Petko Dourmana has forgotten all about the meeting and comes 40 minutes late, as if to supply another proof that practicality and creativity do not mix on Mondays. And even more so with creative people. "Monday is the worst," he says. It is the day to plan the week for all three organisations that are part of the Inter Space Media Art Centre association, which he directs. He is 36 and is the oldest in a team of some 34-35 artists, designers, organisers, programmers and hardware engineers who create culture policies, educational and art projects and internet solutions. And who like hitting ceilings: like the ceiling for a most-financed European Commission media project in Bulgaria for 2006. They also hit the ceiling with Cinemasports - an instant cinema project for youngsters that, before reaching Moscow, had a record number of participants here. Dourmana's explanation for that is simple: "In Europe and America, people cannot dedicate so much time to enthusiasm". The project has a team produce a movie based on three key words (chemical reaction, a blurred glass, and an old friend were the words for 2006), and then leaves them hassle with their own cameras, actors and software for some 13-14 hours until they produce a film. The project is a San Francisco brainchild.

The association picked the name Inter Space because of the nature of their work - they have projects in technologies, culture, art, education. "We have many directions," Dourmana says. "And all of our sectors are promising."

And wildly interesting. Among Inter Space's recent projects was See You in Warhala, a multi-media dance-theatre- performance game acted and projected in a couple of places (Amsterdam, Athens, Sofia) at the same time, in real time, and only once. Another one is Media Music room - a project transforming a physical room into a music instrument that manipulates sound and image, and is controlled by interactive technology devices.

If all that sounds hazy, it is because the association works outside its context, Dourmana says. "In 2002, when nobody had heard about blogging, we started the first blogging portal in Bulgaria and organised debates on how to do blogging. We tried to establish it but there were no conditions. We have promoted streaming, peer to peer protocols in sharing video files and other. Last year we did a workshop on podcasting when people hadn't heard of podcasting. The use of technologies here is some three-five years behind. We practically do not have any competition."

But that can be bad: they have to either go with their surroundings and be very much behind technology, or be forever doomed to do things that will only be understood in a couple of years' time - which they have been doing since their foundation in 1998 anyway.

"This sphere is somewhat anonymous. We are so much ahead of our time that people sometimes do not remember that they first heard of something from us. We try to train them but even in that we are so much ahead," he says. About a half of their projects still somehow flourish. "It's not like we miss fame," he says. But the business still needs some backwards PR, he says. It needs to promote things that were promoted three-four years ago, now, at a time when people can already understand it, he says.
All of that mess in Bulgaria does not discourage them because most of their partners are international and constant. And most constant of them is the European Commission's (EC) Culture 2000 programme. When it is about Bulgarian partnerships, Inter Space prefers to play it safe and only makes short-term business commitments. "Nobody invests long-term here", he says. "Our business allows for long-term planning but even if a certain partner looks very serious, we know that they may go bankrupt at any point and would then do something mean to us to save themselves. So, however appealing a partnership appears, we prefer working with international partners."

Nevertheless, Inter Space is in contact with most Bulgarian NGOs working in the spheres of art, culture, and technology. The association has recently started to franchise an increasing number of projects, which have already found their communities in Bulgaria. And have of course used the time to start new things. They always start new things. "Since 2001, we haven't had a moment without a project. Last year we ran three at the same time. I don't think there is another organisation that has planned so many projects for the 2006-2007 period," he says.

The only philosophy unifying their diverse projects is that they themselves have to find them interesting. "If they aren't interesting to us, we don't do them," he says.

They find it difficult to find people to work on them, though. "At the moment, we are doing something called Upgrade (a monthly meeting of local new media artists). It is a very serous effort, but Bulgarian people don't see its potential. I can give another example of the same: a project to stream video online. We developed it in 2002 and lost some two-three years to convince people to use it; until we realised that it would be easiest if we use it ourselves and sell it. We usually invest a good deal of money in our projects and need to sell them afterwards. But the problem is that we may begin to become self-sufficient (...) At the beginning, we wanted to be part of a network. Our initial idea in 1998 was to create an association that would give more chances to its members than they have on their own," Dourmana says. The association then realised, however, that it could not work without an infrastructure, and created an office with a multimedia lab. Two years later, they started hiring people to work for them full-time and now have 11 or more full-time employees.

