What would happen if during having coffee or while walking in the forest, suddenly some water started to splash from a point unexpectedly right next to our head? What if another dimension was worn through like some ragged trousers and a piece of it filtered through into our world? The photo documentation of this mixed media installation tries to arrest this fictitious moment.
Background:
I bought a mirror, drilled a hole in it and poured some water into the hole from behind, while I zoomed onto the mirror and took a picture.
Experiments in Social Orthodontics, master thesis project
My diploma work wants to call attention to the correct use of the escalator – a social agreement which exists in all big cities, but is ignored here in Hungary.
My work presents the questions I’ve had during long months of using the escalators and the answers given by various people and experts (sociologists, psychologists) that I have interviewed.
Indeed. It seems so simple to take one step aside and queue up behind each other in one line. Still, this is not the case here, in Hungary. Here everyone is an individual: they stand wherever they want to, even if it is often not a place that is good for others.
This small step – that we DON’T take – describes the attitude/way of thinking of the whole nation. Sense of community, tolerance, solidarity – are these only well-sounding but empty words or can we really understand them?
Nighmo (with original name Home Moonlight) is a night-light object which starts to operate when it detects motion in the room, and makes just little light, enough to sense the space, furniture, and things around in the room.
If you have several nighmos placed in different parts of the flat, the pleasant light follows the direction of your movement, and slowly fades out when movement ceases in the space. This light is weak enough not to disturb sleepers in the room.
Nighmo has no other function in daytime than beeing a nice organic object in the flat. When the daylight goes off, nighmo lamps switch on automatically with a smooth fade-in.
This video is about a girl, an object and their relationship.
Everybody has some kind of passion, smoking cigarettes is one of them. It’s not just the taste of tobacco, but all the related rituals of striking a match, the first drag with the morning coffee, the way we hold it – all these make us dependent.
Cigarettes become part of our everyday life unnoticed. After a while one cannot be occupied with anything for a longer period of time as every activity has to be interrupted by a „cigarette break”: we smoke while reading a book, talking with friends, working and even eating. The video is searching for the answer to this relationship: how cigarettes subtly take control of our everyday lives…
Some people believe that global warming is just a fiction, but we know it is happening, because we feel it and we see it every day. Reservoir of Seasons is not about presenting phenomena which many people will never experience, like dying polar bears, melting icebergs or the cooling of the Gulf Stream, but about the subtle changes we experience every day.
Participating researchers
Gina Haraszti, Marton Juhasz, John Nussey, Gyorgyi Galik
This video reflects upon the never-ending process of constructions in the city.
It presents the phenomenon when the view from a window suddenly disappears.
The newly-built 10-storied block-of-flat casts a shadow on the old woman who until then spent every afternoon sunbathing on her balcony, or it hides the Sun from the girl who used to watch the sunrise every morning. From now on, they can only watch the guy in the opposite flat who is about to take a shower. How our surroundings change our habits?
A comparing account of a journey performed in two different ways, as for our load on the environment: fuel consumption, air pollution and waste production. The unit of this account is the “ecological footprint”. Some researchers of Kitchen Budapest traveled the distance between Budapest and Helsinki in mid-March. Some arrived in the festival Pixelache Helsinki 2008 by plane, others by minibus. On the way they were documenting their environmental expenses, by taking pictures and making notes. For the birthday exhibition of Kitchen Budapest the project is summarized in a presentation.
Participating researchers
Tamas Bagi, Gina Haraszti, Szonja Kadar, Zoltan Csik-Kovacs, Agoston Nagy, Peter Nemeth, Gabor Papp, Bence Samu, Melinda Sipos, Andras Szalai, Gyorgyi Galik
Arbour light, an intelligent lighting system can reproduce the visual atmosphere of natural phenomena. It recreates the ambient atmosphere rather than a photographic image, hence it extends communication into non intrusive modalities.
Participating researchers
Melinda Sipos, Peter Nemeth, Tamas Bagi, Aron Horvath, Kadar Szonja, Zoltan Csik-Kovacs, Gabor Papp, Gyorgyi Galik
Young girls like to imitate media celebrities and tend to consider what they see on TV and on the cover of magazines as reality. This creates many inhibitions and pain in them as they can never reach the desired perfection. We are the way we are even if we are constantly struggling against it. Some are afraid to be distinguished from the crowd, others want to be different and turn to extremes. Would we be happier if we could just slip into anybody’s skin? Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough for us. What if we could stay ourselves a little, but could also take some things that we like over from others?
Background:
This is an experimental photo series, in which I asked three of my classmates –Blanka, Kati and Panni – to sit for me to take their portraits.
I took their photos to pieces in order to create new women from them. I didn’t want to have some chaotic collages of faces as a result but I tried to aim at some kind of perfection where even I no longer could tell which portrait is real and which one not. Even I was startled to find how real these faces became even though they never existed only as a result of my work.
In this project we make patterns by using plants as they were photographic materials. We set plants and use artificial light covered by different pattern to leave trails.
Due to the photosynthetic pigment we can influence the color of a plant to change from yellow to deep green, or create a picture with the higher and smaller plants.
Everyone who knows the works of Caspar David Friedrich is aware that he depicted his musing figures from behind. In this experimental work, I decided to bring his iconic figure and romantic landscapes into new situations, mixing them with contemporary elements.
I wanted to experiment whether I am capable of imitating the depth of the sea and to tell an underwater story with the help of only a few things – an aquarium, some colored water, some wax, some tinfoil and a hair-net.
I used the colors and atmosphere of some photos I took during a seaside journey a long time ago as a starting point. My brother was the model of whom I took a photo while he was dry, then I replaced him into the world of the maquette with the help of a software. The scene was built upon a very silly story, in which a swimmer gets entangled in a fishnet and drowns.
We have a new way of research what we would like to realize in this summer. There are some kind of grass which sheep like and which they do not like. If we set a field by mixing two different hayseeds, we get a latent picture or pattern and sheep will make it visible while they eat.
The aim of the Landprint project is 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.
Within the thick visible breath that we exhale in cold air, tiny fairies come alive. Tough we can’t see them, if we are drunk they get drunk too; our breath is their flora and fauna. The Breath Fairies machine exposes these little creates, and lets people keep them on their mobile phones.
Participating researchers:
Gabor Papp, Melinda Sipos, Peter Nemeth, Anita Pozna, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Bence Samu, Zoltan Csik-Kovacs, Milan Korsos, Tamas Bagi, Gyorgyi Galik
The kitchen of KiBu comes alive on the opening day of the lab featuring musical percolators, sighing carrots, automatic wooden spoons and a laser light show with icicles.
The kitchen is where the fun happens, or at least where something is always being brewed: something is always prepared in the pot, fresh coffee is made and it is always something interesting to be found in the fridge. However, at our place everything is a little bit different. The percolator gives the beat, vegetables are sighing when we pull them out of the ground. Ice wonders are illuminating the fridge and our spice seeds are about to germinate soon.
These experiments show that the researchers of KiBu always adapt and transform objects of their environment in a different way. Now they created some kind of a ’smart kitchen’ which is playfully presents their way of thinking about cook-ware. Most of the smart kitchens are focused on comfortability and function. But in homes kitchen is the territory of family life and community life, the place for cooking, the meals for cultural reciprocity (actually people globalize by culinary experiences). These experiments may help understand the real cultural needs of a smart home.
2007-2009 Researcher, Kitchen Budapest Innovation Lab– Budapest, Hungary
Kitchen Budapest is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space. Projects involve brainstorming, design conceptualization, web design, product creation etc. in a multi-disciplinary team – based environment…
