A Karass Suite working session

The karass-suite project is an experiment to explore current possibilities in making an:
"online action oriented database for media art projects"

The karass-suite project started june 2007 and will end in november 2008, combining content-related and technical issues, being built from the point of view of the current media artist's ways of working/creating (and not from the functions suggested by the technology itself), and using quotes from the book "cat's cradle" by kurt vonnegut, who died last year, as an example implementation.

the project started as an investigation into the current state in the art of off the shelve online media technology, trying to develop for online media art projects 2 interfaces that function as:
- a general and modifiable composition tool for media arts online
- a set of performance tools for 'as realtime as possible' network related performances

for the moment we are using the drupal environment as a general interface to the mysql/postgresql databases, which is in itself written and extendable via the php language; currently lots of content is being uploaded by several international media artists, collaborative or solo

one of the crucial points in the usability of the database is the design of a general interface, using drupal and its possibilities of making 'themes', which are basically modular design variations within html/xml relying heavily on css and some php code to accustom them for drupal use

In the frame of "arts meets radical openness" at LiWoli 08

the idea is to work for 3 days half-public at the exploration of these themes within drupal, which means expanding on the following issues:

- what is karass suite, the intended use of an online database, and what is there (not) now?
- how does drupal deal with hypertext, media, and what is where (not) now?
- what are the normally available tools, implemented/extended for karasssuite use?
- what are themes within drupal, and how are they made? (including making the necessary css's and php code)
- what should be part of the interface design for karass suite? (depending on the intended use)
- how can we implement it? (first try outs of a common design)