming years. I love what I am doing in this company, and I hope to take it to a level where more experienced executives can take it over and make it an even larger success. I would love to remain with the company in a leading role, and try to finish my PhD in the meantime.

[B] (missing essay)

(4)[A] I feel like Kitchen Budapest was the perfect start of my professional career. I started as a research intern and picked up different skills during the first years, then I became the Head of Software Development, chief supervising projects and managing my team. Working in the media lab had a big impact on my professional life and I also had the chance to finish my studies at Budapest University of Technology and Economics meantime. Kitchen Budapest was a lot of fun: working on absolutely different projects, experimenting with the latest technologies and spending my days among highly talented and inspiring people.These years also made me see a lot of different opportunities on various fields and industries and helped me moving forward: building online products that solves real problems while creates business value. Prezi.com was a really exciting and inspiring part of this journey, to see an idea turns into a real business with 20 million users. Also having time for experimenting with new products and being aware of the internet industry was a huge takeaway from my days there.

[B] Although Kitchen Budapest was a really important step in my professional career, I got to the point where I wanted to move on. I wanted to dig deeper in specific fields after the wide knowledge that these years gave me. Working in a Silicon Valley startup keeps me busy building online products that solves real customer needs. I truly believe this is what makes me excited in the upcoming years. I am slowly moving towards the product management side of the story. I also can imagine going back to school and get a masters degree in business development. I’m less concerned about the location at this point of my life, but I can absolutely see myself moving back to Hungary at some point and building an online product from there that addresses the worldwide market but uses the local talent pool.

(5)[A] It has fundamentally made me more open to the people, points of view, creative possibilities, linking possibilities of people, projects, technologies, ideologies. I think that change is possible anywhere and that creativity resides in groups of people more than in individuals.

[B] I’m hoping to continue working in media labs because it gives me the chance to work with amazing mixtures of people with different backgrounds, that always seem to find a common ground to meet on. I will pursue my work as a pracademic an I think that working in media labs is and will be an important aspect in my work in the years to come because where theory meets practice is where change happens.

(6)[A] I was almost finished with my bachelor when I found out about Baltan, participated in a workshop and kept sort of in contact with the lab. Angela hired me at a crucial point, because after a bachelor there is always the risk to land in the famous 'black hole'. I didn't even have the chance to end up there, because I went right into the whirlwind! It was refreshing to be able to work in my own studio for two days (limited studio time is always good) and the rest of the week have very different experiences at Baltan. The combination of jobs really helped me to keep on seeing the bigger picture of what it means to work in a field like this, and Angela has really encouraged me to keep going and growing as both a production assistant and artist. Thanks to her, I was given the chance to also do both within the lab - which felt like Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket to be honest! Baltan has played in an important role into expanding my own network, and because I was sent to participate in interesting symposia and workshops I eventually found out about my current studies. Working in the lab really had a bridge function for me, but in the most optimal way possible. I am still glad I got the chance.

[B] In the next one and a half years will be focussed on acquiring a master's degree (ArtScience, Royal Academy of the Arts - The Hague). I expect to come out as a full grown art professional and hope to continue to make a living off my art, artistic research or teaching in the art and technology field. What the market will look like in that timespan I cannot really predict, but I plan to extend my network within the Netherlands as far a possible as well as maintain my international connections (some of which I gathered during my time at Baltan). Hopefully this will make it easier to flow back into a job or self employed position after my masters. If I cannot make it happen to find something fitting right away, I might try to extend my horizon by doing a residency abroad.

(7)[A] My six years at PiNG were my first employed experience as a full-time employee in a non-for profit organization. It's weird to think that it might be my last employed experience as well... Not because I got sick of being employed full time but I had such a freedom in my work, collaborating here and there, meeting new people every week, that it's now part of my way of living. I'm working the same, I just changed a little bit the focus (digital writing / publishing) in an independent way but still in a collaborative and networked environment.

