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Anilogue International Animation Film Festival 2011 in Budapest was a wonderful experience for me. I'm recommending you mark next year's fest on your calendars now. Three days of films at the Urania Cinema and a few other art house venues around town offered plenty of opportunity to catch some amazing fresh films. Aside from all that there were a number of star workshops with current directors discussing the state of the industry and offering some sneak peeks at recent projects.

All of this was especially great because it was such a surprise for me, a 20 year resident of Budapest, and I only discovered it in its 4th year. This year's festival took place simultaneously in Vienna as well, so perhaps this was the first year it played here? I really don't have a good excuse for not knowing about it.

So I'm doubly lucky that the organizers asked me to participate this year. They were looking for somebody to lead a pitching workshop for students from various universities in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and I was happy to get involved. Two days of presenting practice, talking about ideas and pitching various films in all stages of production, and the group was ready to pitch their project to the festival jury. I'll have to say I was humbled to watch these talented students grapple with getting their visual ideas into words, and organize that into a project pitch, and all this in a second language (English)! Wow. The diversity of the ideas that were presented was inspiring as well.

I learned a lot from the students who participated, the process itself, and hope to get my name on the list to lead next year's pitching workshop!

Reading the current buzz about the recent Wikileaks release on the New York Times page, I was struck by how many comments I could agree with or sympathise with in their conclusions but which contained obviously erroneous facts, false assumptions and leaps of logic, not to mention irrelevant and disturbing characterizations.

Initially I wondered why these couldn't be filtered out. But wanders onto the slippery slope of censorship. But logic somehow should be able to break us out of those tired phrases and bad stereotyping that often keeps us from seeing our problems, and ultimately reality clearly.
What if there were a way to create a blog where these could be marked, as examples of faulty thinking and illogical reasoning?
Different colors for different logical mistakes, perhaps a point system to ascribe a logical value to each comment.
Each comment would then appear ranked by most 'valid' argumentatively.

This way users/readers can decide on the merits of the content more than wade through the hacks and trolls who just want to slur.
It might produce people who want to make the most ludicrous statements for the fun of it, but those comments would be buried at the bottom of the list.
It might also induce a community of people to consider their words more before posting. This would be a nice place to go and read opinions.

Of course, execution is a nightmare from what I know. At this point, all posts would have to be marked by human hand. Is this a semantic web device I'm looking for? Or Could there be a Wiki community who would mark each other's comments up in consensus?

The other side of this, is that I would be able to check my own comments for logical hiccups, and learn about my own prejudices and sloppy thinking methods... wouldn't that be fun? hm.

The other downside would be that it would discriminate against people who aren't competent english speakers (i.e. english is a second language for them).

And could it be applied to other languages? And would the data that arise show us something about the differences between languages?
Exciting...

Could a desktop application be made?
Endless possibilities.

As always, if you make one of these, please let me test the beta!

In September, I was asked to write a little about Budapest for the guests of PloneConference2009. Plone is an open-source platform for a bunch of applications. This was my first opportunity to get to know these people who spend their free time, money and energy building something completely free and open to the world. I figured, if they were anything like my friend Balázs who organized the conference, that they had to be pretty passionate about their work and about Plone itself. I'm glad to report that I wasn't disappointed.

I put together a few starters for those interested in trying out the language while they were here at the conference. I also wanted to give people a way to jump past the touristy stuff and get to the heart of Budapest and Hungary culturally in the short time they had here - a holy grail I'm always searching for when I go to a new country. Getting into a people's language usually helps a lot.

Originally, I thought the pieces would be short teasers released everyday but after I started, I realized there's no simple way to explain Hungarian (or any language for that matter), especially it's pronunciation in writing. The articles became pretty comprehensive about the rudiments of language learning. But that's what I love, so it seemed to me the best thing I could write about.

To make it fun for people who just want to get a taste of Hungary, I sprinkled the texts with links to further info about the city, country and culture I've been living in for the last 20 years. Hopefully, they're interesting, funny and insightful enough to inspire readers to learn more about the language and it's people.


welkom tu hungari
language tips 1
language tips 2
language tips 3
language tips 4

I'm a published poet? or transcoder? Or translator? Code Poet? Verse Machiner?

PLOTKI.NET published a pet project of mine this week for their issue about language. It's an Emily Dickinson poem translated into a pseudo-code semi-syntax, then made into a graphic which includes two other ways of getting to the meaning. One is an ASCII representation of the poem for display purposes on computer monitors, the other is the poem itself in english syntax.

The piece is meant to confront the idea of absolutism and understanding in the context of people and computers. The poetry is laid out for people who don't know what code is but could imagine what it might look like. (As I did when I first started to learn HTML, and when I first tried a poem in this form.)

Unlike my first attempt where I wrote a poem and used html tags, this time I drew on my actionscript/javascript/css/xml experience. I kept the code part confined to symbols and physical heirarchical layout of the text which humans understand - ways that we've learned to 'read' relationships into placement of words repetitively as opposed to enclosing the sets and subsets of meaning with html-like tags. This way most of the 'commands' were in symbols and most of the experiential part was in a human language.

It's clearly not code, but the reasons it can't be were what interested me most.
What's a human language, if humans taught computers to 'think'. Isn't a computer an extension of the analytical part of a human brain, as a blackberry or ipod is an extension of human memory?
There is no way a computer can fully understand or do anything with a command to 'come' or an attribute like slowly - unless those commands and attributes are previously quantified and defined by a human. But who defines them for humans? How do we come to our understanding of emotional language? What control do we have of our life if the very definitions of it are qualitative and for the most part not quantitative?
Lots of fun.

Without ruining the experience beforehand, I'll recommend you take a look at the work in the April/09 - Language issue of plotki.net

When I first did this, I found some poetry online which actually works in real computer languages, but I think it limits the scope of the human experience you can write about to the commands that you have in that language. I'm starting from the idea that a human language can best relate nearly all human experience.

Thinking about it here, I realized that if a consistant syntax of human relations could be developed, perhaps translation between human languages would be easier.

If anybody tries one of these things on their own, I would really appreciate seeing what 'syntax' you came up with. Leave it here, or send it to me at mprbudapest@gmail.com

Ginger Agents just found a client who wants my photos to brighten up their office lives. Five of my photos, printed on dieBond aluminum and blown up to 55x67cm are now hanging in the elegant new law offices of

bnt Szabó Tom Burmeister

For the next year their clients will be able to see my stuff printed, large and live in all their tesselated glory. My catalog is growing as the sun comes out for spring in Budapest, but a large number of my shots can be found on my flickr page.