A brief history of C³, 1996-2026.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of C³, and an anniversary is always an occasion to look back. We are preparing a variety of programs and have launched our Facebook and Instagram pages, which, along with our websites, will help raise awareness and visibility of this period and present it in a new light.

On June 26, 1996, the C³ Center for Culture and Communication opened at 9 Országház Street in Budapest as a three-year pilot program of the Hungarian Soros Foundation, Matáv, and Silicon Graphics Hungary. The initiators deemed the project a success after three years and therefore established the C³ Foundation as an independent institution. The founding organizations no longer exist in their original form, while the C³ Foundation, albeit in a different location and under different conditions, is still operating today. To mark the anniversary, we are planning an exhibition whose main themes are related to C³'s most significant projects, above all the major public exhibitions organized over the past thirty years: The Butterfly Effect (1996), Perspective (1999), Media Model (2000), 2001: science + fiction, Vision - Image and Perception (2002), Aura (2003), Kempelen - Man in the Machine (2007), Timebase (2015). But we will not forget the long-term initiatives, such as the Internet programs, Pararadio, exindex, the Freestyle Computing Competition, publications https://www.c3.hu/c3/publications/index_en.php, the video archive, or the media art collection https://catalog.c3.hu/?lang=EN. We will be posting about these, as well as the artworks created with the support of C³ over the years https://www.c3.hu/collection/index_en.php, the more than 100 events https://www.c3.hu/events/index.html, and domestic and international collaborations on Facebook and Instagram in the run-up to the exhibition:

https://www.facebook.com/c3alapitvany
https://www.instagram.com/c3foundationhu/

From the time of its founding, C³ was a synthesis of three programs. The SCCA - Soros Center for Contemporary Art continued its operations https://www.c3.hu/scca/index.html, and in addition to the C³ program https://www.c3.hu/c3/c3bemutatasa, the Internet program, the most important from the initiators' point of view was also created https://tech.c3.hu/index02.html with a new network https://tech.c3.hu/Images/Int99oct-eng.gif. An anecdote from that period is worth mentioning here: since we needed to register our own domain, which at the time was done using somewhat euphemistic home-grown methods, the registration of the two-letter domain (.c3.hu) encountered a temporary obstacle. "No two-letter domains!" - was the verdict, and the end of the quote marked the beginning of a story. Indirectly, this minor conflict led to the establishment of the Internet Service Providers Council (ISZT) in Hungary. When the service (C³ servers) was launched, several individual email addresses were created in a form of @c3.hu, and some people have kept these addresses to this day. Then, about 10-15 years ago, when "cybersecurity intensified", certain servers and email programs automatically directed emails from such "unusual" addresses to "junk" or "spam" folders, which is inconvenient in the daily flow of communication. This is still the case today, and nowadays perhaps only Budapest taxi drivers are happy to hear such emails addresses in dictation when they need to write invoices, as it is short and only takes a few keystrokes which saves them time. And maybe also those who have been able to use them continuously for thirty years.