rob.prou.se

The brief for this online exhibition was to provide a fluid and immersive way to experience the artworks whilst recording and displaying user’s interaction in an innovative way.

Back-end development comprised of MariaDB/Directus to provide both a headless CMS and a structured database to securely store user’s interaction history whilst providing API routes for the front-end. The site itself was built as an SPA with vue.js and pinia stores and I worked closely with the designer on the data visualisation of the user interaction. This was achieved with a custom fork of heatmap.js which was modified to conform to vue’s reactivity requirements and supported transparency, allowing the site to ‘decay’ at activity hotspots.

Heatmap data was pushed periodically back to Directus and formed the background to further user’s browsing experience, creating a cumulative map of interaction. The site was served by apache with some artworks running as node apps embedded with virtual hosts and deployed to a linux virtual machine powered entirely by renewable energy.

Siobahan Davies Archive was the first online dance archive, launched in 2009. The brief was to preserve the archive as the original, proprietary system had become unsustainable.

After initial work migrating the underlying database and backup all archive assets via scripted automation I chose Directus as a self-hosted database manager which could expose APIs to be queried by a headless front end. I worked alongside the client and designer to create a new UI, starting with initial UX design and page layout wireframes. Front end development was carried out using Nuxt.js with particular attention paid to a sophisticated search function, allowing researchers to intuitively find archive items.

The database, Directus and Nuxt were developed within a docker container for stability across the team and ease of final deployment to a linux server.

Arrivals + Departures consists of two custom built, networked signage boards and a corresponding website that allows names to be submitted by the public.

Development work began with a custom javascript API which allowed for entries to an SQL database. The API carried out two pass moderation on the submitted names using third party APIs and provided endpoints to the website CMS, front end and the signage boards themselves via websockets.

Submissions were displayed live across both the physical boards and the website in unison and the installation toured across the UK, New York and Switzerland with over 5000 entries submitted.