In the run-up to the launch of Living Media Art, LI-MA's new interactive community platform, we are pleased to introduce one of the driving forces behind its development. As its name suggests, Living Media Art is designed as a living, accessible environment where anyone can explore, contribute, and engage with media art. From audio-visual materials to interactive collections, the platform allows users around the world to experience the institution’s work in a meaningful, participatory way. 

In this spirit, the Living Media Art platform was developed in collaboration with studio mot, a flexible constellation of generalists and specialists, thinkers and doers, insiders and outsiders who assemble around commissioned projects at the intersection of humans and technology. Just as programmers iterate, debug, and refine their code, so is Living Media Art constantly evolving. 

By shining a spotlight on both user experience and thoughtful design, the platform burgeons into a space for global dialogue, learning, and engagement, keeping LI-MA’s mission resonant and timely.

To give insight into its design process, we spoke with Florian van Zandwijk, media artist and designer about the design process behind the platform. As a media artist and designer, Van Zandwijk approaches technology through play, using experimentation to expose its inner workings and to show how society is continuously reshaped through digital systems. For this project, Florian van Zandwijk teamed up with creative developer Koen Verbruggen.

Living Media Art is described as a fluid ecosystem that grows with its users. How did you translate this conceptual openness into actual design and technical choices?

Those go hand in hand, I think. It was quite a long journey also to grasp what LI-MA is about because it's so multiple, such a multiplicity of things that are happening. And actually that's also what makes LI-MA valuable, but also very invisible in some ways. It’s hard to define what LI-MA does, but that’s the challenge and the fun of it: to sort of narrow it down.

You could come from a gamer's perspective and say, hey, this might be interesting because they're working with Amiga. But you can also be an art historian who wants to know more about performance art and has a very direct and specific question. I think that's what we're aiming for: to share with the world the multiplicity of things that LI-MA has and let people have the agency to work with that material. 

We're trying to transmit many directions at the same time, all stemming from the base that is in Amsterdam. LI-MA is in Amsterdam with a physical office, with actual people present, with actual materials, a library of books, and random finds. I think the beauty is also in those little corners of the LI-MA office and the brains of the people that work there.

How is the platform built to ensure long-term sustainability and avoid the obsolescence issues that media art itself often faces?

The very direct answer is to be a portal.

The project and platform are not meant to create another layer of additions, but to enrich what's already there by taking an object, material, or remark as a starting point for another question or research. To avoid adding too much, we show what LI-MA has in the collection. Even if the platform is never used, it would still hold a database of LI-MA materials from different streams that were never previously collected.

When people use it, they can see whether an object has been part of a case study or research project and learn from that. What will keep it alive is that LI-MA keeps reusing the same materials. The reinterpretations LI-MA already does are what we aim to enable: an object or artwork can become obsolete if we don’t reinterpret its meaning. 

What strategies have been put in place for accessibility (both technical and social), ensuring the platform is usable by a broad international community?

Anyone can browse anonymously or sign up with minimal details.  The second tier would be to sign up with only your email and a self-chosen name. Once you’ve done that, you are able to interact with it without being tracked. That’s making it accessible for anyone with the link to browse, see, and listen if there’s audio or video.

Were there any platforms that inspired the affordances of this platform – in terms of features, aesthetics, or design?

One of the platforms we were inspired by was the Sitterwerk Katalog. They have a website that shows you what is being used from their library. I think that was a very clever way to sort of connect the online to the physical. Coming back to accessibility, a physical space in Amsterdam is not very accessible for most people on the planet, and the internet is in many ways.

We also looked at platforms like Are.na, which is essentially Pinterest for designers – it doesn’t host its own material but allows users to organise online resources. This inspired us to imagine a similar approach for LI-MA’s materials: a Pinterest-like system that makes the physical library accessible online and allows users to create their own curated articles. 

Another one I want to mention is fuse.kiwi, a curated website of interesting internet references that balances exploration with simplicity, providing a focused, user-friendly experience. 

One honorable mention also goes to NADD (Network for Archives of Design and Digital Culture). Then we had some of our own projects that made sense to think about. Our own experience with the Transformation Digital Art 2022 event highlighted the value of combining explorative browsing with communal interaction. During the festival, all materials, live streams, and chat interactions were stored in a way that allowed participants to engage and explore collectively. This informed our approach to LI-MA: combining three key elements – the materials themselves, the community, and the tracking of how those materials are used – to create an accessible, networked, and interactive experience.

What challenges did you face in making the platform engaging and interactive, rather than another static archive or database?

Yeah, there were many challenges. Because you’re dealing with a project that is very long-term and influenced by outside factors, which make the platform different from how we envisioned it from the start. I think it’s also good to mention that we initially planned to do this with RNDR, and they would be handling the physical space. They would, in a big part, do what we’re trying to do by reverse-engineering it: to share what the physical space of LI-MA feels like and how people can engage with it, either from the outside or online.

Besides that, it’s also about the institution itself, in the sense that there will always be questions like, “What does this mean for me as a staff member? 

Do we actually want to share everything? What does it mean to share everything?” So it’s really about navigating what the needs are and what can be beneficial for the institution itself.

One of the hardest parts is getting people in: you don’t want it to be overcomplicated. From an accessibility perspective, you just want to allow people to engage. Right now, the platform is almost like a one-page portal filled with media; it’s like a gateway to all the other LI-MA content. 

Things changed throughout the project. We were initially quite focused on the event side of things – we wanted to make this a living space where all sorts of events would be going on – but that changed due to budget cuts and the nature of what LI-MA does. LI-MA as an institution has also changed throughout this process. Now we’re still trying to incorporate some of the physical aspects, but without them being accessible as a physical space.

That was a big challenge. It’s a long process, and it’s really complicated to oversee the outcomes of what you are designing. There’s always the bias of having thought out a project – or a design, or a platform – that you believe will definitely work, and then suddenly it does the complete opposite of what you expected because of feedback from the feedback group, the LI-MA staff, and your own use of it. I think that’s also the beauty of these processes: it’s a creative process, but in the end, it has to make sense.

A next iteration would definitely need a feeling of communal exploration. So you can feel the presence of other people by going to our website. We aim to implement it in our current developments, but don't think we can make it happen at this point. (Although the concept for it already exists!)