back to curiousLee
Time: No one seems to take the time to do things right
Solutions: The opposites of genius, obvious and focus
Genius: An amazing maze is the human brain
Innovation: The old quest for the New
History: Meandering paths from then to now
Media: We depend on the interface to the public
Leaps: Nothing seems to happen and then suddenly...
Ideas: How to help and hinder them
Origins: A thousand years permeate this space
Location: Where in the world is the Byteburg
Pictures: Some things can´t be put in words
Contact: Projects, Press, People
Numbers: Vox, fax, email and snailmail
[ top ]
How to use a book...
Sounds a bit like a Do-It-Yourself show for complete idiots, along the lines of "How to boil water in 9 easy steps"...
But since this is not a normal molecule-laden "bookbook", a few introductory words seem in order...
Using the little tabs on the left side of each page you get a new set of tabs on the top edge. This way you have five chapters, each with a handful of subchapters for a total of around 15 pages for now.
In principle one could continue with further sub-sub-chapters on the right and bottom edges, but for the moment we will start with only two levels in this first book.
Of course there are also lovely possibilities to have real 3-D page turns, insert pictures into the pages and have more and more books on all kinds of topics.... we´ll see what will happen.
You can read them in sequence, but each of the two-pagers are self-contained closed chapters, so you can also hop non-linearly...
The empty book as a background is a picture, the text is then overlayed in Flash, rotated properly and anti aliased. A lot can still be done though, we are happy to talk about ideas, inspirations. Show us your prototypes and extensions... it´s a huge area to play with and extend.
I am completely aware of the fact that this cannot "replace" a real book, nor is it meant to at all. It is rather an attempt to let the written words stand on their own, separate from mere email Ascii and hinting in its aesthetic form at the unusual content.
The method of overlaying the text dynamically once the single load time of the background image has happened allows expansion in principle to an endless number of further chapters and pages.
This may not seem like a big deal with the initial couple of dozen, but with increasing complexity and scope and in other applications it can become quite interesting indeed, especially once the link to the paper analogy is left behind and the content can be combined and presented both in completely new ways.
Hyperlinks within the text overlay are not included so far, but they could nicely allow for jumps within a book itself, as well as total reorientation of the contents and multiple paths of reading...
I am quite interested in exactly that link: the known forms and the new possibilities in unknown future variations. That in itself is one of the themes we are focusing on and the website will reflect that as we go forward.
Obviously we are just as tickled by the opposite approach: maybe there might be a paper version of the virtual book, thick and bound in leather to hold in your hands. I have turned down many many offers to write so far, but I am warming up to the idea considerably now... who knows...
All in all, please don´t take it all so damn seriously and literally, not every comma is following the perfect punctuation laws, not every quote has footnoted sources and many times there are complete inside jokes, those who get it will smile and chuckle, and those who don´t won´t, no biggie...
The German version has its own sense of mischief and is not a transliteration of the English version, if nothing else the many language specific word plays in blurred ways would be meaningless anyway... If your bilingual brain is able to do it, snoop the other version a little, it´s kind of fun. Certainly wasn´t easy to do...
So in the end: read it loosely and with a smirk, in one stretch if you can, to get a sense of the overall theme. I hope it does answer a few questions out there, and obviously it creates many new ones. A lot of details will have to follow, about the projects and the people, but it was by design and on purpose to not do that quite yet with this first book.
Have fun.... personal email is always welcome, just don´t be mad or disappointed if personal replies can take a little while...
[ top ]
No one seems to take the time to do things right
"There are not enough months in the day", I used to say. That was when I still had time!
Recently the Byteburg "as a place" taught me something about time though. Sitting in a space that has such a sense of enduring longevity, where details were lovingly crafted and persisted hundreds of years later make it obvious that it was worth it then to spend the time.
Everyone seems to be talking about Innovation these days, not one sewage tank cleaner or insurance company that doesn’t like to claim ownership and yet hardly anyone seems to take the time to actually let it happen.
Danny Hillis tells a story about Oxford University. I heard the same story from a carpenter with his twist: the table of the Elders had been built from single pieces of wood for the entire length. When it came the time to finally refurbish it our carpenter was told to go to a particular person he should talk to. Upon arriving the man said "I wondered when you would come... they knew you would need new planks, so they planted them 400 years ago to be ready about now. They are over there...." True story and a story of truth.
We should be thinking for 10 generations ahead with our planet. But we don’t. In a way we can´t. There are no more solutions to grow slowly and linearly and still be worth much of anything to the problems of 2400 AD. But there are insights to small changes we could make that may affect everything and everyone.
