IdeotekIndustries

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.

Hey, I just recieved news that a snapshot of mine was included in a new travel guide website calledschmap.com. I took it one sunny day in my new neighborhood. This is one of four buildings on Kodaly Körönd.

Here's a link to the photo:

schmap.com/budapest/introduction_history

Eyes Need Rest, too.

I've finally had some time to work on the visual design for the chinese characters contemporary art space 's site.

During a side discussion about a completely different subject, the main dilemma with the old design became painfully clear. Noise. Every month's new program brought a slew of new colors and styles and weights of images. Though we thought we might catch eyes by making the sidebar just as lively, it turns out we were just getting turned off by the busy-ness of the overall design. REPEAT: EYES NEED REST.

While the 'loose' noisy feel of the original worked perfectly for the image of a flegling gallery's in its first couple months of business, after two and half years the dust should have settled. Like moving a table that you always bump into, I rearranged a couple things here and there, toned down the color, regularized the font size and even added a new section for the online archived features.

With this look for the more permanent 'identity' side of the site - a neutral clean look - the logo can now project the 'mood' or the seasonal changes of the gallery image (and client - ). This allows the site to give the visitors a long-term feel that the gallery is evolving and constantly changing, and makes the experience feel fresher without losing it's brand.

Simple or Minimal

We also suddenly realized that there's a bunch of great material we've been storing for a rainy day! So there's a lot of new documentation of the past shows. They're basic html pages that store what we have as best we can. Though there haven't been enough rainy days to get those back pages standardized, we agreed that their disparity is somehow advantageous, since it gives a more documentation-like feel to the material, a no-nonsense "we-have-to-get-this-info-out-there" attitude.

This brought me to the odd thought sometimes the simplicity of my designs are confused with a 'minimalist' style. These extra pages are simply what we could do with the resources we have. I believe it's always fair to do what you can as long as the pages do what they are designed to do even when they are not designed to look any particular way. I'm still working on a CSS template that can encompass the differences between the documentation needs of various kinds of artists, which I hope will be designed specifically to give the feeling that we already have achieved.