Image courtesy of Ornamika
Ornamika is… an independent project at the junction of culture and technology.
The Idea for the Initiative… originated from a combination of a personal interest in ornaments and the absence of an ornaments “wikipedia.” There was an understanding that numerous groups -designers, arts and culture educators, ordinary people, etc., who would benefit from such initiative.
Key Goal… to find best ways of bringing together the use of digital instruments to reconstruct and interpret ornaments from different regions of the Russian Federation.
Innovation and Inspirational Know-How…
Applying the new to the old! Its cross-sectoral innovation activity that links cutting-edge digital instruments with a wide range of historical ornaments, bringing about modern interpretations. The project scope is 5000+ ornaments covering over 20 types and more than 200 styles of applied arts, over 500 reconstructed ornaments.
Challenges… Securing funding in the initial stage and then to find further funding to scale it up to its full potential to cover more territories and develop more advanced technology.
The initiative originally had only a small project team with limited technical competence -digital archive, image analytics instruments.
Meeting the Challenges…
Some early funding was secured so activities are ongoing with a monthly budget varying from five to 10,000 EUR. This is enough to gradually develop the project, but not enough scale it up rapidly to include more territories and more advanced technology.
The team is proactively exploring potential partnerships for further funding.
Impacts….
There have been about 100,000 users since the launch in February 2020 and 11,000 monthly website users and social media followers.
Five museum collaborations promote authentic ornamental objects at Ornamika.com.
Since autumn 2020 Ornamika has had a daily program on Radio Culture, reaching 800,000 listeners every week.
As a result of its impact Ornamika was selected as TOP-3 Cultural projects of Russian in 2020 (Moscow Urban Forum).
Two commercial collaborations with big business on high quality reconstructions or specialised interpretations of the designs.
Authors that make interpretations for Ornamika illustrate the highest impact. They instantly get orders from companies for similar tasks.
In the digital domain, the impact is expressed in the creation of a “new graphic”- modern visual interpretations of historical patterns.
Further information