In the late 60s the Club of Rome created a stir with a manifesto of small negative changes building up to near catastrophic results. I have nothing as grandiose in mind, but I yearn for the Byteburg to maybe talk about small positive changes that can have tangible effects.
For the moment we are merely building the foundations for such work, the place in which it could happen and the magnet that could attract the people to contribute to such work. But one of the key components beyond that is indeed time itself.
I am rediscovering for myself the pleasures of reacquainting myself with time, its cycles and psychological variations. From day to day and weekly rhythms to the seasons of the year I had taken for granted how I lived within them and they affected me. Time taken for a book or a bath or a walk or a game, the stolen moment and the rapture of a cancelled appointment...it allows me to squeeze more out of my time than ever before.
It is far too early to describe the specifics of the projects themselves, but I wanted to give a larger overview to the principle key thoughts.
Clearly there is no intention to build software products. Anyone who is expecting colorful buttons and ethereal landscape generators or real-time image filters may be surprised to find out they aren’t even on the top 100 of lists.
Surely if another Bryce crossed my path the way it did with Eric Wenger in Paris, or another Vector Effects with Sree Kotay or another Power Tools with Ben Weiss I might still dabble in this or that area, but almost as a sideline bit of fun rather than the main mission. Certainly there will be some immediate innovations that require code to achieve, such as a TiVO and I don’t mind getting my synapses dirty with little muddy bits of software and pixels.
If anything, the choices we will make here will be eclectic and unpredictable, always surprising and never boring.
Anything truly well done. With a smile and a smirk.
No self-imposed milestones in the way. No time limits.
"I love deadlines, I love the whooooshing sound they make as they fly by" said Douglas Adams over a very long dinner with way too much Chateau Margaux.
That’s the way to see them, in the rearview mirror.
Bye bye, deadlines...
[ top ]
The opposites of genius, obvious and focus
There are many apocryphal stories about serious new ideas and inventions. Often they make a leap of assumption that complete happenstance is at work coupled with amazing genius to translate that into a finished idea.
Take the apple falling on the head of Newton. There is the random accident happening and the implication is "only a genius" would derive such deep understanding from it.
But I differ. There is no luck involved. I always used to say that when people wondered about whether success just fell into my lap. "Luck will open the door, randomly and suddenly, but you have to be fully dressed, ready to jump, because luck will also close the door right away again!"
Clearly one cannot decide to sit and wait for falling objects, nor does every incident of bodily harm spit out Second Laws of Thermodynamics. But one has to ask if, with certain knowledge, should not someone have been able to infer or derive it much earlier than it seems to have taken in the course of history?
There are for instance beautiful solutions to remove a wine cork, entirely mechanical contraptions, which technically should have existed in the 1600 century. But didn't.
When I was about 11, I was convinced that the story told to us in school about Kepler and Galileo´s problems with the earth being a sphere was total bullspit, simply because the shadow on the moon is SO obviously curved and ONTO a curved object as well. Never mind any math... It seemed just common sense to me.
Still today I pick up a cell phone and wonder about the obviously missing details and other details entirely missing the point.
But as clear as this seems to me, it just doesn´t seem to be as obvious to the world around me. The Emperor´s clothes syndrome, I spent a great deal of time not wanting to say much of anything any more.
Sometimes there were limits. Seeing the general rush of lemmings throwing themselves over the cliffs of early OS versions, I would be on stages crying about the silliness of 8.3 character filenames. Ten years they lived on, costing this planet untold billions in productivity and for what...? It would have been technically trivial to fix and when it WAS finally fixed, I was once told by a deep insider that it was done in less than 4 days.
The point has nothing to do with software, but rather that innovation and improvements are limited by sometimes entirely mundane obstacles such as corporate structures.
What I want to do with the Byteburg is definitely not to "just nag". We are not academics damned to publish their hybris. We are not in need of coming up with notions of concepts for idealets that may sound good in filled out forms for grant applications. We don’t need to achieve quarterly pennies and bottom line results. No corporate mission statements. No legacy code to save. No regards to not destroy last years model or not to obsolete warehouses of a product. My most ardent foe of recent years was the All American disease called "Low Hanging Fruit"
Here, we just don’t care. We just want to think and muse and ponder. Making money should be a result not a goal.
And one more thing. That dreaded F-word! I don’t want to hear about "focus" any more. I desperately want to be OUT OF focus and NOT quite know where I am going, not quite see what´s in front of me, not quite remember where I came from. New solutions often hide in the unlikely and counter intuitive corners. If you know too much you might miss the forest for the trees...
"Sometimes being lost gets you somewhere good", said Marco Polo. He said it about women, but lets pretend he meant his discovery journeys, ok?
