Spicy Little Things from Budapest

A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Budapest airport.

Although many of my friends look at the changes here with far less optimism than I, let us be practical: the optimistic version is much shorter. Besides, I had better look at my glass, as half (or only a tenth?) full rather than half empty. This is a mind game, in which pessimism was mainly the winner here for a long time. I will try to draw a rough sketch of some people and activities, that may, I think, influence peoples' minds, opening up new perspectives on the interactions between art, science and technology. These are the special spicy little things for me, the standalone civic initiatives, which-to play the optimistic mind game-will grow from the bottom to the top in the coming years. Yet first, I describe briefly the wider local context where these interactions may occur.

The financing of research activities (in art, science and technology) is a core problem here. It is definitely dependent on the ruling government and its decision makers, as the private sector still takes only a small part in sponsoring these fields. Since 1989, in almost every segment of life, the government has granted special tax exemptions to the affiliates of large international companies and privatized the major share of the main industries to them. Resources are directed by companies' global enterprise strategies; therefore, fewer of these companies play a significant role in supporting local culture, art and science than might be expected. The R&D expenditure as a percentage of the GDP is about half as much in Hungary (~1%) as in the rest of the EU (~2%), where 55% of R&D funds come from the business sector. In Hungary, the business sector's contribution to R&D is around 30% of the total [1]. Coloring the picture, during the past 16 years Hungary has produced dichotomous political brands, strongly relying on different cultural accents. Overall values and terms such as "local vs. global" or "traditional vs. modern" are used to characterize the dividing line, but it has far more complicated and sensitive ramifications in daily life, in which oversimplified political propaganda spins it as "irreconcilable differences" to the public. After a decade of discussing the political situation, many people are fed up with the polarized mainstream politics, leaving more room for alternative movements. There is a growing bottom-up (and more or less independent) civic world, which makes our daily life rich in rising initiatives generating new spaces to transform the urban landscape both physically and mentally. By forming, developing and maintaining new communities, these young initiatives use the Internet and its related technologies intensively. New communities need new physical environments, so old houses or former industrial areas are being converted into new, usually temporary, pubs, galleries and workshops, or all-in-one cultural institutions.

Intensive Networking

This country with its 10 million inhabitants has about 800,000 micro and small enterprises. This means that almost every twelfth person is self-employed, relatively independent and certainly defenseless. Many are artists, researchers, journalists, etc. employed on a project or contractual basis, obtaining commissions via personal acquaintances. Physical and virtual public spaces become extremely important places/venues to meet and exchange information within this multi-interwoven social network. Everyone knows everybody via just a few other acquaintances in this city. This was the basic concept used by a few young guys (Péter Petrovics, Márton Szabó, Zsolt Várady, with backgrounds in information science, sociology and economy) and their artist friends when they founded the WiW (Who is Who) collective in Budapest in 2002 [2]. It started as a hobby with no money involved, and though it developed into a small enterprise, even today everyone works on the project without pay. The WiW is an invitation-based, database-driven Who's-Who web site collecting social connections. Entering the site, you can gather acquaintances, generate a graphical map of your social network, form teams and...