Soulbath.com could be described as our first real website. Named 'Greyscale Paradise', it was mainly void of colour and celebrated malfunction as a source of beauty and surprise. It was built in late 1999 within the 30-day period of the Macromedia Flash 4 Trial version with next to no knowledge of the web in general or Flash in particular.
In June 2000,we launched clickhere! an exhibition of banners that we curated from an open submission call to fill the banner space with meaning and to use the space of a banner, 468 by 60 pixel, to sell something other than a product. Although labelled as an exhibition of 'Antibanners', the idea was not so much to be anti-banner or anti-commercial, but rather to use this seemingly failing advertising space - remember, we are
in 2000, the dotcom bubble bursting in front of our eyes - to sell an idea, an emotion, a story, anything you could fit on the small canvas we provided. The result, launched in June that same year, was a wildly eclectic mix of activism (eg. Adbusters), interactivity (eg. Soda), rants, small narratives and pretty pictures, housed in a virtual exhibition space.
And it was then that things were catapulted beyond anything we could have anticipated when Clickhere! caught the attention of Matthew Mirapaul, then arts editor @ large for the NY Times, who decided to run an article on it in the paper. And eventually, it caught the attention of a young director, who had just completed his second feature film...