Junction Arts is recognised for high quality rurally-based participatory arts work that changes peoples lives, builds confidence and skills, increases communication and supports community and personal empowerment. The Derbyshire-based organisation’s vision is to increase and extend access to high quality arts through inspirational, innovative participatory arts programmes and projects via partnership and collaboration within rural areas of the East Midlands.

In a time where arts funding is a constant victim of cuts, Junction Arts needed to publicise the success and importance of their work and were finding their existing website was neither engaging its visitors or conforming to the styles defined in their recent rebranding excersise.

10th Planet were called in to provide a complete visual overhaul and to add several new levels of functionality and interactivity for the site’s visitors and Junction Arts themselves. These included:

• Full content management and control for Junction Arts
• Blog and news updates
• Project viewer
• Past projects archive
• Photo gallery
• Video area and YouTube integration
• Social media integration
• Viewer contributions and comments

We also consolidated the wide array of conflicting domain names, email addresses and hosting packages to all operate under a single name:

www.junctionarts.org

Yooouuuutuuube is a simple idea, brilliantly executed, it basically copies a youtube video and tiles it endlessly over the background of the page. This would be pretty cool in its own right, but add in the ability to zoom out and pan the camera round and soon you realise you’ve watched the video twice over and you’re still not bored.

If you go to the site’s root you can enter the ID of any youtube video you find online, the video that I’ve set the link above up with is a music video made by the charmingly named “Fagottron“, a kind of meta art work in its own right, re-editing and reusing footage to create his own work.

So, how is this meta? When we talk about meta-*, we’re talking about something being about itself, metalanguage is language that is used to describe language, metaemotions are how a person feels about their own emotions in a certain situation. Well, yooouuutuuube is nothing on its own, it’s in fact a piece of art, that needs more art to complete it, it’s essentially art about art.

The idea of “Meta-something” has flourished on the web, where it has both practical uses, such as adding metadata to a webpage to help give it some context, to the more dubiously practical art of ‘metahumour’ – where an Internet in-joke (known by Richard Dawkin’s term “Meme”) is used as a basis for another joke, usually involving 1 or more other memes. Then there’s ‘recursive metahumour’, where the joke makes a joke about making a joke about itself within the confines of the original joke…
It all gets very complicated. I think it might be best to just watch the pretty colours.