Bianco at Limerick City of Culture


Coming to Culture Factory, June 14th - June 22nd
An Irish premier in the Summer of 2014, BIANCO is seductive, thrilling and enchanting.


The Creation of the NoFit State Digital Archive

This has been a long process, and is really Toby's baby, and as with any pregnancy it's had it's aches and pains, and the birth is just coming into sight. The hard slog is beginning to be replaced by anticipation as the time for the archive website to emerge into the world grows closer. 

The priority for Toby was always to try to create a manageable, easily navigable site. He has worked closely with John.

Toby hard at work in the Archive office!

John Ellingsworth won the tender to create the digital archive framework. He is from CRKO, a digital creative agency with strong connections to the contemporary circus sector.

John Ellingsworth is a writer, online editor and developer with deep knowledge of the contemporary circus sector. He founded the website Sideshow as a platform for writing and research on circus art, and as a space for experimentation with multimedia and data journalism

Below are a summary of the requirements for the digital archive as written in the heritage lottery fund application: 

It needs to have a responsive design to work on a wide range of platforms - tablets, PC, smartphones etc.

It must be engaging and the ethos of the user experience must be considered at all stages of the design and build.

It is being built in Drupal – an open source CMS (the second largest in the world) which is extremely well documented and constantly being developed/updated.

The archive will be searchable by a variety of terms, such as:

Venue Production name Cast name Skill Date/year

The target audience -
Circus sector NoFit performers, staff, cast crew past and present 
   Audience members 
      General local community 
         Researchers 
            Curators 
               Historians

The interface will be based around a timeline and will allow the user to explore the archive from a variety of points.

There is a sense of the content existing in layers – users can dig down as far as they want, having an archive layer and a content layer. The archive layer is the entire catalogue, and the content layer lies on top of that and is the first thing the user encounters. It draws on the archive to tell more controlled stories and creates entry points into the full archive.

The whole website is being designed to feel social – should reflect the voices of NFS and give a sense of the company as a large (and sometimes chaotic) family.

And this original blueprint for the website is more or less how its taking effect.