When the Coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, many cultural actors were facing unforeseen consequences. No matter what sector – be it arts, music, theatre – almost all cultural activities rely on the meeting of people. With the quarantining mandate, facilitating these kinds of meetings almost became impossible from one day to the other. One of the institutions affected by these changes was the State University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe.

Every year, the graduates of the Fine Arts, Design and Theory programs get the chance to present their graduation projects. But with the class of 2020/2021, this could not take place as a physical event – or could it? An idea took shape: gradution.studio, a dedicated place online and offline. The platform would be broadcasting talks, insights, and much more to an online audience, right from within the university, where a physical exhibition and studio space would be set up. And while it would not be possible to explore the exhibits in-person, the space would be made accessible through various live-streaming cameras.

Technically, one of the main challenges was the streaming infrastructure. We selected Vimeo as our video provider, which enabled us to live-stream and archive any materials that were broadcasted. The streams were embedded into a Nuxt based front-end that combined the video streams with meta data provided by a Strapi instance. The online platform was adapted both for desktop and mobile devices.