A project by Juan Ospina/Fabrica
Winner of Grand Prize Award at the Japan Media Art Festival

Flipbook, a media art project designed by Juan Ospina, young researcher at the Interactive department of Fabrica, the Benetton research centre on communication, has been awarded with the Grand Prize at the prestigious Japan Media Art Festival, for the section Entertainment. 
Flipbook!, which started as a small offline installation, very similar to DRAW of the DARE series (FABRICA INTERACTIVE, Museum of Moving Image, New York 2003), has become in a few months a real web phenomenon with thousands visitors in a short time. 

Juan Ospina, the mind behind it, explains how the project was conceived:  
“When I first arrived at FABRICA, I was introduced to the concept of "Relational Art", well demonstrated in the work of Andy Cameron and the Interactive department. During my early days at Fabrica, my awe and wonder at the power of the internet blossomed into  a need to explore this powerful platform as a medium for my own work.  I was always amazed at the way simple interfaces and applications could change the lives of their users – like Google, and blogging.  I believe the Internet to be an ideal platform for art considering: it's accessible by many, information is available democratically and instantaneously. These qualities solved my issues with the traditional art delivery system. 

I intended to combine the lessons of Relational Art to my interest in entertainment as a good entry point for people to get involved in a piece.  I felt an online, publicly accessible animation station would be the perfect vehicle to test this.  This resulted in the online version of Flipbook!.

The evolution of Flipbook! was largely due to the incredibly useful feedback I received from Fabrica.  The criticisms and suggestions from my department's creative director, Andy Cameron, was particularly helpful.  The comments were considered and fed back into the system to create ever more successful versions.  It was launched in February and it was only in June, after Flipbook! was featured on the American TV show “Attack of the Show – G4 TV”, that it saw the contributions and traffic greatly increasing.  The web's chain reaction of spreading information began and it was linked to by many blogs and message boards.  When Flipbook! was featured on K10K, the traffic that resulted shut down our server.

Learning from the breakdown and user / peer comments, I produced a leaner version which is still in use today!  Currently we have over 160 000 animations and the gallery receives between 1000 – 2000 new animations a day!

I have noticed a trend in the types of animations users produce with Flipbook!.  Stickmen: Simple, fun and often involving painful, violent endings.  These are definitely the largest percentage of the animation pool.

There's also a number of people that post erotic or pornographic images. This approach interests me, since used in this way, Flipbook! generates the same social dynamic that you would find in public places such a toilette or a graffiti wall. When you are allowed to produce from your private corner, then you feel more conformable to express things that you wouldn't otherwise. 

Other people use it to send personalized messages to each other, like an alternative to a traditional e-card: this is a nice side-effect I didn't consider at first.

Then there's people who draw about historical and current events. From the Kennedy assassination to the 9/11 WTC incident, the Irak war, President Bush, the KKK and so on. Some people even draw things as they occur. When the bomb treat was happening in London, I remember getting a lot of drawings of two buses blowing up, quite scaring. 

Finally, there are actual animation professionals who swing by from time to time and create wonderful pieces that quickly make their way to the "Top rated". These people usually find Flipbook! as a way to produce something quick and fun that they can instantly share with everybody.”

www.fabrica.it/flipbook/