January 22 and 23, 2009
Cultural center Točka, Lajka, Castro, Skopje, Macedonia

In January, two Macedonian portals www.culture.in.mk and www.plagij.at, members of inSEEcp (informal network of cultural portals from SEE), organised the ONLINE/OFFLINE festival, focused on culture and internet.

The ONLINE/OFFLINE festival, true to its name, had an online and an offline component.

The offline component was taking place in Skopje on 22 and 23 January 2009. It started with a blogging workshop entitled Blogging and networking tools for artists, lead by blogger Deborah Hustić aka lomodeedee (Personal Cyber Botanica) from Zagreb. Her lecture targeted especially artists and cultural operators. A discussion under the title Where is culture, where is the audience? followed, involving not only the representatives of culture portals (among them Vesna Milosavljević, editor of www.SEEcult.org) but also editors of other popular, fun-oriented portals. The discussion focussed on issues of interest, presentation, content, technology, social networking and web 2.0 modules and tried to respond to the issue of attracting audiences to culture, through portals as intermediaries in the process.

On the second day, member of Artservis' editorial team Dušan Dovč presented Artservis' Suitcase, featuring art works, mostly videos, questioning the conditions of art production. The video screeninig included works of Vesna Bukovec, Martina Bastarda, Mladen Stropnik, and Tina Stropnik, while other artists included in Artservis' Collection were presented by the website.
An exhibition of photographs from previous Plagij.at events followed after the video screening.Tthe festival ended with a concert of the Serbian band Petrol.

The online component of the festival is from now on continuously updated and consists of two blogs jointly managed by www.culture.in.mk and www.plagij.at. The addresses onlineoffline.wordpress.com and offline2online.wordpress.com will feature collections of works of relevant Macedonian artists, also their recommendations on other artists worth exploring, longer journalistic forms (interviews, reviews .) as well as audio and video features. Through the process of collaboration with the artists and journalists covering culture, the editors of www.culture.in.mk and www.plagij.at aim to find the right format, satisfying the artistic criteria, while still being attractive for a wide audience. One of the main role of the joint blogs, considering that a large part of portals' visitors come from abroad, is to provide a more immersive cultural and artistic experience to audiences who cannot physically attend the events in question.

The festival was supported by Pro Helvetia, Swiss cultural programme in the Western Balkans.