[ top ]
An amazing maze is the human brain
I am not a genius. You are not a genius. Trust me. It doesn’t take a genius to see that.
But there were some out there...
Consider Alan Turing before the apple he ate to kill himself. Different kind of an idea... In his days of Enigma machines he displayed a unique inventive spirit. Or to top that, one could think of truly amazing brains like Rahmanujan, who created solutions to endless equations with ease and on the fly. According to his own description they often simply "flowed out of him". He could for instance see a huge number and instantly tell details about it that had never been proven before and some of which still have not been proven since! He died by not eating not only apples but anything at all, the absence of India in London made him wither away.
There are few who fall into that category of absolutely stunning abilities which truly and only deserve the term genius. Euler lived 76 years until 1783, had 13 children and wrote over 700 books in the process. Among them were insights like possibly the most beautiful formula ever derived by human mind: e ^ i ^ p = -1 combining transcendental, irrational and natural number constants as powers of each other, for the first time in one formula and to then say, all that ... plus one, is ....nothing!
It boggles the mind. Even Albert would throw emcsquare away in humility.
Leibnitz, Bach, Dürer, Goethe... there have been many of these truly statistical outliers in human achievement. I cannot add many today on that kind of scale.
Just musing about black holes is not quite enough.
And certainly nothing that I have ever achieved. We should all be very quiet and humbly realize that there can be real genius. But the term should be reserved for such deserving creatures and not worn out.
But if there are some out there now... I would like to find them.
The question how a Mozart would live and work today, whether an Einstein could still succeed in climbing to the top of the current state of knowledge while employed at the patent office on the side... all that is moot but amusing. We are obviously merely at an accidental point in history and the total knowledge base will explode more than ever before. But Nobel prizes do not nearly reflect accurately who in fact actually influenced the fate of the world.
There is a lovely discussion on the www.edge.org site, in which the question is brought up what really has been the most important invention in history. The answer is inconclusive but the dialog is what matters and inspires.
Don´t get me wrong. There is nothing elitist about the Byteburg, I am not saying I want to work only with accredited genii by any stretch. But I am fascinated with the outskirts of knowledge and to make a difference.
What I would love to achieve with the Byteburg is to hold up a flag that says "Here we are, find us!". To the brilliant people that are hiding under rocks. All those characters, how do I somehow glue them into a poem?
I don’t need brain surgeons at all levels for all tasks. Sometimes a dedicated person with stickwithitness is worth a lot more than a Prof. Dr. Dr. giving long speeches. All I am really looking for is good humans, someone I can look in the eye and see that they are team players, have a sense of humor, respect, humility and a sense of wonder. It will be the day when I see resumes with a degree in "Curiosity"
And if you know a recluse savant, let me know.
Idiots we already know. : )
[ top ]
The old quest for the New
As we humans are noodling along on this tiny planet there have been moments of "the next new thing" from the very beginning. Somewhere someone was putting hexagons as wheels under carts, and then another tried octagons and suddenly Bob Neander had the brilliant flash to finally try a complete circle.
"Now!! NEW!! 50% Less Wobble!" the ads would proclaim and everyone knew that it was good.
There were a few real biggies: the wheel, fire, gummibears... and just as everyone was certain we were just about to exhaust the supply of newness, along came the next next new thing.
As I so fondly proclaimed on Japanese stages, waiting for the translation to wave through the audience, "American Scientists have discovered that we have seen exactly 0.9423% of all possibilities". Some wrote it down. Exactly.
But where does this newness itself originate? Is there a theory of Innovation, a pattern to discover, can the process itself be optimized? I believe the answer to be yes...
At first glance, a new idea appears completely unconnected to anything and anyone. It could happen any time and take many forms. For me it usually manifests itself in moments of lucent dreams, hour long showers, train rides and other random events.
Surely, some ideas are the result of sweat and patience, diligently building upon cycles of small steps, honing and smoothing, iteratively achieving the goal at hand.
But other times it is much more surprising that there aren´t these steps and building blocks.
In my past I have had numerous cases of envisioning a complex idea such as a software tool in "its entirety", all at once, including the ads for it and the reviews of it, my acceptance speech of the awards and my explanations to the team why we need to build the next one already.
Michelangelo is reputed to have said "He wants ME to paint the bloody ceiling of THAT little chapel?? I have no time, damnit, who does he think he IS, the damn POPE??" but we wont mention that here now.
