East Art Map Online is a joint effort between the artist group Irwin and Renderspace – Pristop Interactive, the production company I was working for at the time, to bring the East Art Map to the internet as an interactive collaborative database. It allows visitors to post comments, suggest replacements for individual works and read news and articles by participating curators.

The project “East Art Map – A (Re)Construction of the History of Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe” was initiated in 2001 by the Slovenian artist group Irwin. The “East Art Map” (EAM) aims at critically (re)constructing the history of art in Eastern Europe between 1945 and the present beyond ex-Socialist ‘official’ chronicles, national legend formation and fragmented information present in the West.

Execution

Flash 7 frontend. Data (structure, text, images, video) is loaded dynamically via PHP 5/MySQL 4.1 backend.
Custom Content Management System written in PHP 5.

Involvement

• Website concept, structure and design /w Matevž Klajnšek
• Backend programming
• Content Management System /w Marko Novak

Memory is an interactive installation dealing with the random imagery that affects our everyday life in the urban environment.

Exhibitions:

• 15.06.2004 – 19.06.2004 Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana
• 09.09.2004 – 12.09.2004 The Belgrade Youth Cultural Center Gallery, Belgrade

Execution:

An X-Keys based interactive intallation with a top projection of a Flash 7 standalone application.

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming

Thoughts:

We are not very clear on how our memory works. From our experience, long forgotten memories are accessed using different cues, mostly visual. These cues are rarely straightforward images of objects that we instantly recognize. Usually, they are small abstract snippets that, by themselves wouldn’t make much sense. On the other hand, they can much more clearly convey a feeling or a state of mind. Martin’s Memory deals with these visual cues in a playful manner, arranging the visual cues that trigger his memories randomly, enabling the visitor a glimpse into his inner reflection of the visually saturated urban environment in which he lives.

In American Beauty, Ricky explains his obsessive videotaping of the seemingly most insignificant curiosity with the line “I need to remember”. The need to remember is becoming an obsession to the modern man, where he can barely distingush his own life from the world artificially created by the media. In a struggle to exist in a life where everything is referenced as a line from a movie or part of a pop song, the photographs that we take and the videos that we tape serve to create our own biography, the movie of our life.

Martin’s reconstruction of his Memory goes even further. The visual cues that he presents in the installation brings up the question: Are most of our memories today tied together with commercial brands and logos?1

The goal of the game is to drop all the penguins into the car. Big ones throug the front doors and little ones throug the back doors. When there are too many of them inside, you have to turn up the cooling, so that they don’t run out.

I thought this project was going to be one more thing on the assembly line, but I had quite a few laughs animating the penguins and everybody went crazy for the game.

Launch game

Producer:

Renderspace

Client:

Volkswagen Slovenija

Execution:

Initially Flash 5 with Quicktime embedded in a carefully positioned HTML layer. Later reworked into pure Flash 6. The data is dynamically loaded from static XML files.

Status:

Offline

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming

The idea for the site was to create an online simulation of a fashion magazine. I find it cool because it reminds me more of those magazines that you read while you’re waiting for your haircut at the Lassana hair salon. It features a product-line spread, make-overs, style tips, prize-winning opinion polls, desktops and so on. The plan was also to have all sorts of gadgets that you usually find in magazines, but all we ever did was the complimentary shampoo sample that’s glued to page 2 of the first 2 issues.

The issues are all designed manually in flash, but the system was devised so that the designer can add and update the content himself, without my help.

URL:

http://www.subrina.si

Producer:

Renderspace

Client:

Ilirija

Execution:

Flash 6.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming

Proteusfont.org is a guestbook that displays its entries using Damijan Kracina’s Proteusfont typography.

The very nice and simple design, done by Ajdin, was rather easy to implement. The guestbook entries are parsed character by character, dynamically attaching Proteusfont glyphs to the display area.

Execution

A Flash 6 based website with a PHP backend.

Involvement:

• Frontend production

Thoughts:

Continuing his endangered species theme, Damijan Kracina’s Proteusfont.org continues the story of the olm as typography. The olm (Proteus anguinus) is the only living cave-dwelling amphibian in Europe and as such is considered a living fossil. The blind little salamander that resides only in the Karst region is an important part of Slovenian national heritage and is a big tourist curiosity at the Postojna cave. Because it’s skin lacks pigmentation and it’s eyes are overgrown with skin, its eerie resemblance to a human fetus earned it the name “the human fish”. It is this quality that I think makes it so important in Damijan’s work, because it provokes meditation on humans as an endangered species.

While it looks simple enough to produce, the project is a classic example of how too many cooks spoil the broth. There was a lot of power-play and politics involved during production, we had the site almost finished when it was trashed and completely redesigned. But eventually the situation cooled down and Matevž and I started communicating directly to creative and technical teams of Agencija 41 and finished the site so that everybody was pleased. The best thing is to cut out the middle man where creative and technical work is involved.

Since it wasn’t going to be hosted at Renderspace and Agencija 41 wanted full control over the site administration, I had to come up with a cheap and not overly complicated solution for producing video and audio conversion. This meant creating small stand-alone applications for batch processing using mostly open-source. And of course teaching the site administrator to use all the software.

URL:

http://www.agencija41.si

Producer:

Odiseja / Renderspace

Client:

Agencija 41

Execution:

Flash 6 with a PHP backend and open-source media conversion tools. Images, video and audio is dynamically loaded into Flash.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming
• Media conversion solution

However, the site wasn’t done with the right enthusiasm from any of the involved parties, so it kind of died down before it even started.

URL:

http://www.mtvjournal.net

Producer:

Renderspace

Client:

MTV Networks Europe

Execution:

Flash 6 with a PHP powered backend.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming

I think this was Parsek’s first site running on the CP2 architecture.

URL:

http://www.mg-lj.si

Producer:

Parsek

Client:

Moderna Galerija Ljubljana (Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana)

Execution:

Flash 5 enhanced DHTML-based layout with a CP2 backend.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Flash calendar application design and programming

URL:

http://www.nordcross.com

Producer:

Parsek

Client:

Nordcross

Execution:

Initially Flash 5 with Quicktime embedded in a carefully positioned HTML layer. Later reworked into pure Flash 6. The data is dynamically loaded from static XML files.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Flash animation and programming

In addition, it makes very good use of the internet as a medium, offering many different services that makes life at least a bit easier for owners (and future owners) of Renault vehicles. It’s definitely not an advertising site, but a service for their customers.

In spite of huge amounts of content on the site, it looks light and it’s easy to navigate. What I like most about it is that, once it was done, there was never any need to modify the site’s skeleton. The textual and visual content is fed via JSP generated XML and managed through Parsek’s SeeEdit CMS. How the site’s layout works is cross-browser voodoo that only Fry can do.

URL:

http://www.renault.si

Producer:

Parsek

Client:

Revoz

Execution:

Dynamic-data Flash 5 and HTML, tied together with DHTML layers and Javascript. tied together Frame-based HTML with Flash 4 menus and animations. The content was managed by one of the first incarnations of Parsek’s SeeEdit client, fed to the frontend via ASP.

Status:

Online

Involvement:

• Site concept, structure and design /w others
• Flash animation and programming