Click the image for the link to the scroll; you may want to download & install the OPERA browser first
In 2005 I made this scroll for an exhibition in Lisboa on graphic design curated by Max Bruinsma and financed by the Premsela Foundation. At that time – as usual – it was difficult to raise some funds for all the work that had to be done and the hardware and software that came with it. At the opening the scroll was only partly working and it took a few months more to have it completely finished. The scroll is just the first of a series of seven scrolls, but alas till now I did not find somebody who would finance the two months of dedicated work and concentration that is needed to make the second visual narrative on visual language… The first version though has been shown on two occasions. Once in 2006 in a printed version (17 meter long) in the Mediamatic Gallery Amsterdam, and from autumn 2007 till 2009 it has been shown in a touch screen version in the Museum of Communication in The Hague. Today I remembered I still have a web-version somehow hidden away, so let’s make a more public through this blog. A few years back most internet connections were too slow and only a few people would have a computer screen that is big enough to fit the whole scroll frame (you need minimal 1280 x 1024 pixels, a 19 inch monitor).
All that has changed and it would be nice when this work will find a new public. The work is best viewed in the not so common web browser Opera (which is a free download, both for Windows and Mac). Opera is one of the few web browser that gives you a full screen mode for any web page (so when you have a 19 inch monitor you need to choose that option, otherwise you will miss part of the pictorial material and also the navigator bar that pops up and disappears at the bottom). You can drag the blue rectangle of the condensed scroll at the bottom to move the scroll, or click anywhere in that bar to jump to any position. Clicking on any detail of the scroll will give you an information overlay. It should be quiet intuitive. Last thanks again to Joachim Rotteveel who worked with me on the graphic interface for this scroll and did make it absolutely stable… The information pop ups may be a bit slow, that depends on the speed of your connection and your computer. After all this has been designed as museum installation and not for the web, only the web gets almost fast enough now to handle this…
NB This presentation is build using ‘flash’ which is an Adobe plug-in which has been depreciated by the main web browsers… still it works when a small free available piece of software is installed locally. Web browsers are supposed to pop up a message telling the user to do so and give the link for downloading the ‘plug-in’.
the limping messenger 