The sentence I would like to mention is his description of creating a new sculpture: "It's easy", he said, "you take a block of marble and simply remove the parts that don´t belong"
Ah yes. It´s insights like that which must have helped Edison. His was the other extreme in approaches to Innovation: after a few thousand combination tests finally there was the light bulb filament that stayed lit for more than an hour. Made from the element Wolfram. Which was the name of my father. Since age 11 that double meaning puzzled me no end.
So: when in doubt about choices, why not try to exhaust them all? More elegantly though: there is such a thing as Common Sense. Striving for the most meaningful solution, using the minimum of time, energy, money and resources to achieve the most pleasing result, the best fitting solution to all chosen criteria.
And so what we are after is "Extreme Common Sense".
Stuff that in hindsight is not only obvious and sensible but begs the question, why didn’t someone do this a long, long time ago?
Why didn´t YOU come up with LEGOs or Pokemon? Inevitable inventions that had to happen. And how many hundreds are just in front of us or were missed by an inch?
It's not as obvious to apply this concept to the little tiny subdetails, but it does work, even if language may fail us. There IS such a thing as "getting better at getting better"!
[ top ]
Meandering paths from then to now
The influence of the ambience of the workspace on the quality of the work is to me plain obvious. Ever since I was yay high (In German the exact translation of that will be since-I- was-a-three-cheese-high) I blessed the days when I was "sick but not tooo sick", just enough to surround myself with 9 pillows and everything I needed for a good days work in bed. Some cars, some books, little figures, paper and pencil and various amounts of chocolate and sweets. And they needed to be just so, within reach. In German: "Happiness was dripping from the ceiling".
Then I started to build cities out of wooden blocks, Legos and matchbox cars. A motorized Skilift up to the sink, move the furniture around to make room for the new zoo. Including corner wardrobes 5 times my size. The door needed to be locked and during all that I would endlessly listen to the radio plays and "Schulfunk", re-enactments of historical situations, biographies of composers and such, sometimes even binaurally recorded.
Those hours of falling into my own phantasy world were quite likely the happiest moments of my entire youth and the point that perfect control of the space around me was of tantamount importance only dawned on me years later.
And really I should have realized this right away... : this whole project here is merely a scaled up version of the exact same thing! The last 25 years were a quest for me to build the next larger idea on the edge of what I thought possible and so it still is today.
And the tinkering became the Credo.
First it was music. It lead me to the very first synthesizers in the early 70s. I probably owned one of the first handful machines in the entire country and paid dearly for it.
Here they were: the Lego blocks of the Next Higher Level: oscillators, filters and amplifiers that I could cross connect and combine in endlessly new ways: the audible versions of cities. I dedicated myself to understanding how and why it worked, studied psychoacoustics to cognitively deal with the origin and nature of sounds.
Interesting in hindsight the drive to make those connections in unconventional and unforeseen ways. Just like the misuse of the pure guitar ala Jimi Hendrix opened entire new paths with feedback and distortion.
And then came the computers. The next larger idea on the edge. In 1977 I had probably one of the first usable machines. Lego blocks again, combining even more possibilities with programming languages and I ventured to the edges creating many many results that had never been seen before by anyone.
In a way, I chose rather quickly not to just make pictures and sounds but to make the tools for the process as such. Not only did I want to climb Mount Everest, but to enable others to follow.
Byteburg is really the slightly nonlinear extension of my entire life´s work. It is an attempt for me to go further and deeper than I ever have before and to give more people than ever the opportunity to find similar ways for themselves.
This is not a software company, or indeed any company. We don´t create products or services. We don´t design web sites or supply little buttons for hire. All that Byteburg is trying to be is a place where general Applied Innovation and pure thinking is given a chance to happen.
It is nine pillows, a locked door, music, books, chocolate and endless amounts of new kinds of Lego blocks. Just leave us the f@ck alone and some day when we go to bed at 9 am and get up at 5pm we might come across a new obvious solution to something seriously useful. Or instead something seriously beautiful.
Symbolically the first patent application here is a Zipper.
[ top ]
We depend on the interface to the public
Let´s say you are a baker. You make the darndest best bread and cookies in the region, damnit! But, if you live behind a brick wall, without a door and windows, then no one will come and buy even one lone loaf, no matter how good it may be...
The moral is not to give up baking and become an accountant, but to put a damn door in. And while you are at it, hang a huge pretzel outside that says to all comers far and wide "Here resides the best baker, come and get it."
I have always been both optimist and realist, skeptic and tea drinker but also a pragmatist. Since the very beginning of my work it became clear to me that it is not enough to make a beautiful movie only to have it be seen merely by a handful of students in art theaters, not enough to paint pictures only seen by aunts and uncles and not enough to sit in pubs lamenting the state of everything and let those words not leave that room.
