Press Releases

Budapest, September 2, 2010 15:00

Magyar Telekom's innovation lab, Kitchen Budapest, presents a new style concert linking five cities and a device that involves the public in a visual creative process. Experts are implementing the initiatives introducing the connection between the arts and innovation under the auspices of the European Media Facades Festival.

On Friday, 3 September at 9 pm, an innovative performance in the building of Kitchen Budapest (KIBU) will link five European cities (Berlin, Budapest, Helsinki, Linz and Liverpool). During the event performers at distant locations will make music together and create continuous visual effects comprising geometrical components by using laptops with broadband connection. The eight-piece "technological string quartet" includes programmers, designers, musicians and other visual artists. The project has been created on the initiative of Magyar Telekom's innovation lab, and the performance can be seen and heard in all five cities. The venue in the Hungarian capital is Kitchen Budapest (Venue: Budapest, District IX, Ráday u. 30, entrance from Biblia köz).

At another point in Budapest on three consecutive nights, likewise starting on the evening of 3 September, those present can play with the interactive façade of Lánchíd 19 Hotel and colour the building with the aid of a device sensitive to blowing developed by KIBU. The signal emitted by the device depends on the strength of the air exhaled by the user and this generates waves of various shapes and colours on the surface of the facade. Anyone interested can try making digital waves from dusk to 10 pm.

The events are being presented by the staff of KIBU as part of the European Media Facades Festival. Eszter Bircsák, Member of the Board Trustees of the projects said that the aim of the festival that started in Berlin is to create local and international connections through the participation of artists and the city dwelling public using the "media facades" of buildings. The cultural festival designed for public spaces intends to emphasise the similarities of contemporary culture in the different regions of Europe while highlighting the experience drawn from the diversity of the differences. The festival seeks to create dialogue in seven European cities using unusual means by inviting the public at each location to interact and create.

The Kitchen Budapest, Magyar Telekom's innovation lab is a multifunctional place dealing with mobile communication and the Internet in an urban location where space and equipment is provided for young researchers to think freely and engage in creative teamwork. One of its main aims is to seek points of contact between society, art, science and the new media, and to find local answers that are valid in a joint, international context with the help of engineers, artists, designers and the lab's researchers.