Summer fairytale 2006. 30 artists recreate the games.

16 June 2024

An art project started 18 years ago at a time when the rights to the images of the 2006 World Cup were held exclusively by a few large corporations. Back then, blogging was one of the most efficient communication methods on the Internet. Our assumption was that many people would get a letter from lawyers if they blogged about their favorite team's game with screenshots from the broadcasts.

This assumption, combined with our first experience with the relatively new Creative Commons license, brought 30 people together to give FIFA and its machinations the finger. It's perhaps worth noting that only a few of us were really into soccer.

Every day at 12:00 noon we published the previous day's matches, replayed and under a free license. We used any means to give our own creativity room to interpret the games.

The only rules: who played against whom, the final result and the publication under a free CC license had to be fulfilled.

How-to nachspielzeit

We created real re-enactments of soccer situations, stop-motion films, bizarre compilations of historical records and short films that can best be described as free associations.

In the beginning, we firmly believed that we would replay all the games. But over the course of almost 30 days, reality caught up with us and by the end of the World Cup we had replayed around 70% of all the games.

Social media was just emerging, and platforms like Facebook did not yet play a major role in Germany. We therefore quickly needed our own website that was designed for community and multilingualism and was easy to use. Hubert suggested Drupal. At that time still in version 4.6, the multilingual website was completed in two weekends. All we needed now was a hosting platform for the videos.

Around the same time, sevenload was founded, the German answer to YouTube, which was looking for ways to differentiate itself from the top dog in the US. Hubert made contact with Ibo (Co-Founder sevenload) and we quickly agreed to launch a new format on sevenload. The sevenload special - a channel with editorial support, on which only the content of the aftermath appears and which is prominently presented on the start page. After various investors came on board, the format was renamed "Premium TV content".

In 2014, sevenload was discontinued.

What we hadn't considered at the time was that sevenload was our central repository for all our videos, which we had received from various parties for publication.

Now, to coincide with Euro 2024, we wanted to present our work again and had to search for our videos on long-dusty hard drives, on YouTube and in old tape drives. Unfortunately, our colleague Michael Trachenberge had passed away in the meantime, so we were no longer able to create a complete collection.

In the end, we found 37 videos, which we are making available on our own Peertube instance.