What a shame would it have been if Bach had kept his third Brandenburger Concerto just for himself and his weird cousin Bob to listen to... Surely it was his duty even to bring it out to the world and let his baby live and grow and survive him.
Recognizing these basic truths to be self evident, I have always lived with the inevitable need to deal with the media in all forms. Doing interviews in print, radio or TV is simply my version of hanging my pretzel out there.
The Byteburg in itself is a gigantic pretzel, which says "look at these guys, they are holding up a flag that it is still possible today to do something new and cool and different, without selling your soul, without compromises, and with a sense of style and grace, fun and happiness."
I know that in the beginning many stories will focus on the inevitable dishwasher-to- millionaire local-boy-makes-good angle. Some are looking at the building purely for its unusual story, the sappy Count von Pixel in his Thinktank.
And you know what? I don’t care. I can´t care.
At this stage I can´t expect anything higher than that from the media and frankly, for the purpose at hand, the pretzel swaying in the wind pointing to the entrance, it works just fine nevertheless. I want to slowly earn the respect!
Iteratively I hope to wean them of the superlatives and the guru talk and get down to the nitty gritty of real issues, propose solutions, interesting ideas and inventions, events, theses, and simply the results that count.
Maybe we publish a book, maybe we do our own TV show, maybe we organize events . Or a game about the movie of the perfume of the idea? Who knows...
But there is a kind of pretzel logic at work.
In a nutshell: we need to create as many one-way-arrows pointing towards us with the minimum of fuss and overhead in order to get the largest vats full of submissions for people and projects, since only 3% of it will be really any good in the end.
Sorry ahead of time if yours was in "the other pile", but you know what I mean: understandably we can only deal with a fraction of them anyway.
Clearly we will get letters from people selling us all kinds of angles: investments in grave cleaning (happened), new castles up the river (happened), Rembrand scholar paintings for the chapel (happened), all the way to prodigy kids who hacked online banking passwords and now might want to do something good for a change (happened, loved it).
Sometimes 3% is plenty.
That, times five years, is all I need.
That and that thermos.
That´s all I need.
[ top ]
Nothing seems to happen and then suddenly...
Hardware has improved by leaps and bounds. A project team with a complex computation time of 2 years ahead of them is probably better off to go to the beach for one year, then start with the next generation of machines more than twice as fast, and finish ahead, and with a decent tan.
Whether 10,000-to-1 or a million-to-1 becomes academic, but suffice it to say that within 25 years we have come from a few thousand to a billion bytes or RAM, from a-few-tens-of-one to a-thousand-megahertz in speed, from a-few-hundred- thousand to tens-of-billions of saved bytes. Even that does not encapsulate the enormity of the change: Going from a tricycle to a car is, in one description, merely a "25% increase in wheels", but even in the smallest of cars one can drive coast to coast, while even the most expensive tricycle will fail at a millionth the distance.
The changes are exponentially triggering even further possibilities in change and so the achievements of one era breed new breakthroughs, unforeseen but inevitable.
Given a linear law like Moore´s "computational power doubling every 18 months" one is tempted to say "there you are, building a 128Mb RAM module, when you full well know that you need to build the 256Mb version within barely more than a year...so why don’t you go for that right away?" And the surprising answer is that they cannot do it!
It’s not a choice, its not some deep marketing insight. The methods to make camcorders shrink from Shoulder size to Hand size to Palm size were at every level considered to be the best they could do. Period. That’s it.
And then... someone else would come along to suck a bit of air out and shrink it all yet again. Somehow. And the whole thing starts all over again... and every time unexpected?
Surely the derivative "rate of change of change" also cannot remain constant forever...?
We are in the submicrons now where soon the connections are built from individual discernible atoms (!) and the halving will come to an end. Or will it....?
Jumping to 3D chips seems inevitable. Someone will jump out of the loop of the system with its linear limits and approach the problem in a new way.
Maybe indeed the binary system will be extended to a third state, renamed trinary and instead of bits we have tits?
Don´t laugh. Not only would 3 tytes be 27 instead of 8 possibilities, imagine 3 teratytes!
And then while we are at it, someone may suggest that 4 states would be better than 3. Quads and quytes and gigaquytes... and next thing you know, we reinvented "analog" with continuous steps. Who knows....
The point is the jump.
Some ideas are perfectly obvious in hindsight. And here we would like to somehow "think through" some of those inevitable events on the road ahead, coming to conclusions that no matter how the road will be built, it somehow has to cross this valley and then find our toll booth there.
Or at least a sign. With a huge smiley : )
"too late, been here."
