2023 · live interactive intellectual property and blockchain event with a companion digital platform · public cultural-educational festival project
Public interactive festival where attendees co-create photographs and practice authorship rights through smart contracts.
Javni interaktivni festival na kojem posjetitelji zajedno stvaraju fotografije, a autorska prava vježbaju kroz pametne ugovore.
This project credentials: Cross-media & events · Corporate event production · Smart-contract distribution
I still think the core idea was right: you understand intellectual property far better after you have actually signed away a share of something you helped make than after any lecture about it. So we built the whole thing to be practical — pick a photographer, make one picture, sign a real co-production contract, and watch the rights move onto a smart contract and a platform. The talks and terminals were there to explain what you had just done, not to decorate it.
What I have to be straight about is that it stayed on paper. We did the unglamorous work well — the budgets, the declarations, the tax certificate, the speaker line-up, the Creative Europe framing — but the audience-development application to the Ministry was rejected, the remaining sponsorship never closed, and I never got to a live event, a deployed contract, or a single signed visitor agreement. The concept and the package are real; the festival, so far, is not.
- Matija Radeljak
Intellectual Property Festival — filed with the Croatian Ministry of Culture under its Croatian name, Festival autorskog rada — was Aning Film's attempt to teach authorship by making people practice it. The format was blunt: a visitor picks a professional photographer, the two make a single photograph together, and on the spot the visitor signs a co-production agreement that names them co-author and splits the rights and any future revenue. That contract was then meant to move onto a smart contract, with a companion digital platform presenting each work and selling clearly scoped exploitation rights as NFTs. Talks and on-site terminals on art history, cultural production, intellectual property and blockchain were not a garnish around the event; they were the method.
Led from Zagreb by Matija Radeljak and art historian and critic Feđa Gavrilović, the program lined up a bench of practitioners as speakers and contributors: film theorist Petra Belc, producer and gallerist Damir Kanaet, film producers Igor Filipović and Srđan Krnjaić, cross-media producer Nuno Bernardo, cinematographer Damir Kudin, and Ida Pandur of Near Hub. The roster was chosen to cover the whole chain the festival wanted to dramatise: how a work is made, how it is produced, who holds its rights, and how it reaches a market.
What survives best is the development itself, and it is unusually complete. Through late 2022 the project was packaged for the Ministry's audience-development call: a program description dated 20 December 2022, a tax certificate confirming no public dues on 16 December, and non-double-financing and truthfulness declarations signed in Zagreb on 21 December. The budget was a moving target rather than one frozen figure — a Ministry-facing plan of 163.549,50 HRK (21.706,75 EUR), a workbook variant at 144.075,50 HRK (19.122,10 EUR), and a later 36.365,75 EUR framing for the 2023 phase — but its priorities never moved: expert honoraria and the digital platform dominated, followed by the live event, promotion, and a 7 percent production fee. In parallel the team logged the Creative Europe Innovation Lab call (CREA-CROSS-2023-INNOVLAB) as a funding frame and prepared partner-facing pitch material.
Here the record and the ambition part ways. The project's own short description states the festival secured 2023 support from the Ministry of Culture and the City of Zagreb, with a further 15.000 EUR in local and blockchain-industry sponsorship still open by 1 March 2023. The public record is less kind: the Ministry's 2023 audience-development results list Aning Film's Festival autorskog rada among the rejected programs. No final agenda, attendance count, event documentation, deployed smart contract, or signed attendee agreement survives in the archive.
What the project proves, then, is not a festival that happened but a development capability — the ability to take a genuinely awkward idea, sitting at the intersection of art, law and a hyped technology, and specify it all the way down to signed declarations and a costed platform build. As a service, it is development and packaging: turning an abstract proposition into a fundable, buildable production model, even when the money and the event did not follow.
Related work: Croatia goes cross-media