The two Macedonian portals, members of inSEEcp, www.culture.in.mk and www.plagij.at are founders of the ONLINE/OFFLINE festival. inSEEcp members Vesna Milosavljevic (SEEcult) and Dusan Dovc (Evrokultura) are also taking part in the festival.
Supported by Pro Helvetia – Skopje, the ONLINE/OFFLINE festival, true to its name, has an online and an offline component.
The offline component is taking place in Skopje on 22 and 23 January 2009. It starts with a blogging workshop entitled 'Blogging and networking tools for artists', lead by blogger Deborah Hustic aka lomodeedee (Personal Cyber Botanica) from Zagreb, and targeting especially artists and cultural operators.
A discussion under the title Where Is Culture, Where Is the Audience? will follow, involving not only the representatives of culture portals, but also editors of other popular, fun-oriented portals, and the audience. It will deal with the issues of interest, presentation, content, technology, social networking and web 2.0 modules and will attempt to respond to the issue of attracting audiences to culture, through portals as intermediaries in the process. The evening will end with the Plagij.at listening party.
On the second day, Artservis’ Dusan Dovc will present its Art Suitcase, featuring digital art on the topic of the survival in the art world. It will also pack within works by Macedonian artists. An exhibition of photographs from previous Plagij.at events and the festival will be closed with a concert of the Serbian band Petrol and Macedonian all-girl band Vivid.
The online part of the festival will be continuously updated and will consist of two blogs jointly managed by www.culture.in.mk and www.plagij.at. The addresses onlineoffline.wordpress.com and offline2online.wordpress.com will feature formats previously unused by the two portals – collections of works of relevant Macedonian artists, also their recommendations on other artists worth exploring, longer journalistic forms (interviews, reviews …) as well as audio and video features. Through the process of collaboration with the artists and journalists covering culture, we will aim to find the right format, satisfying the artistic criteria, while still being attractive for a wide audience. Also, one of the main role of the joint blogs, considering that a large part of portals’ visitors come from abroad, is to provide a more immersive cultural and artistic experience to audiences who cannot physically attend the events in question.
