MESO - Manifesta7

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Project: Manifesta7
Date: April 2008 - May 2009
Client: International Foundation Manifesta (IFM)
Partner: Surface Gesellschaft für Gestaltung
Location: Trentino - South Tyrol, Italy
Tasks: Interface-Design, CMS, Realisierung
http://www.manifesta7.it/

After being cancelled in 2006, the european biennale for contemporary art is finally back in 2008. Since the early nineties, the exhibition takes place every two years in changing locations and with different teams of curators. The nomadic exhibition sees itself as an open, dialogic process. Event and location mutually influence each other. This time, it’s Northern Italy’s Alpine scenery with it’s valleys and rivers. The Bricolage idea in our partner Surface ’s corporate design smoothly develops this inspiration and provides our team with a perfect guideline for the interface-design: superjacent areas combined with changing weight in typography.

Searching the calendar for individual events is facilitated by the different filter options (by location, date or artist).

The search results are augmented with references to other art events in the surroundings, which underlines the focus on the exhibition’s location. The automatic generating of a complete list of more than 170 artists involved in the biennale saved the editors a lot of time and work: Texts and graphics were extracted from the catalogue’s printing data (from InDesign) and directly transferred to the website. When viewing an artist’s profile, one gets informed about his/her project within the manifesta7 and the according location. Of course full-text search can be used to look for individual artists or events. The description of each event location is completed by directions and maps. Finally, by an individual subdomain, each team of curators are able to create their own blog. All team’s blogs are combined on the manifesta7 welcome page.

The Content-Management-System (CMS) based on
Ruby on Rails was custom made to fit the client’s needs: its functionality is deliberately limited to the needed features, which minimizes both the technical complexity and the knowledge required by the users.