I am postulating that the affinity to understand the nature of newness can itself be learned and improved and optimized.
The birth of a new idea is like that ancient story about the fleeting butterfly. "The more you chase after it, the more it remains elusive. Only when you have given up already and you least expect it will you find that it sits right on your shoulder...
Quick, a tissue.
Isn´t nature a tear jerker...
Sigh
[ top ]
How to help and hinder them
Karajan used to tell this lovely anecdote of Zen Masters shooting arrows. Aiming, they would say: not "I am shooting" but "IT is shooting".
The process itself would follow on its own through the sequence and achieve the nearest to perfect result. The person is merely there to convert the concept to reality.
Ideas, at best, are like that for me.
In the proper context I can sit down and muse about how things might be in an ideal state without any regard whether this is realistic in a technical or business or marketing sense.
Just arrived from the home planet of Zontar (hang a left at Boötes and then ask) one could look at the state-of-the-art of the first cars and comment "why not simply add a mirror so you can see behind you without creaking your neck?" Everyone would slap their foreheads and ever hence you collect a dime for the idea.
The question is when did the first person think of the obvious missing item? Are there many such ideas and inventions that could have been "pre-invented"? Are there many of those that we should be able to infer at this stage... inevitable needle ear entries to another level? For me the answer is again an emphatic yes.
An idea however is not enough. The conversion to reality hinges upon more than mere concepts. Anyone could muse about a 300 mpg car doing 300 mph as a beautiful invention. Or rather an idea of an invention.
The key is to include real life limitations into the definition of value for an idea, the feasibility, applicability, sellability...the weakest link still needs to be strong.
The key is the balance: to be able to overshoot everyone into dreamland, pure idealized wishful thinking, then pull back into cruel worst case scenarios. And ultimately find the realistic sweet spot.
Research in large groups and academic institutions does not lend itself to this type of innovation.
Publish or perish is not the paradigm for "lateral thinking". Edward de Bono´s term in itself describes not how to have an idea but the prerequisite state of mind to let having an idea occur.
There may not be an objective universal state that applies to multiple individuals, but it occurs to me that there are positive steps to build on as well as negative avoidances to remove barriers, that one can follow to improve the odds.
Creating an environment that is conducive to this subtle occurrence can take many forms, but I venture to forge ahead with a personal vision of one such ambience.
For me the concept of an ancient building with historical significance, with depth and substance, is inarguably one of the ways to achieve such a special place. Peace and Quiet, untethered from neighbors and restrictions, surrounded by spaces to walk to, unconnected from disturbing influences... with views that always change, with inspiring settings.
I have never been able to work in Cubicles, or even an office. Or even in a Day cycle, or even in any defined cycle.
I have to be able to drift in space and time, walk around, sleep at will, or sleep at won´t. No one can see my screen if anything subtle is to be given birth to on it.
Maybe people feel uneasy about being watched making love. But Making ideas is just as private and it is obscene to have over the shoulder glances. Your brain may be more private than your private parts!
In a nutshell: the surroundings greatly impact the work.
[ top ]
A thousand years permeate this space
Byteburg as a name is clearly a fabrication of this new venture, trying to encapsulate a meaningful combination of new (byte as in bits) and old (burg meaning castle).
The first working title - codename was actually "Bitburg", but as that happens to be the name of a different town and one of the largest beer breweries in Germany we decided against it. Maybe if we end up with applied innovation in beer we can still use it elsewhere later... ; )
The original proper name of this first Byteburg building is "Burg Rheineck", and that´s how we refer to the actual place rather than the concept.
A dynasty of Rheineck barons and counts has resided in the various buildings, chapels and Burgen that have been built and burnt down over nearly one thousand years.
There is a first mention of dwellings on this spot above the river around 78 AD. (!) but little is known until much later
In 1045 the area was given to the Nuns of Essen by a Graf Otto. This is particularly interesting since Essen, about 200 km north in another state, is my home town. How the circles close, could there be a dog...?
Sometime then the first incarnation of a castle was built, since between 1113 and 1124 the Baron "Otto von Salm" inherited it in his marriage to Gertrud of Pfalz, taking the name of Graf of Rheineck.
In 1190 the dynasty continues with the brothers Gottfried and Johann and follows through 400 years within that family until the mid 1500s. Through the following centuries the buildings were burnt down partially by feuding bishops and the third vandalizing crusade of Louis XIV in 1689 (!)
The main Tower and the Chapel remained, the rest was rebuilt in 1718, but the stables and living quarters burnt down again in 1785 and were in a sad state until 1829 when the then famous Professor of the university in Bonn Bethmann-Hollweg.
