CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

12-18 december 2009

Kitchen Budapest is seeking for participants: we are looking for programmers, artist and designers, architects, urban designers, ecologists, biologists, chemists, sociologists, anthropologists to participate a one week workshop about the air quality of Budapest.

For 21 days straight, our guest researcher Jason Dunne was a multi-webcam street photographer in Budapest during September-October 2009.

Using still-captures from these multiple webcam fractured vantage points, all of the images were downsized to ultra-low pixel counts. On Day 1, each image was downsized to 1x3 pixels; Day 2 the image was downsized to 2x6 pixels, Day 5 became 5x15 pixels, and so on, until Day 21, when each image is 21 pixels in height (and about .001694 megapixels in total), and the original image reappears.

Our project aims at creating a mobile application that will be a personal and essential guide for touring the city of Budapest. While you cruise through the city, this product will enable you to watch videos about nearby interesting places with the help of mobile Internet. These videos are created by researchers from Kitchen Budapest with the help of a friendly-faced Hungarian stand-up comedian.

Bycall is a bicycle alarm, which transmits warning sign from the bicyclist to the radiostations in the cars, within a radius of 15 meters.

The installation consists of floating bubbles that carry conversations happening in the “private” space of a “public” phone.

“Cross-connections” is a term that was commonly used when one call between two people from a landline phone was superimposed by another call making both the conversations heard by all four people involved. Often leading to the four speaking with each other. This is interesting because privacy, suddenly becomes a relative term. It has little to do with isolation but with the hope of not being discovered in a crowd. The dispersed conversations out of a seemingly “private” space indicate towards the presence of “listeners” and “hackers” at various levels of the current communication model.