[B] Co-organizing for 2013 a nomadic cycle of conferences and workshops on digital writing and publishing for the Regional Book Center.

Currently writing a novel, being supported by the National Book Institute. This novel will experiment new forms of writing and reading through a web platform developed together with designers from OSP/Constant during a residency in PiNG in 2013.

Moving to Brussels next summer.

(8)[A] It was fundamental because it allowed me to initiate the research project I´m still working on. It has been also an opportunity to meet people and ideas from other disciplines, although sometimes I miss a little bit of openness in terms of ideology and a little bit less biased exchange of knowledge. It also allowed me to participate in the Lab to Lab, which was a great experience which enabled me to see other ways of understanding collaborative research, forms of organization, interests and technologies.

[B] I wish I knew. This year I need to finish my PhD, but afterwards I don't know. I hope I can still teach and research, and eventually continue with my architecture practice. But with the Spanish crisis I don't think that would be possible.

(9)[A] Kitchen Budapest was like a springboard for me, but more than that, it provided a network of friends and colleagues that I can count on even after 3 years. Without KIBU, I would never had a design portfolio to get interviewed in RCA London, or get admitted easily in Politecnico. The attitude and braveness that I get used to when working with KIBU people helped me to go further and always take the next step – and be where I am right now.

[B]I am finishing my masters this month and I am not planning to stay in academics, although I would like to teach some classes/courses, do some consultancy in the future.

I really would like to develop my own businesses, or be part of a startup and be an entrepreneur (with interesting and cool projects).

(10)[A] Both Kitchen Budapest and Hexagram have been a beneficial addition to my professional life as I am pursuing fictional filmmaking from an innovative point of view. I enjoy working with a cross disciplinary team, should it be film or art. I always strive to create something innovative and having my background in fine arts and been working at such high achieving environments is truly and inspiration. I believe I had learnt the basics of creative teamwork in Kitchen Budapest which has helped me find my way in a film crew as well. I got to know the world better by travelling and meeting visiting artists from all around the world, made friends and got a better understanding or my own practice as well.

[B] Hopefully my career as a filmmaker will continue ameliorating as I am working hard to create something unique and innovative.

(11)[A] When I first attended an event at Medialab-Prado, at the end of 2007, I went to the washroom and saw a pile of dirty glasses and plates there. It is a public institution, and that image made me dream about the conditions that facilitated it to work in such a relaxed and domestic way. That together with the program, which being a Humanities student interested in digital and visual cultures made it just THE place. I managed to become a cultural mediator there thanks to an internship, but having no idea at all about what mediating meant. In Medialab-Prado (I don't know if as part of a strategy or just due to a lack of time) they never explained concisely what mediating was. Hence, me and my colleagues had to define our task, and we choose to make it very situated, incorporated. Mediating was and is for us (as we kept defining it in masterDIWO) based on four key gestures: 1) generation of links between agents with no previous contact, 2) facilitation of weak links between agents in the lab's ecosystem, 3) monitorization of the lab's ecosystem: its community, resources and governance's flows, connections and problematics, and 4) documentation and archiving of the processes that take place within the lab and its ecosystem, so those are made open and re-practicable. Understanding that there are places where a new cultural paradigm based on open practices is taking shape, definitely made my career take a new direction and energy. Somehow I could say that Medialab-Prado was the launching platform to a whole network of heterogeneous projects, institutions, extitutions, agents, and systems that I consider “my network” today.

[B] For now, I'm very concentrated in 404 development. I hope this can last for at least a whole year long so we can evaluate its path.

I would like to approach the project (apart from my actual curatorial/facilitation perspective) with an auto-ethnographic methodology.

I am thinking about the possibility of starting a deep research on cultural laboratories as performative interfaces, related to the notion of “extitution” taken from ANT. Still not sure if academic field is the most suitable one. Perhaps it is better as a non-formal research project.