He employed one of the most prestigious architects of the day, Johann Claudius de Lassaulx, as well as Steinle, one of the preeminent painters of the period, both of which had been working on the Dom cathedral in Cologne.
Lassaulx built on top of the 12th century chapel over an archway, and added another level with the Octagon, an eight sided salon with beautiful views in arched windows.
Steinle spent nearly 33 months on wet on wet Fresco paintings inside the chapel, a technique which he learned from the Nazarene artists in Italy over several years.
The Bethmann Hollwegs family remained in Rheineck until the end of WWII, the last remaining member now living in London has visited us already, a delightful day. There is even a crypta mausoleum and a cemetery on the grounds.
Visitors in those days included the future Kaiser and later endless streams of government soirees. Yehudi Menuhin played violin in the chapel, and it gave me a real thrill over a long dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev to remind him that he had already slept in my bed in Rheineck a few years ago the German foreign minister used it for weekend retreats.
Since then it has been the private seat of the large family of Herbert Hillebrand, and used in the 1990s as a conference center. After a 6-year state of solitude we have reawakened this beautiful building and its surrounding forests for an entirely new mission.
A detailed historical account of Burg Rheineck from the many sources we have so far discovered, will be collected over the next few years. Some of the tradesmen who worked on parts of the castle have contacted us as well
We are grateful for all information.
[ top ]
Where in the world is the Byteburg
The Byteburg I, castle Rheineck, is situated in Germany south of Cologne and Bonn and north of Koblenz and Frankfurt. This is quite central in Europe: from almost anywhere one can fly within an hour into Frankfurt, Düsseldorf or Cologne and be less than an hour from the central portion of the Rhein river. From Frankfurt airport one can step into a highspeed ICE train right inside the terminal building and zoom north to Koblenz, or in the future we will pick up visitors with a speedboat on the Main river and travel right up the Rhein.
The nicest route from either Cologne or Frankfurt would be along the A3 freeway and then cutting westward to Bad Hönningen where one can take the ferry over the Rhein to Bad Breisig in under 2 minutes. Just look up and wave.
The Rhein river from Frankfurt north is the famous windy meandering valley with vineyards on the slopes and old castles like the "Loreley" dotting the hilltops. The northern most point is at Bad (´Bath´) Breisig, a tiny spa town with ancient mineral springs. Along here was the original border of the Roman Empire to Germania along the Limes wall, one of the last ones still standing right across by the ferry.
The regions north towards Bonn and Cologne are much less hilly, and castle Rheineck enjoys probably the only long range view along the river for a hundred miles, any further south the river bends limit the distance, any further north and the buildings are situated substantially lower.
From Cologne or Düsseldorf the most direct route is inland along the 61 freeway, over the large bridge across the river Ahr valley near Bad Neuenahr, and then towards the Rhein through the tiny villages of Niederzissen and Waldorf (where the salad comes from, well kind of, one of the villagers ended up starting a hotel in NYC...)
Further inland are beautiful cobble stone villages like Ahrweiler with complete city walls from mediaeval times. The Ahr valley is carving itself into the high Eifel mountain range; 20 minutes to the famous Nürburg Ring Formula 1 racetrack. If you are into slinging your molecules from A to B at great speed, you can drive the Ring in your own car on most weekends.
Within an hour westwards one would hit Belgium. An hour northwest is Holland. About 15 minutes south is the stunning Mosel valley, meandering into Luxembourg and France. All within Sunday afternoon picnic distance.
Fun too is a drive to London via the Chunnel train in little more than 5 hours. Paris is about 3 and a half as is Amsterdam.
Bad Breisig has a lovely "Flaniermeile", a hard to translate term for a stretch of restaurants and shops along the banks of the river Rhein, where visitors old and young have been strolling along for decades, eating schnitzels or Spanish tapas and drinking serious beer into the wee hours.
Some of the tiny pubs are open until 5am, when the first bakeries open up with fresh bread. The cutest ones are for locals inland, our favorite is the size of a napkin really.
In Heppingen, 10 minutes inland from the Rhein, one can even enjoy the best cook of Germany 1999 in his two Michelin star restaurant "Steinheuers´". Don’t eat for three days prior, bring 4 hours for nine courses and some cash for the Chateaux Margaux %26 Penfolds Grange Hermitage.
This all sounds like a tourist board ad, but its not.
DONT COME. lol
The Byteburg is obviously not a public building. In order to arrange a visit, you will need to talk to Uwe Maurer first.
We will open up the castle in the future for events and salons, concerts in the chapel and the inner courtyard or the large meadow. Look for news on that here...
