Yesterday we had a great meeting at the Műcsarnok (literally - Arts Hall, I wonder why they brand themselves as Kunsthalle on their English site, and not have a proper English name). Műcsarnok is the organization hosting the Venice Biennale Hungarian Pavilion project, and it is within their framework that the Corpora exhibition will be made there.
They are very nice and operative people, and I’m sure it will be fruitful to work with them.
Yesterday I met officials at the Hungarian National Office for Research and Technology, where we applied for funds to display Corpora in Hungary as a form to popularize embedded and ambient computing in general.
Corpora relies heavily on Zigbee wireless mesh-networked technology to sense the outside environment, which acts as input for the generated architecture. These sensors are spread around, magically form a mesh network and start to talk with each other that way. Then we can ask any one of them, who will get the information from the other motes and then give it to us. Much like gossip and other information is disseminated and spreading in human societies.
As it turns out, our application got the go-ahead after the usual evaluation procedure - but, the Office has already spent its complete budget for the program we applied for on other applications. For the whole year, even though it’s only April.
This is a major setback for both displaying Corpora in Budapest next year, and providing required resources for the Biennale exihibition.