A peculiarity of the business, however, is that its people rarely stay to work with them longer than three to five years. In four-five years, they usually receive very good propositions from outside companies, Dourmana says. "Our organisation has a ceiling of development. So, we constantly attract new young people and this is how it goes. Our Bulgarian workers are typically young and this is either their first job or they have worked somewhere completely marginal before us - like a game club. Some of them are students that work and study. There is no other way," he says. "This is just a phase in the development of any person. Even if we want, we don't have the moral right to hold them because wherever they go they automatically receive a salary that is double the salary they get here. This sort of makes me feel good about things as well. They come here completely illiterate. That is, they have graduated, but if you bear in mind the level of Bulgarian education, it is like they start from scratch; and then they go out and they become, say, the best programmers in Sofia." Or the best creative directors. "At one point  some four or five of our former people worked as creative directors of advertising agencies. It was funny," he says.

The flow of people has its good sides as well: new people are usually more enthusiastic and more eager to experiment, he says. "We constantly have foreigners that are here on an internship as well. Now we have a French woman, before that we had a Japanese photographer, before that - a Canadian artist and organiser. The Canadian came for an event we organised, but liked Bulgaria and stayed," Dourmana says.

Most foreigners never stay longer than a half year, though. That makes the working atmosphere somewhat difficult. On top of that, Bulgarians are among the most stubborn workers. So, how does one organise a team that is both young and stubborn? "There are two ways: the easy way and the difficult way," Dourmana says. "With the easy way you have a young person who is motivated and ready to learn and only needs to be helped and channelled. But the easy way is rare. The difficult way has degrees. The worst degree is to have the guy shouted at and stressed," Dourmana says. "The stages are officially announced so that the person realises that they have to deal with the stuff alone."

When dealing with intransigent workers, Dourmana uses a Dutch theory of cultural differences that explains why one culture is different from another.

"If you read the theory of cultural differences, you will see that Bulgarians' understandings about labour, discipline, family, correspond precisely to that of South Eastern and Southern Europe. We have some characteristics of the Spaniards, the Poles, even the Latin Americans, Turks, people from the Middle East."

Dourmana has had to improvise and come up with his own managerial theories as well. And he came up with the following:

"I have found out that Bulgarians have a selection of problems that can only be overcome by shock therapy. So, I use that on a specific person that I place under stress. But it is very important that this stress is short term because man is an adaptive animal and gets used to things. And it is worse to have someone get used to stress because then you have a stressed person around you. Stress should only be used to put one out of balance…"

Dourmana has no actual education in management. He graduated from the National Academy for Fine Arts in Sofia, the Technical University in Gabrovo and the arts school for industrial design in Kazanluk. So he has had to develop his own theories on how to misbalance and stress. "I trained in judo as a youngster. The main principle in judo is based on balance, and placing people out of balance - so you have to keep your balance and place the other person out of balance. So my not-so-humane practices are inspired by judo," he says.

And the judo thing works - Dourmana says that he has a good team and that foreign managers who managed to change their approach to workers and impose different working practices have built very good teams. "There is no difference between the way I see things and the way foreign managers working in Bulgaria see things," Dourmana says. "This is obvious from the conversations I have with them. But there is one thing that usually shocks foreign managers: workers here expect managers to both be authoritarian and be their friend - this is some sort of schizophrenia. There is this logic that if the boss is not your first friend, he is your first enemy."

