Mavromichali is a small but central street of Athens with a lot of interesting old buildings and a modern center for Digital Culture, called “Fournos”. Fournos is the Greek word for a bakery shop and the center is named after that because it is now hosted on an old bakery shop.
As part of my studies at the University of Ioannina I had the opportunity to do my work placement at “Fournos” working together with Giorgos Chloros on a project idea assigned to us by Fournos Center. The project we worked on, mapping Mavromichali street, was one layer of the bigger project, “In Between”, which deals with the creation of virtual neighborhoods. We attempted to gather habitat experiences and give a smell of this very charming old neighborhood.
The In-Between project, coordinated by Multimedia Lab of the Athens School of Fine Arts with the participation of the Art and Technology of the Image Department of University of Paris 8 and the Department of Sculpture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, started as a collaborative project for the creation of multicultural virtual neighborhoods on the web. The participants can insert an audiovisual description of their house, different audiovisual elements as well as other information, to the dynamic database and their house automatically becomes member of the endless neighborhood. The ultimate goal is that every web visitor may freely participate by enriching the virtual neighborhoods with his/her own house. In the In-Between space, which exists between the real and the virtual and amongst the different participant countries, one can navigate and become familiar with the houses, the lives, the fears and the beliefs of the different people that become the “real” citizens of a virtual world.
You can visit “Mavromichali street” uploaded on our server (unfortunately all interviews are in Greek) or you can visit the “In Between” project page, which is still under development, uploaded on the server of School of Fine Arts in Athens in order to see the whole project.
