Internet and Art in Hungary: The First Three Years
 

During the last three years, several significant steps have been made in developing original net art projects in Hungary. The background for one site was the first media art faculty in Hungary, the Intermedia Department, founded in 1990 at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, http://www.intermedia.c3.hu/. The other was the continuous interest of Hungarian artists in new media and new tools of expression, from photography to performance, from happenings to experimental film, from installations and environments to video and computer. As early as the mid-70’s, the first computer animations were shot here on 35mm film and what else, if not a pre-non-linear-multimedia, is the film scenario by László Moholy-Nagy, The Dynamics of the Big City from the years 1922-24, later printed in his book Painting, Photography, Film (published by the Bauhaus).

In practice, the first  M e t a F o r u m  conference in 1994, organised by the Media Research Foundation, http://www.mrf.hu/ and the Intermedia Dept., was the event where for the first time within an artistic context, a Hungarian audience received access to information about the new possibilities of the Internet and multimedia as an art form. This event was organised two more times, in 1995 and 1996 (see also http://www.c3.hu/c3/mr.html and http://szocio.tgi.bme.hu/metaforum/index.html), under the titles NO BORDERS (M e t a F o r u m II) and UNDER CONSTRUCTION (M e t a F o r u m III). Last year, a book was published in Hungarian containing mainly lectures and texts by the authors who were present (among others, Richard Barbrook, Manuel De Landa, Critical Art Ensemble, János Sugár, Pit Schultz, Lev Manovich, Eric Davis, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and an interview with Arthur Kroker by Geert Lovink). This is also available on-line in two locations, http://www.mrf.hu/bulldozer/index.html and as part of the Hungarian Electronic Library, http://www.mek.iif.hu/MEK/.

Regarding net art and the Internet in general, if it has any sense, the breakthrough in Hungary came in early 1996. In January, in an exhibition organised by the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts at the Mücsarnok (Kunsthalle) Budapest, five free workstations were available for the public to try and test what it means to "surf" electronically. This open access was soon to follow on several other occasions. The unusual success of the show entitled The Butterfly Effect, http://www.c3.hu/butterfly/index.html, in essence, gave birth to a new, virtually institutionalised program of the Hungarian Soros Foundation, C3: Center for Culture & Communication, http://www.c3.hu. The grand opening took place in June 1996. The first website of C3  was made for this occasion and entitled Exploration Network, http://www.c3.hu/c3/explo/exp_next.html. The introductory text declares that "the future-users are able to step into a latent gallery, where they can act as an active, collaborative participant in developing the real or the (virtual) image. Understanding the past tense as the traffic signs of the highway, the next moment can be the common responsibility of the viewer and the creator. Is it the pitfall of methodological chaos, or the new grammar of the new synthesis that symbolises the interface used for accessing global knowledge?"

Since that time onwards, numerous Hungarian and international residency projects were realised, including Masaki Fujihata, Impressing Velocity in Real Time, http://www.c3.hu/~masaki/; Protected by etoy, http://protection.etoy.c3.hu/; Artist in the Age of Information - by Alexei Shulgin; The 6th International Vilém Flusser Symposium, a part of the Beyond Art exhibition (curated by Peter Weibel). 

Some of the projects were initiated by the author(s), like web art such as the latest work by Olia Lialina: Agatha appears, http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/, which is a unique and exciting piece using the same information material upon which it reflects and in which it appears as its content and artistic medium. The presence of internationally known artists naturally inspires Hungarians, as do exchange programs like EMARE (two pieces realised in Budapest are Anonymous Drawing Room by Beverly Hood and ConciseCreativeConcordance 2.0 by Reinhold Adt, http://www.c3.hu/emare.htm).

Nevertheless, the first Hungarian projects were developed in parallel with the international scene. Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák’s Cryptogram is a communication-system which provides the possibilities of encoding messages (for instance, e-mails) to virtual sculptures (actually VRML files). The user can send messages in the form of virtual sculptures, which can be decoded back to their original form: http://www.c3.hu/cryptogram/, see also http://vrml.c3.hu/.

In the introduction, the author explains the system more extensively:
 

The idea of the Cryptogram is very simple: having a 3D virtual object built of triangular facets, we can link the points holding the faces to character codes. This way any text could be encrypted to a virtual object: each character of the text could be converted to one vertex-point of the sculpture, and the triangular faces could be built according to the order of the characters in the text.  The "encrypting program" reads a "key file" and a "text-file" as input, and produces a virtual sculpture (a file with the extension "wrl") in the format of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language 1.0. The decoding process is similarly simple: the program first scans the "key-file" for setting up the relations between the vertex-points and characters, then scans the wrl file for vertices, and converts each of them to character-codes. The text is built from the characters according to the order of the faces of the wrl-file.

Communicating through "Cryptograms" (with wrl files as text sculptures) has not only the advantage of encryption; it encrypts the fact of exchanging messages as well, since for unsuspecting outsiders the process seems to be the exchange of wrl worlds by vrml-fans; if one of them would look at the wrl files, they might seem to be some kind of "artworks" for him. On the other hand, the initiated Cryptogram-fans could acquire the skill after some practice to understand the most common enrypted messages in form of "sculptures" without decoding them.

