THE ART OF REBELLION_book_RZĆ’
05.09.2003
15:11 Uhr
Seite 27
Stickernation http://www.stickernation.net/
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Respect always go out to people who act on their word. Gas face to those who dismiss others without showing anything themselves. Where you are from? The team of StickerNation members are from across the globe, each representing their home turf. I'm from Manchester UK, although right now I'm living in smokey Amsterdam where there is a fantastic sticker community.
When and why did you start StickerNation.net? Promoting artists through the medium of stickers started StickerNation back at the turn of the century. The concept let visitors download preformatted artwork for printing onto blank sticker paper. This allowed the work to travel places the artists themselves would never go. After the purchase of a digital camera the site expanded to include a photo archive of stickers whilst on adventures in and around London. The scene was quite small but with some real good artists emerging (Gas & Bed, Instant (D*Face), Solo, Regular Product, Zeel). As people began hearing of the site the Seen and PDF archive began to grow. Friendships were made and the sticker buzz became more intense. After a series of uncontrollable incidents the site was forced to close in September 2001 and we went back to the drawing board. We had created a monster, too much time was required to keep it happy and fed. A new concept letting a global team of members update the site was born and went into production 6 months later. The screens shown here are the fresh result of this idea and we relaunched in April 2003. 132
How many people are involved in stickernation and is that is your job or are you just doing it for fun? StickerNation is maintained by an ever growing community of members, each is encouraged to document their local scene both with news and photos. A core team of 10 contributors look after written features, artist profiles, site maintenance and design. My role is primarily design. As much as we would like the site to be our daily operation we all work for the 'man' elsewhere. The site is done for love but we hope we can change this in the future. Funding will allow us to do bigger and better things although I do see the need to remain true to our original concept.
What problems come along with doing such a website\ Where do I start? There are countless problems in creating a website like StickerNation, from the obvious (design, technical, production) to StickerNation is. Come back each day / week / month and you will see
http://www.stickernation.net/
changes and updates. The amount of work can be quite overwhelming and v1 of the site closed as it became too much. It was managed by just myself and almost gave me grey hairs... almost! As you can imagine building the new site to include all the new features was incredibly difficult but will make the whole maintenance far easier. It means we can focus on the content and promoting sticky love. One major oversight became apparent when we relaunched the site and that was traffic and bandwidth. Traffic costs money and within 3 days we'd hit our monthly limit and had to close the site down. 10 months of work potentially wasted. Big shouts go out to Media Temple (www.mediatemple.net) for hosting the site for us. We would have been fucked otherwise.
What is your aim for the future? StickerNation could go in many directions and right now we're trying to choose the best path. I think as long as we adhere to the reasons why we started then we'll be ok. Promote known and unknown artists; Document street art; Act as a news base for good design, art and illustration; To be inspiring. We initially focussed on stickering but since we launched the whole notion of what street art can be has changed. It has become quite an exciting time. I think our biggest and fundamental change will be to cover a wider spread of street happenings from stickers to posters to stencils to sculpture. Boundaries are growing and styles influences one another. Artist don't just work in one format anymore, why should we? Ultimately we want to show and share everything we see around us. Thanks to Dom Murphy
How is the process in giving birth to such a site? Just do it! It sounds blaz\'8e but it's really that simple. The web has made projects like StickerNation available to everyone. Don't waste time wondering how and why, just get busy. Anyone who saw the very first release of StickerNation will know how basic and humble a beginning we had. http://www.stickernation.net/
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