I'm doing a residency in Constant/Variable (Brussels) in January, to research in group (specially with Femke Snelting) on the notion of interfaces applied to cultural institutions.

(12)[A] Without Kitchen Budapest in my CV, I would have never got all those amazing opportunities that I had the last years. As I mentioned already, the lab/ the projects/colleagues are really well-known, at least in all those places where I have worked...

[B] My plan is to finish my PhD at Goldsmiths and continue to work as a freelance concept developer.

(13)[A] Important in enhancing my skill set and expanding my network of collaborators. It was an important time free of commercial constraints with valuable creative input from other lab members. The experience was positive in diversifying my work methods and research approach.

[B] Continue developing my business as both a creator of progressive content as well as strategic consultant of how to use that content for commercial purposes.

(14)[A] Kitchen Budapest played an enormous role in my professional development. I was studying to become and electrical engineer/physicist, but was not happy with the single-threaded approach the my university was proposing. Kitchen Budapest was my 2 year long practical training, where I built what I was taught in school. But that is an understatement – the most important difference between school and KIBU was that at school they tell you how to solve problems with engineers, while at KIBU you learn how to identify/create a problem, assemble a team, and execute to solve that problem. As a soon-to-be engineer I was very concerned trapping myself into a the engineering world, solving problems exclusively with engineers and using other people to bridge my knowledge with other professionals' knowledge. At KIBU you think and solve problems with people who preferably have a completely different toolset than what's yours.

Today I work at the company me and my friends created and we tend to be efficient, because our skillets are nicely aligned and we can utilize the skills of each other. Utilizing other people's skills, even if they are from other disciplines is the most valuable skill that I have acquired through KIBU/Media Labs.

[B] Continue working on Terrarium Inc. and build a company that will help people sell their stuff online from their phone. At one point I would like to return to MIT to concentrate more on academics, but it's unclear to me currently when that will happen.

(15)[A] Medialab-Prado is a special place. First time I met it by pure chance, and loved it from the first moment. I've been quite engaged into all their activities and looking for ways to develop interesting projects there. I like meeting people with similar interests and different tools or backgrounds. It's been pivotal to push forward some projects as DCDCity. I've been able also to meet people from all over the world, like the KIBU crew. I believe it also opened some doors for collaborations and networking.I've been working for the City Council for the last eight years, and Medialab-Prado has been a wonderful hobby for me. Right now, it's not my career indeed. But, what if it was my day to day job? MLP might be a bit different, as there are no researchers but mostly administrative staff, compared to other labs like KIBU. Most people full time into media arts are some kind of nomads, travelling looking for grants and opportunities all around the world. Given my age, I wonder: How could I sustain a family if MLP was in some way my career or main income? Until I solve these questions, I'm creating more projects and advancing other exciting ideas there, given it's a wonderful space open to the serendipitous meetings.

[B] I'm expecting big layoffs in public sector in Spain and I suppose I might be one of the first out. Anyway, I've joined Fab Academy educational program to learn product creation and prototype manufacturing. I'm also pushing here in Madrid for the creation of the first hackerspace/fablab.

(16)[A] Perhaps the greatest thing about being involved in the medialab community was to become more open minded and meet people who think differently about the world.

Media labs in general have a strong technological component. During my first contact to this kind of places it was quite relevant, but with time is getting less and less important. Social ecologies of interdisciplinary people and people who want to change things for the better are the key aspect of these labs. For me media labs boosted my life not my career, in fact, sometimes I think that media labs “tend to disperse people's minds”. We get more intellectual freedom but less willing to have “normal well-paid jobs”. Don't misunderstand me when I say that, mind dispersion is not a bad thing :) So usually people who passed through the Medialab Highway prefer to do jobs which are more creative, or where you have more freedom than others, and those jobs are quite scarce. In my career Media labs had a big influence since I could apply for positions and and opportunities I wouldn't have otherwise. On the other hand I have to say that most of these jobs are poorly paid. I guess the society is still building an specific role for us, and we are the first generations to establish it and sometimes its hard (and exciting at the same time).

