Kitchen Budapest, Monday 18th May

Kitchen Budapest was the final destination before our return to Preston and a full winter wardrobe. After an initial panic, in which the address we had written down appeared to belong to a 'nail bar', we managed to locate the venue, craftily camouflaged by a neon sign proclaiming "Kitchen Budapest".

Affectionally referred to as 'Kibu' by its members, Kitchen Budapest is a small, multi-functional space which resembles a combination of a teenage hacker's bedroom, a trendy dot.com office and a youth club. Set up two years ago, the organisation is fully funded by the Hungarian Telecom foundation and functions as a research and development centre for projects which combine art and technology.

Each year, 15 young people are selected to develop their project proposals as researchers within multi-disciplinary teams that can include artists, engineers and programmers amongst others. Generally, each research period last for 3 months, however some projects may be extended after this time. The final result is often a new device or an unusual and creative application for existing technologies. In particular, the project encourages a hacker aesthetic, in which new tools are created through combining parts from different devices, and existing tools are used for alternative purposes.

The organisation also hosts international residencies. We met the current artist-in-residence, Christopher Baker , who is from the US and studied bio-medical engineering as an undergraduate (narrowly beating Pest's combined qualifications of grade 5 violin, Diversity Awareness and a licence to trap small mammals). What seemed most valuable to him was the experience of being surrounded by other researchers from diverse disciplines and with specific types of knowledge, however he did make the point that the "playground feeling" of the organisation calls for high levels of self-motivation.

With that in mind, we motivated ourselves to sample a bit more Hungarian beer before being whisked back to the airport and the sheer luxury of a Ryan Air flight (as we overheard a woman in the boarding queue say "they don't even have magazine pockets on the back of the seats!")

So, that just leaves for us to say a great big "Koszonom" to everyone who took the time to meet with us and tell us about their projects (oh, and to the masseuses at the thermal baths for elevating Pest's collective executive stress). It has been a truly fascinating and inspiring trip!

Our trip to Budapest was supported by the Networking Artists’ Networks initiative (NAN) through a-n The Artist Information Company.