These works are all related to a new C3 project, The Collection, which is a museum and future-plan, while collecting the most diverse "objects" like a contemporary "Wunderkammer" (Wonder Collection) on the Internet.

In 1996, the first Internet.galaxis was organised in the form of a show and exhibition for Internet providers together with the cultural sphere, http://www.inf.bme.hu/internet.galaxis/ig97/index-e.html, initiated by the adam studio http://www.adam.hu/.  The third edition took place in February 1998: http://www.adam.hu/internet.galaxis/. For this event, artists were asked to present their work within a market-context. The main works derived from two institutions: students of the above-mentioned Intermedia Department (eg., http://www.c3.hu/~nyorsi/, http://www.intermedia.c3.hu/Students/Vecsey_J/), and the art workshop of the Scientific Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences called "SZTAKI Mühely." This studio, where highly educated programmers provide assistance for artists in addition to their daily jobs, aided in realising the first Hungarian on-line art magazine, Nightwatch, http://www.sztaki.hu/providers/nightwatch/index.eng.html. They define and advertise themselves as "Art-Net-magazine. Changing still life. Idea, image, news market. Nightwatch - around a world" Published in Budapest continuously and periodically. (e-mail: <nightwatch@sztaki.hu>) In the project Vanishing trace, art historian Gábor Andrási explains the idea: "Day in day out, we see in the galleries exhibitions that leave no artwork behind - either because they are calculated to deteriorate, dissolve or diminish, or because the group of objects, the installation composed for the given space, is taken apart and is never put together again. Why - one may naturally ask? Why make an artwork that lives only for an hour or two? And in what form do they still survive?" Then the list of disappeared works follows with an appeal: "Review the whole list and vote for which one we have shown at its best."

The most recent issue, entitled Experimental Document, was co-produced by C3 and contains original web artworks by Gábor Bakos, Gábor Gerhes, Endre Koronczi, János Sugár, Gyula Várnai and Imre Weber, as well as Beta Tours by Balázs Beöthy and Travel document by Ágnes Eperjesi, http://www.sztaki.hu/providers/nightwatch/kiserleti/.

Another very intensively developing unique art resource and web site is the http://www.artpool.hu/. Artpool is a non-profit, alternative art institution in Hungary, with the objective of registering changes in art, to present and document the most interesting artistic experiments and to promote artistic communication. Via their current activities of electronic publishing, http://www.artpool.hu/onlinepublication.html, as well as research-exhibitions, http://www.artpool.hu/RayJohnson.html, they are establishing a real communication-oriented, content-based site. More Hungarian galleries and art institutions are on-line mainly due to the C3 assistance, dial-up service and webspace available for NGOs and cultural institutions, awarded via application (eg., http://www.c3.hu/ngo-e1.html, http://www.c3.hu/~bartok32/#English.)

Besides art galleries and NGOs, C3 provides assistance to minorities, for example, the homepage of the Hungarian Roma community is also found at: http://www.romapage.c3.hu/engindex.htm.

Though this is not an "art project" in an academic sense, there are artists whose interest in sociological issues has expanded beyond what was usual during the 1980’s postmodern era, when this was really not an issue either in the gallery space nor in the pages of well printed and skillfully designed art magazines. The project http://www.c3.hu/collection/homeless/Angol1.htm initiated by Dominic Hislop and Miklós Erhardt (Intermedia Dept.) is unique in this sense. The brief description here is taken from their website:
 

Photographs taken by Budapest’s homeless
'Inside-out' is a photographic project which began in Hungary's capital city, Budapest, in July 1997. Since then, some 30 people from a variety of homeless situations have been given simple single-use colour cameras and asked to record their view of whatever they feel to be important or interesting in their everyday experience. Each image is accompanied by some text taken from the transcript of a recorded interview with the photographer. As well as drawing attention to the issue of homelessness in Budapest, it is intended that this project can empower the homeless with the responsibility for their own representation, and produce images which challenge common preconceived notions of the homeless as a homogeneous or stereotypical group. (For more information e-mail: <homeless@c3.hu>)

There are no similarities between the homeless e-mail and the addresseless free-mail, but here, near the end of this overview, a play on words might be permitted: "To assist in the development of personal access to electronic communication, C3 has also created a web-based free electronic mail system in Hungarian for Hungarian speakers: http://freemail.c3.hu/fm/login."

To return to the arts, a year ago a new initiative began in a strange town, created by young professionals with the local government. The Institute of Contemporary Art-Dunaújváros, http://www.ica-d.hu/, is  a museum, a working and meeting place in an industrial town 80 km from Budapest, an extraordinary locus built up in the fashion of the so-called socialist-realism style of architecture. Young artists and art historians describe the main activities of the ICA-D as follows:

The Institute of Contemporary Art-Dunaújváros is a multi-functional, non-profit institution organising and coordinating national and international art projects. In addition to exhibiting and lecturing about the national and international scene, its goal is to build up and maintain an intense/vivid and challenging cooperation with artists and theoreticians. It also aims to launch, coordinate and document analytical research on contemporary art, as well as to maintain and develop the Insitute’s collections and to initiate new projects that might generate new works of art.

To conclude the review of current events in art and the Internet, from the readers’ point of view, I would like to quote Olia Lialina’s dialogue:
 

Sailor: i can’t follow the story
Agatha: it’s your problem