[B] Right now I'm working in The Patching Zone in a project related to experiential education and I would like to continue in the same line but more closely with the academia.

The respondents (numbers in the brackets refers to the essays above):

(1) Irma Földényi www.irmafoldenyi.com

(2) anonymous

(3) anonymous

(4) Milán Korsos milankorsos.com

(5) Loes Bogers www.loesbogers.com

(6) Angela de Weijer www.missmilivolt.com

(7) Catherine Lenoble litteraturing.wordpress.com

(8) Nerea Calvillo www.cmasarquitectos.net

(9) Judit Boros juditboros.com

(10) anonymous

(11) Jara Rocha jararocha.blogspot.com // masterdiwo.org

(12) anonymous

(13) Harald Haraldsson haraldharaldsson.com

(14) David Lakatos www.lakatosdavid.hu

(15) anonymous

(16) Víctor Manuel Díaz Barrales http://www.victordiazbarrales.com

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Art & Technology as Lifestyle

Emerging scenes in CEE and SEE countries

by Adam Somlai Fischer and Attila Nemes

in Disegno Industriale, 2009/1

To explore innovation industry or more specifically art & technology in South East Europe, we have to understand its past and its present integration strategies to global networks. In the late 80's the region's industry had been devalued, mostly because lack of capabilities to develop new technologies, in order to be able to reach higher shares on European - so called Western - markets. At the same time these economies became primary fields of investment of mass production because of low cost human resources and cheaper production rates.

Young educated professionals goal was to improve their knowledge, so many of them left East and South East Europe to study abroad. Fifteen years later conditions have changed, GDP is much higher - e.g. in Budapest GDP is higher than the EU average - so the people once left are back and some of the largest companies has recognized the possibilities in innovative industries and willing to invest although they know there is still no art&tech market present and it has to be formed by force. A CEE or SEE country has not more then one or two innovation labs (1), most of them is funded and financed by a large company in need of the innovative spirit, the image of progressive thinking in their corporate identity.

To have ideas is nothing. Most people have ideas but to make a project out of it is hard work. Many times we experience that a well thought project, application, interaction ends up in the waste cause there are no innovative people in those industries could apply it.

For the late 80’s, early 90’s generations having very early access to technology meant that it has always been part of our social life, so having the urge to change it and form it to our own cultural needs has always been almost trivial. This generation ended up to be at the technological forefront way before academic education cloud catch up, and many landed as CTO's for advanced technology companies.

A second wave following the above generation had access to much simpler technologies, didn't need to learn to think in assembly code, they had the ‘freedom of expression’. This change has resulted in a more complex new situation, cultural motivations - e.g. social sciences, humanities, philosophy, architecture, visual arts - had an enormous effect on low tech and experimental technological thinking. While technology earlier was a closed realm, it become the metaphor of the present, access and freedom and become a primary source of self expression. The art and technology, electronic art, new media art culture has emerged in a strong international network and its participants started to share, create and exhibit internationally from the start, far before becoming visible in their local cultural contexts.

This phenomenon has been quite present in many Eastern European countries, where cultural production is slower and more anchored in local discourse and traditional media. Working in art and technology offered a very free and fertile ground, which enabled more experimental ideas to emerge - outside of and parallel with the local cultural realm.

What's next? Geek pride! In the Japanese animation 'Denno Coil' ten year old kids are living their social lives and competing as hackers in their fantasy realities. Not as monsters, not as princesses. Pirates have more connotation to demolishing copyright than to boats and golden treasures.

