JELLYFISHES AND THEIR FAMILIES The encyclopedia of the arts consists of six big families of jellyfishes representative of six main categories. These are: visual arts, design arts, performing arts, literature, film and music. Each of these families is comprised of several family members - the subcategories. One jellyfish represents one family member. In this way the family design arts is composed of the jellyfishes architecture, furniture, graphic design, interactive design etc.   JELLYFISHES AND THEIR BEHAVIOR IN GROUPS Besides a color-coding of the different families, the behavior of a jellyfish indicates the affiliation to its relatives. All jellyfishes can freely swim around during the running application. By touching one, the relatives (the jellyfishes of the same main category) swim next to this jellyfish. The rest, the jellyfishes of the other families, move away from the chosen one. ROLLING OVER ARTIST The structure of the single jellyfish is simple. At the margin of a jellyfish the artists who have worked in this certain subcategory are represented as dots. By rolling over a dot the name and picture of a certain artist will be shown. In this way you can find, for example, artists like Michael Thonet and Charles Eames inside the jellyfish “furniture.”   SELECTING AN ARTIST Clicking on a dot selects a certain artist. Thereby three things are triggered at once. First, a second circle grows out of the jellyfish. The margin of this circle is where the artist's works are located, which are represented as dots. In addition a text field appears, containing information about the artist. Finally, a connection to another artist becomes visible, which means that another jellyfish opens itself, showing a second artist. Through the dot on the connection line between both jellyfishes you can get information about the kind of this link.   ARTWORK The artist's works are shown on the second circle. By rolling over a dot the name and picture of a certain artwork will be shown. In this way you can find “chair no. 14” by Michael Thonet. By the same principle as choosing an artist, you can investigate a certain artwork, too. This time two things happen at once. A text field containing information about the work and a connection to another artwork appear. In the same way as before, you can discover information about this link.   LEVELS OF INFORMATION There are different depths of information about the artists and their work. You have the possibility to scale up jellyfishes. Besides just bigger pictures, this offers a broader selection of artists (the number of dots on the jellyfish will be increased). Likewise the accompanying information text becomes more comprehensive. The text field contains sound information, which offers a more detailed description. By rolling over bywords, indicated by bold type, you can listen to it.