Here is Dourmana's list of other peculiarities Bulgarian workers have:

1. Each Bulgarian is convinced that he knows things best. Even when he enters an organisation with long-established practices, he still knows that he knows best.
2. People are never ready to work in a team.
3. Regardless of how good their intentions, Bulgarians botch their tasks. They may not botch a task for a long time, but they will botch it in the worst of times.
4. People do not like to test, to perfect, to work on the details. For them, it is enough to have a plan in their head to announce that it can happen. They will never try and see if it can happen practically.
5. Some communist leftovers that get passed from parents to children are around as well. There is this phenomenon that parents convince their kids to not work in competitive surroundings that give them the chance to grow, but make them look for security in state institutions. And we are speaking of 22-23-year-old individuals that are the victims of their parents here: they somehow manage to make them do that.
6. Lack of initiative is so Bulgarian as well.
7. As is escaping responsibility
8. And, masochistically enough, looking for an authoritarian boss to tell you what to do.

Dourmana believes that people like those above need to be subjected to stress so they derail and then re-rail on another set of rails, as he puts it.

"What I do is shout at them to stress them when they have made a mistake - but I have to be sure that they have made a mistake."

Understandably, Dourmana has no huge respect for the most American-born management books because they just do not work on Bulgarian soil. "I try to read them but they either tell me things that I already know, or things that I totally disagree with. So I have read them, but then thrown them away."

Another potential manager problem for him is that his young team is overly diverse. "It is like we speak different languages. This gets in the way, of course. There is no way to work unless you accept that the person talking to you is probably not talking bullshit, although you may be programmed to believe so."

Everyone in Inter Space's office usually works on a different project, so that helps add to the confusion.

Dourmana himself has worked on many diverse projects, but his current drama is that he can't realise any more of them, he says; and he can't promote them. "I have to live as well," he says. Moreover, his interest in his own projects disappears when they are finished.

This doesn't mean he doesn't have his favourites, though. His personal favourite is a 3D model of a body that can be modelled based on the principles of metabolism. You can, for example, make a woman tall if she is short. The idea behind it is to visualise the pressure that people's surroundings exercise on them to change in order to be accepted, Dourmana says.

Another one of his favourites is Social Scan - a software that maps emotional conversations in IRC chats on the basis of clusters. You have words that, say, belong to emotion and are coloured red, and words that are, for example, technical, and are coloured grey. "The internet turns humankind into a global mind," Dourmana says. So the scanner acts like this global mind that scans the use of emotion in chat channels. "You can have a chat channel that speaks professionally, for example."

Although those things may sound detached from actuality, Dourmana says that he gets his inspiration from real life, mostly. Movies, books and music have exhausted their magic with him, he says. Tower Chat, another of his projects, was, for example, inspired by September 11 and is based on technologies the Pentagon used during the Persian Gulf War. The technology acts on the principle of mapping the speed of information exchanged to guess its probable outcome. During the war, they did not try to decode information because it would take too long. So they watched for a moment when information exchange reached a peak and decided that something must be happening. They determined what the something is based on the theory of probability, Dourmana says.

Tower Chat is a 3D tower that can be built or destroyed depending on the words that chatting people use. "Modern wars are basically 3D wars in real time as well," Dourmana says. "Soldiers have these screens before them that show them what's in store. There's new information coming to them all the time. So it is like the soldier plays a computer game. This is why the ratio of American to other victims in contemporary wars is like one in 1000. Life changes so fast. And the military industry is among the first to apply the changes," he says.

Dourmana does not believe in theories of doom, though. Things cannot spin out of control because societies have survival instincts, he says. None of the anti-utopias of the beginning of the 20th century ever came true. "There were all those drama stories about a third world war, nuclear catastrophes, and none of this happened."

The technological aspect of their work- internet solutions is based on software with an open code - a term that is almost equivalent with and usually used interchangeably with the term open software. The thing with software is that it often sinks, Dourmana says when asked to explain the term. And it was somehow estimated that only five per cent of the software ever makes it to the client. So what smart software-saviours have done is get the already sunken software published or shared online, sometimes in its unfinished phase. This revives the sunken project, makes it accessible and reduces its final production cost. Inter Space uses this software almost completely, Dourmana says, and is now planning to do professional training for multimedia instruments with an open code. "This hasn't been done in Europe so far," Dourmana says. "We have experimented with the product for three years, so very few people know it better than we do. In Bulgaria, no one knows it better. Every separate tool may have a better expert, but as a whole - there is no one. When someone from the branch starts some project related to open software, they turn to us."

Another project Inter Space plans to introduce is white nights - a combination of night of the museums with open-area events and projections running in many capitals that will come here next year.

"We'll probably work with Sofia municipality (SM)", he says. "We are very pleased with them. It is a very good team that Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov has created. The Goethe Institute is now collaborating with them for the Cargo Sofia project as well, Dourmana says. (Cargo Sofia is a mobile truck-home travelling from Sofia to Ljubljana that visits forgotten routes like roadside restaurants and storehouses, while the travellers listen to the drivers'comments…)

But SM is not always perfect. Some time ago, they voted to continue their contract with Inter Space (Inter Space created SM's interactive portal that offers live streaming of Sofia Municipal Council's meetings and access to important documents), but Inter Space still can't get hold of the new contract. "It has been travelling through different departments for some two-three months and still can't reach Borissov," Dourmana says.

Organisational problems of the sort are even more dire with Bulgarian universities. Inter Space has been attempting partnerships with the journalism departments of Sofia University (SU) to establish a part-time second major in New Media, but things don't work.

"New media is not taught anywhere in Bulgaria. We need to have a major teaching the theory, practise, history, tendencies in new media. We have negotiated with SU's journalism faculty, but the case with universities is tragic. Even if they have the most friendly deans and presidents, their systems are so complicated that they cannot do anything. SU, for example, won a grant to buy computers three years ago, and installed them only now. Now, if this happens in SU, imagine how the other universities work. New Bulgarian University is very chaotic also. Each time I want to do a project with them, I have to start anew because their people have been completely changed. There is no continuity there. This is a big problem. People do not understand us. And journalists do not understand us also. Actually, I don't want to comment on Bulgarian journalism at all."

So it has turned out that Inter Spaces' cultural projects find support much easier than educational ones.

Inter Space has already managed to make some breakthroughs with certain municipalities that it convinced of the benefits of the so-called "Bilbao effect" (after the post-industrial Spanish city that changed after its leaders decided to invest in culture as a way to develop it). Bilbao has its Bulgarian followers in the Bourgas, Varna, Gabrovo, Plovdiv, Rousse, Sofia, and Tryavna municipalities and their Sofia partners - Inter Space and Open Society Institute.

The project works this way: the municipal administration creates a fund for culture that finances 50 per cent of a culture project, while the other 50 come from the project's authors - people who usually live in the municipality and know its tastes in music, poetry, theatre. "We try to make this simple calculation for them that if they start giving money on the basis of competition, they will raise the quality of the product and attract more investment because money will come from other sources as well - the so-called public-private partnerships."

Culture funds otherwise come from three sources: European, national and local. The EC's Culture 2000 programme gives eight cents per head of the population - including non-EU countries - while Bulgaria spends four euro per head of the population, or some 50 times more. "People here usually talk bullshit - they say that we are waiting for the EU to finance cultural programmes. They don't sit down to make a simple calculation and see that this is not the case: we give 50 times more, but it is not distributed well enough, and not according to competition. The state decides what to finance through the Ministry of Culture. And the Ministry of Culture chooses to spend most of its money for Bulgarian National Television. But this is another conversation. So, we cannot influence decisions on a national level, but we can do so on a local level. The state does not recognise NGOs and culture as a factor, but local authorities do. If an event happens in Sofia, investments are made in Sofia - and the local administration sees that and co-operates with us. The previous one didn't see that - we tried to work with them as well," Dourmana says.

Dourmana's enthusiasm to bend thick walls and pierce impervious administrations will take some time to subside. At the moment, he has found a candidate to whom to delegate his tasks, but says that it is still not the time to do so completely. And he can't rest well anyway because his mind always feels like it needs to work on something. His personal motivation to always aim to go far is like that of other artists as well, he says: to identify social hot spots, localise them, visualise them. As if in an attempt to pinpoint important things that might otherwise vanish because of that "monstrous", as he says, pace of our lives. New Media, he says, participates in our lives in crucial ways: it changes the way people think and see and we are only just now beginning to realise the effects of those changes.