Obviously there are dangers of digital division, segregation of society - there is an expression called 'Johnny don't surf’ for people who don't keep up with the monthly reborn cultures of the net. Maybe some readers are not aware that email is for the old. Today's teen geeks don't really email any more: they IM, Twitter, Blog or not, but keep communication with a large number of friends via much more refined and proliferated modalities. However, the idea of the old geek, socially crippled teenager, is gone. It is way cool to be good with computers, live in gadget-land and be present in society as an offline avatar with multiple IDs. Most games for the Japanese market for PlayStation Portable are high school dating simulations, not flying spaceships.

In Budapest, almost one year ago, we launched Kitchen Budapest (KIBU), a new model in the media-lab scene. When creating KIBU's fundamental policies and characteristics we emphasized obligatory sharing, forming strong temporary communities, adapting cultural production with easy use simple technologies, reaching beyond the web & desktop for hardware and mobile platforms as well. A usual KIBU researcher share her / his time in the following model:

50% main projects - management & creative development - 40% auxiliary projects - helping others' main projects - 10% communal efforts - keeping the website up-dated, networking, presentations & representation of KIBU community. The above model has been proven very successful, if we consider the very large number of projects in one year. Some of these are full time, innovative, large scale developments, some are week hacks we call 'one hour projects'. Let's see some examples of KIBU's first year production.

The Mllamp project is an experiment for simulating emotions by putting minimal intelligence to everyday objects. The viewer can easily identify with an object of anthropomorphic character and recognise human gestures and emotions in it. Anchoring in norms – sometimes communicating new ideas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), such as ambient communication and remote presence is very difficult for the abstraction levels they apply. Adding human expression to an everyday object and cultural IDs from fairy tales where lamps become alive (Chihiro, Aladdin, Pixar's Mascot, Alice, etc.) is a successful combination of cultural & tech motivations resulting a lovable object. Bence Samu's and Tamas Bagi's take on the subject has been very clear, taking a very low cost IKEA lamp and adding gears and motors and light level control, and starting experimenting with the lamp's human expressions in weeks. The project currently is in the product preparation phase and hopefully soon will be a new available future on contemporary lightning tech & design markets.

Lets see an other example of collaborative projects: Nighmo, a simple idea in a new form, using Passive Infrared Sensors (PIR). Nighmo is a lightning system, switches on when it senses movement. It gives just enough light in the dark to provide a sense of space and objects around. When action stops, light dims slowly. The author's aim was to develop a lightning object can be tailored and adjusted to its user, creating comfort and ecological, low energy waste usage.

Invading the urban and rural landscapes, the aim of the Landprint project was to reproduce subtle patterns and photos by combining various species of plants with programmed robotics. Plants and flowers that spawn seem to make continuous patterns with their various colours and shades seen from a distance. With the use of programmed robotics for the planting and cutting of plants, we can manipulate the evolving patterns, to render photo-like, delicate images.

We have been collaborating in projects that grew over Kitchen Budapest's capacities and had to be outsourced at the end of the first year, eg. ZuiPrezi.

ZuiPrezi is a zooming presentation editor which allows you to easily create stunning presentations. With the help of ZuiPrezi anyone can create dynamic and visually structured zooming maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings. ZuiPrezi has a very intuitive interface and support for online sharing. Change from linear presentation of ideas (ppt.) to creative representation of your mind, it changes the way you think (zui.)

And finally, a project that we (Attila Nemes and Adam Somlai-Fischer) have coordinated that was realized before Kitchen Budapest was started, but we have tested many of our collaborative production models there. Reorient, was a large installation exhibited at the 2006 Architecture Biennial in Venice. The installation was presenting examples of DIY projects made of large quantities of toys from open markets and objects available in today's urban spaces. Reorient team's aim was presenting a cultural production model bringing responsive systems to communal usage, in a low cost and large scale format.

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Where is the Art?

