code flow museum - designing the future state of balkania

Designing the Future State of Balkania

1999-10-17 - 1999-10-23: Designing the Future State of Balkania was one of four workshops curated by Geert Lovink in the context of his project TEMP, a Temporary Media Lab at Kiasma, Museum for Contemporary Arts Helsinki, Finland, from 8 October to 14 November 1999.

The workshop can be seen as a follow-up of an initiative developed during the Syndicate meeting in
Budapest
in April 1999. The critical situation in Yugoslavia/Kosovo inspired the founding of a virtual state, a state of mind called the Future State of Balkania.

The participants were Anna Bocheva, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Arthur Bueno, Ile Cvetkovski, Micz Flor, Darko Fritz, Vedran Gulin, Honor Harger, Alain Kessi, Dejan Krsic, Geert Lovink, Melentie Pandilovski, Ana Peraica, Sinisa Rogic, Ajla Selenic, Dimitrina Sevova, Katarina Zivanovic.

Location History

The original location of the Web site of the workshop Designing the Future State of Balkania was <http://temp.kiasma.fi/balkania>. Unfortunately, almost immediately after the end of the project, the subdomain <temp> disappeared from <kiasma.fi>, and the entire Balkania website along with it. A copy of the site was moved to the Savanne website at <http://www.savanne.ch/balkania>, where it remained for several years. On 2006-05-08, it was transferred to the code flow museum.

Site Overview

main interface (HTML)

balkanian spermatozoid - alternative site interface (Flash)

Note that it was a decision of the project's participants to leave the site with two different interfaces, as this reflects "the situation on the Balkans".

For reference, here is also an exact copy of the original site, with no conservatorial intervention whatsoever. The primary site has been touched here and there to make sure the links work.

Conservatorial Interventions

We are just beginning the work on conserving this project. Several of the pages do not currently work. The Javascript driven pages need re-engineering so as to become platform independent, and some of the Flash movies need adapting, either for speed or due to absolute links that need to be converted to relative links.

Done:

The Flash movies how do you feel? and welcome to the future state of balkania by Dimitrina Sevova were reverse engineered and reworked. The former received a completely new timeline in which the text scrolls much slower and is readable. The latter had a few technical glitches corrected.

The balkanian spermatozoid which constitutes the alternative Flash interface of the site was reverse engineered and re-generated with relative links, and some links fixed.

The Sky Express Pizza was originally written with Netscape 4 in mind using layers, and was ported to platform independent code. We used a standard package, dynlayer, to achieve browser independence. The frames were turned into <div> elements.

Planned:

The eXXXplicit Pizza, which was also written with Netscape 4 in mind using layers, still needs porting to platform independent code.

The musical chairs by Luchezar Boyadjiev (Flash) needs to be reverse engineered to fix some links.