[ top ]
Some things can´t be put in words
We have several hundred images of the castle now, collected in the first few months of living in the structure as well as finding paintings, etchings, postcards and drawings in libraries, flea markets and antique shops in the region.
We would be grateful for any other historical memorabilia.
Obviously we will not be able to put the entirety or even a fraction of these pictures online, however we hope to provide a selected few views and stills.
There should be an entire book with images up here over the next few weeks…
Have a look once in a while to see what happened
For further deeper information you can send us an email
[ top ]
Projects, Press, People
The entire idea of the Byteburg hinges on the notion of attracting interesting people and projects from all over Europe. We are therefore very much open to contact and submissions.
The buildings at the first Byteburg, Rheineck, are limited to less than 20 people working on-site, however there is already a second much larger Byteburg castle underway. Details will be announced here soon...
We are not really employing individuals like a company, nor are we acquiring companies like a corporation. We also don’t engage in design-for-hire or code-for-hire ourselves.
But don’t let general guidelines keep you from just trying, an email doesn´t cost anything, the worst that could happen is that we might mumble some four letter word like sorry...
A large part of the contact at this stage is press, magazines, radio and TV. We have selectively done a few interviews but then we enforced a cone of silence over the entire project. For one, we are still a construction site on several levels but the real point is a self-imposed restraint until we can earn our respect slowly with actual results of the work.
As Goethe said "if you are sitting on your laurels, you are wearing them in the wrong place".
Please understand if we simply cannot follow through on every request by the media. We are at this point swamped up to our sticky eyeballs with newspapers from Israel, magazines from New Zealand and just about every TV channel in this country.
It’s just a few weeks too early for all that since we cannot effectively deal with the results for a while yet. But things are spiralling upwards daily...
But even all the swampedness... in a way we obvious like it that way. It´s what we call a "Happy Problem"....
We are not selling any products here, we are not slapping together web sites as a business, there are no banners or ads. Therefore we are not looking to place exposure to generate consumer awareness, hawk random products, nor are we engaged in projects for the public per se.
But we are happy to look for helping hands in all directions. Programmers and designers of serious calibre we can offer quite a few perks, but there will be places for people to just help out, via internships, as online guides, etc...
Lawyers, patent attourneys or webqueens can be needed just as much as carpenters and construction workers, or someone who has Italian fabrics or great Pomerol wines.
The To Do list of tasks is sheer endless in an object of this scale and we only want to surround ourselves with people that truly enjoy rolling up their sleeves to get things done.
We want to surround ourselves without compromise purely with people that still have a friendly smile, respect and interest. The cynical attitudes seeing half empty glasses are just misplaced around here.
Soon there will be an area on this site where we describe in great detail the acute topics at hand that are waiting for solutions and then ask for specific and general help of the teeming millions out there. It is always amazing what all they come up with and what already has been sent our way in recent weeks.
Long term there always will be suggestions and requests that don´t quite fit, but even then we might be able to cross connect some or have other suggestions and contacts.
S0 : the only rule is, there is no rule. Send whatever you think is worth sending, shoot off a short e-mail in any case. Worst case we just won´t get to it right away and not much might happen... and that’s not SO bad... better than not trying at all in the first place.
[ top ]
Vox, fax, email and snailmail
We are happy to receive all forms of mail, be they letters or pictures, cool invitations, little prezzies or fun toys, old books or new proto-types.
We got nice portfolios and useful business plans, hilarious nudes and wonderful old engravings of the castle. Never boring....
In this first phase we are slightly overwhelmed with the response, so please have a little patience.... eek
Please do not come by unannounced. We are just not able to deal with random visitors at this stage. The castle is gated and secured and has not been open to the public for 25 years.
Please call ahead at least 48h and even with firm appointments try to check with us once more the same day to make sure. Never know if the pope dropped by...
Best way is to start with a fax or an e-mail.
______________________________________
Snail mail Address for letters and packages
The Byteburg
Burg Rheineck
Bad Breisig 53498
Address it to "Uwe Maurer", General Manager of the Byteburg
Or to "Kai Krause personally", which will ultimately get to me, if I am not in California at the moment.
Uwe is the right person though, we know each other for 33 years since the school days! His lovely assistant Andrea will take great care of things...
______________________________________
Fax Address for letters
49 26 33 42 44 23
If you can, live a little, fax in color; these are HP G85 color fax machines. Highly recommendable....
______________________________________
Vox Number for voice calls
49 26 33 42 43
Andrea will usually answer or it forwards you to her cell number. On some rare days you get a machine.
______________________________________
info@byteburg.de
[ top ]
back to curiousLee