A New Mapping Project in Art and Technology

Attila Nemes

in: Media/Lab/s, mcd review spring 2011

"From this perspective we can see that modernism and the avant-garde are functions of what we could call the discourse of originality, and that that discourse serves much wider interests- and is thus fueled by more diverse institutions- than the restricted circle of professional art-making. The theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian and the maker of art. And throughout the nineteenth century all of these institutions were concerned, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original."Rosalind E. Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-garde and other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, p26

Reflecting on recent structural changes in the creative industries, this text develops an argument for the importance of mapping media-labs and analyzing their role in artistic and industrial production. Exploring these questions in the context of Rosalind Krauss' text on The Originality of the Avant-garde, I will make the case that media labs are not only potential hotbeds of industrial innovation, but they are heirs and successors to the avant-garde tradition.

My thesis is based upon the phenomenon of the rapidly changing media lab network 'research cloud' worldwide. Collaborative R&D today is mostly conducted in community-funded labs: cheap facilities where people share ideas, collaborate in projects and share incomes in the end. Rather than being called an 'artist', most of them prefer titles, such as 'sound engineer', 'creative programmer', and so on. Yet, their institutional structure, work-flow, and work-model is closer to an avant-garde workshop than competitors of earlier existing research parks, science parks, university labs, and the like. My aim is to review how this movement of media labs has evolved and took a major role in R&D and in the contemporary art scene at the same time.

These labs' creators are selling their production by/in terms of creativity, off-the-street proof of concepts, let's say for now: originality. Are the creation and existence of these institutions based on the same myth that is described by Rosalind Krauss in her text on the Originality of the Avantgarde? Is it (sponsoring labs) more than the insecurity of markets of recent ICT developments and their unknown social consequences?

It is possible that most of these labs are well financed because their sponsors think they know much about the prosumer (the creator and consumer of information), and it might just be a lack of understanding of the fact that what they were doing is a new form of artistic production. While the earlier science city, science park, industrial park, etc. model was certainly effective and successful in basic science and its technological applications, it was expensive and isolated, and in most cases central governments or local governments played a major role in the creation and operation of research parks.On this issues a very interesting study is available on the internet: Future Knowledge Ecosystems

The Next Twenty Years of

Technology-Led Economic Development, Anthony Townsend, Institute for the Future, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Institute for the Future, Rick Weddle, Research Triangle Foundation In the new situation media labs are financed by the collaborating partners, independent public funds (sometimes municipal funds) and by major companies(Magyar Telekom – Kitchen Budapest, Deutche Telekom – Creation Centers, NTT-Docomo sponsors several art&technology collaboration in Japan and ICC, etc)

of the ICT market, and tend to play an increasingly important role in their innovation processes.

Might these institutions and their professional human encounters be taking the role of the avantgarde artist? Can it be seen as a new form of modern art movements and its institutions? Shall we consider a comparative analysis of this phenomenon to avantgarde models of artistic production?

Where originality comes into play

The Art & Technology scene and the media lab culture evolved in the last decade and although it has not been defined as artistic production, it does have something in common with the avantgarde movements and its institutions, and so could be interpreted in terms of Krauss's argumentation.

What they have in common is that both of these phenomena (avantgarde movements and their manifestos, and media labs and their self-definitions) deny the terminology used by previous art practices and practitioners and they define themselves with new ('original') terms. This is to say that denying the notion of 'art' is used to create space in the existing scene and the creative industries spectrum with original terms and terminology. In the case of the avantgarde, the discourse of originality serves, as Krauss puts it, "much wider interests, and is thus fueled by more diverse institutions than the restricted circle of professional art-making".

Understanding the correlations between the two subjects might be important in distinguishing between the 'facade' of the media labs and their real production. It might help to draw a clearer picture of what these labs are 'making' and why their production is described as industrial instead of artistic? Why are these producers of cultural goods understood as professionals instead of being perceived as artists of the contemporary domain?

Expending the artist role

In the late 90s Art & Technology became a whole new world and went beyond E.A.T.A media-art term, earlier used for Experiments in Art and Technology

All over the globe, people started practicing Art & Technology without considering themselves artists or having strong connections to the contemporary art scene. DIY became an ideal form of activities in popular culture and large groups of society started to deal with technology in a new way. They were not afraid to open up the 'sealed box' anymore.

