An interactive artistic platform for a Berlin art collective’s multimedia archive.
Background
Coven Berlin is a queer feminist transdisciplinary art collective creating art exhibitions, performances, and artworks. We applied for and received funding from the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa for a year-long events series exploring bogs and their ecosystems as an analogue for queer community and futurity beyond biological reproduction. Since in-person gatherings were unsafe in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the events were hybrid or entirely digital. As such, we wanted to create an online space to document artifacts from the events and speakers we hosted throughout the year, to bring the full program together in one digital, asyncronous space.
Our priorities for this platform were:
- a playful, accessible format, and
- a theme that reflected the bog’s role in collecting, preserving and transforming things that fall into it.
Design
I began my design process by exploring a variety of formats for collating and gathering large, diverse types of media, including simply using the existing Coven magazine and creating a new category there. However, since we were looking for something playful and experiential, I focused in on bog objects, considering ways to reflect the passage of time while treating the digital artifacts as individual objects and representing them as such.
The final design uses a light blue – green – brown – black gradient to simulate the layers of a bog or wetland. Individual ‘items’ in the bog are listed from most recent to least recent from top to bottom, and each item has a small visual icon representing its progress through the bog’s layers. Created by Cooper Lovano following briefs and concept discussions with me, these object icons are whole at the top the bog, and have transformed significantly by the time they reach the bottom. Each piece of media, whether it’s an image, documentation, video, artwork, audio recording, meme, or other, also has a description and other relevant information, but all media is viewable only on the bog homepage. A single menu links to the bog’s concept and the curatorial concept, as well as COVEN’s impressum.
I built the initial version of this iteration of the Cyberbog, which Cooper Lovano then updated with additional graphic elements. As of May 2025, the Cyberbog is still viewable at cyberbog.covenberlin.com.
