Adam Somlai-Fischer
Encyclopedia
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
is an architect and interaction designer interested in the cultural qualities of new technologies. He creates installations and experiments that blend spaces, technologies and interactivity. A team worker, Adam collaborates with designers, artists and engineers, where motivations are shared to create projects from conglomerates of thinking cultures.
In 2007 Adam co-founded "Kitchen Budapest medialab" where he worked as the program director until 2009, since then he remained a key advisor of the lab. He is founder and currently Head of design at Prezi
Prezi
Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for exploring and sharing ideas upon a virtual canvas. Prezi is distinguished by its Zooming User Interface , which enables users to zoom in and out of their presentation media...
.
He is lecturing and holding workshops in architecture and design schools across Europe. He graduated from the Architecture + Urban Research Laboratory, KTH, Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, taught at the Architecture and Media technology departments at KTH, working as a guest researcher at the Smart Studio (now Interactive Institute in Stockholmhttp://www.tii.se/at/). He was guest researcher at the MOKK Media Research and held workshops in design schools such as Domus Academy
Domus Academy, Postgraduate School of Design
Domus Academy is an international postgraduate school of design based in Milan, Italy. Domus Academy offers master courses and advanced short courses in the field of design, fashion, architecture, interior design and management. It was founded in 1982 as the first institutionalized school in Milan...
, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
and Goldsmith College, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He is directing "aether architecture", an office for mediated environments based in Budapest.
Important works
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
of Architecture 2004, 2006, ISEA 2004 Helsinki and 2006 San Jose, Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica is an organization based in Linz, Austria, founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society that was part of the International Bruckner Festival. Herbert W. Franke is one of its founders. It became its own festival and a yearly event in 1986. Its director until 1995...
2006, Kiasma Museum
Kiasma
Kiasma is a contemporary art museum located on Mannerheimintie in Helsinki, Finland. Its name kiasma, Finnish for chiasma, alludes to the basic conceptual idea of its architect, Steven Holl. The museum exhibits the contemporary art collection of the Finnish National Gallery founded in 1990...
Helsinki
Helsinki
Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...
, Ludwig Museum Budapest, China International New Media Artshttp://newmediabeijing.org Exhibition 2008, NTT
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
, commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked the 31st in Fortune Global 500, NTT is the largest telecommunications company in Asia, and the second-largest in the world in terms of revenue....
ICC
NTT InterCommunication Center
NTT InterCommunication Center is a media art gallery in Tokyo Opera City Tower in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. It was established by NTT to commemorate the 100th anniversary of telephone service in Japan and opened in 1997...
Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
.
Horizontal collaboration
One of his main principle is that the idea, the project is the center of the action. Therefore there is not one author, nor authority and novelty is not a major preoccupation even if every project, in its practical existence requires a lot of creativity and invention: not creating technologies but inventing creative usages of recent technologies, often through hackingHacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
and hybridization. The product of the collaborative
Collaboratory
A collaboratory, as defined by William Wulf in 1989, is a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing...
process in the architecture realm is therefore more oriented toward the culture quality, embodying technology as culture.
When authorship is involved with identified individuals, Bengt Sjölén, Usman Haque, Tamas Szakal, Massimo Banzi, Peter Halacsy, Peter Hudini, Andras Kangyal, Attila Nemes, Anita Pozna can be picked as recurrent collaborators.
Peer production
Commons-based peer production
Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical...
(coined within social sciences) in a "controlled environment like Kitchen Budapest created the necessity of a work methodology : throwing ideas, and a collectively agreed distributing of time, "60% own personal project, 35% someone else's project, 5% practical collective tasks)". The work of Adam Somlai-Fischer in the Kitchen Budapest is more than to identify areas of interest and organise the dynamics as groups of work : "Mobile expression", "Networked things", "DIY media, intergang", "Toy hack space", "wireless city"... In every project he admits everyone has his/her own goals and satisfaction factors. For him the individual identity can be blurred in the community, but it is precisely the belonging to a community, even as a part of a loose network
Wireless mesh network
A wireless mesh network is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways.The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic...
, that individual identity can emerge stronger.
Sharing
Goals
In 2008 at the Royal College of ArtRoyal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
Adam Somlai-Fischer declared his goals are:
- opennessOpennessOpenness is the quality of being open. It sometimes refers to a very general philosophical position from which some individuals and organizations operate, often highlighted by a decision-making process recognizing communal management by distributed stakeholders rather than a centralized authority...
; - the capacity of an architectural of design work to be writable, to diversify, to allow people to reconfigure and appropriate the object (Mass customizationMass customizationMass customization, in marketing, manufacturing, call centres and management, is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output...
?); and - in the abstract, a quest for freedom in the technological society.
External links
- http://www.prezi.com
- http://www.aether.hu/
- http://www.kitchenbudapest.hu/en
- http://www.reorient.hu/
- http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/08/interview-of-ad.php
- http://house.propositions.org.uk/
- http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/
- http://www.tii.se/at/