In late summer of 2006, I was involved in a project at the Venice International Biennial of Architecture as a curator. I worked on this project as a producer of contemporary culture, or so I thought at the time. These were my first experiences outside the so called 'contemporary art scene', working with young architects, engineers and designers. Quite soon I had to realize using the terms of 'art', 'artist' and terminology of contemporary art are not easily tolerable by them. This was the first time that it occurred to me that there was a shift that I had to understand, as the project was clearly describable and interpretable with the vocabulary of contemporary art. Since then, the focus of my practice has moved to the so called Art & Technology, Science & Technology field, and the world of media labs, and I began to realise that this phenomenon of denial is quite international and wildly spread.

In order to see the similarities or differences we have to understand why does original definitions comes into play when defining art and technology practice.Earlier terminology, such as 'media art', defined artistic production within the field of contemporary art practices. Artists like Num June Paik and groups like Fluxus were understood as artists and groups of the contemporary art scene with a specific interest in media - in contrast to traditional forms of media, such as painting and sculpture.

Meanwhile, Art & Technology in the late 90s was emerging in another context: geeks, DIY, and new practices connected to the Internet age. More recently, artists have begun to follow these trends and made professional careers out of this phenomenon. They tried to define their practices with the terms of these new industries and the culture of the prosumer. Art and artistic production was perceived 'fake', far from 'reality', far from everyday definitions, and too 'high'. Thus, artists working in the field of Art & Technology started to define themselves as hackers, engineers, and so on.

A new domainthis is a quote from an earlier article I have co-written:

Art and Technology as Lifestyle

Emerging scenes in CEE and SEE countries by Adam Somlai Fischer and Attila Nemes, in Disegno Industriale, 2009/1

How (DIY) technology become the metaphor for the present, access and freedom and a primary source of self expression?

Having ideas is not enough. Most people have ideas but to make a project out of them is hard work. Often we experience that a well thought-out project, application, or interaction ends up in the wastebin, because there are no innovative people in those industries who could implement it.

For the generations of the late 80s and early 90s, having very early access to technology meant that it has always been part of social life, so the urge to change it and shape it according to our own cultural needs has always been almost trivial. This generation has ended up at the technological forefront way before academic education could catch up, and many landed as CTOs at advanced technology companies.

A second wave following this generation had access to much simpler technologies. They did not need to learn to think in assembly code: they had the ‘freedom of expression’. This change has resulted in a more complex new situation and cultural motivations, for example, social sciences, humanities, philosophy, architecture, and visual arts. It had an enormous effect on low tech and experimental technological thinking. While earlier technology was a closed realm, it become the metaphor of the present, access and freedom and become a primary source of self expression. Art &Technology, electronic art, and new media art culture have emerged in a strong international network and its participants started to share, create and exhibit internationally from the start, far before becoming visible in their local cultural contexts.

Towards a mapping project

The project's aim is to create an interactive map online, in order to gain personal narratives related to Art and Technology DIY culture worldwide. The first step is to collect user generated data without standardizing terminology in the data input process in order to see a wide range of terms, notions, definitions of these practices. Presently, I am working with Catherine Lenoble to find the best possible solution for data collection strategy and the interaction-design of the map. We would like to work as ethnographers and holding workshops and help people write the stories they tell. We hope a valuable knowledge database could be build by these personal narratives. The further step is to establish how this map can be studied in terms of contemporary art and historic relations to avantgarde movements. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate and analyse the shifts in technology-oriented artistic production of the past few decades.

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Our Driving Forces of Collaboration

• Beyond Data publication, Baltan Laboratories and Kitchen Budapest2012

Authors: Nemes, Attila

http://issuu.com/kitchenbudapest/docs/beyond_data?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaboration