The Programmer Building Pop Culture's Biggest Animated Space Station
For more than five years, Belarusian programmer Pavel has been building Floor796, an ambitious digital art project that has captured the attention of millions of people around the world.
On a single gigantic space station, characters from entirely different universes coexist – from Game of Thrones to Soviet classics, from Belarusian internet memes to Hollywood blockbusters. According to Creative Industries of Russia, the project has built a substantial global audience, with more than six million visits in the past half year alone.
Animation the Size of a Universe
Inspired by the film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Pavel set out to build a "planet" of his own. It is populated by countless iconic animated characters, from The Simpsons to the heroes of Pushkin's Lukomorye. Every section contains a five-second animated scene featuring familiar characters, and new stories are added continuously.
Almost every character is clickable, allowing visitors to discover who they are and where they come from. Exploring this virtual "puzzle book" quickly turns into an engaging quest.
Even the project's name comes with a puzzle of its own. Each digit in the number 796 represents the position of a letter in the English alphabet, together spelling the word GIF. Floor796 is, in effect, one enormous, constantly evolving GIF that keeps expanding.
To build the project, Pavel developed his own online animation editor with a custom technology stack that includes a dedicated color palette, filtering tools, projection capabilities, and a proprietary video storage format. Creating the software took about a year, and he has continued refining it ever since, adding features for new scenes, whether simulating waves in a swimming pool or supporting increasingly complex interactions between characters.
"From a technical standpoint, this is quite a complex project. It involves a great deal of mathematics and graphics processing on both the client and server sides. That is exactly what makes it so fascinating to me," the author says.
Everyone Who Visits Comes Back
According to Pavel, users return to the website every two to four days to discover which new characters and scenes have appeared in this unusual world. One of the audience's favorite attractions is Chuck Norris, locked in an arm-wrestling match. Behind every character and every scene lies not only technical craftsmanship but also a deep appreciation for popular culture and painstaking attention to detail.
At the end of each workday, Pavel spends three to four hours on the project, and eight to ten hours on weekends, turning what began as a hobby into a way of life. Creating a single section takes about a month, and his current goal is to expand the station to 100 compartments.
Pavel emphasizes that Floor796 is a non-commercial passion project. Even the possibility of monetization is viewed only as a way to cover growing bandwidth costs as the audience continues to expand. His primary goal is simply to build an animated world and share it with everyone.
Art Before Profit
Last year, the global animation market exceeded $430 billion and is projected to reach $777 billion by 2035. Russia's animation industry is also expanding. By 2030, the domestic market is expected to approach RUB 39 billion (about $500 million). Russian-produced content is already distributed in 160 countries, while the number of animation studios has more than doubled.
"It is a unique form of art that has become an inseparable part of our culture and continues to bring joy to both children and adults," Russian Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova once emphasized.
The global audience for animation now totals approximately 2.5 billion people. Floor796 serves as an excellent map where visitors can rediscover their favorite characters. It is also a kind of time machine, connecting generations and eras through a universe people want to revisit again and again.
Pavel's project continues to grow across the vast "space" of the internet. Visitors to the website can suggest new characters they would like to see added. The current list includes about 1,200 requests, which Pavel plans to illustrate as time allows.
