Europeana online again!

Europeana is online again in a beta version. Which means, as far as I can tell, that not all the links work, and the search functions are a little wonky. But, even at this stage, it's pretty darn wonderful.



This YouTube video gives an idea of what will be available on the site once it's up and running properly (although their choice of background music is questionable). The other videos listed on the sidebar under theeuropeanlibrary will give you an idea of how Europeana came about, especially this one, which is a little bit dry but try to bear with the speaker until the end when she describes how a search will work. This video made for the American Library Association is probably only of interest to library staff and librarians, but it does provide a nostalgic reminder (pleasant or not) of PowerPoint presentations.

As you may have heard, Europeana crashed badly when it first went online in November. Evidently they vastly underestimated interest in the site. Now they don't expect to be "fully operational" until 2010. In the meantime, wandering around the site should keep you occupied until then.

Or you can search the collections that aren't directly available from Europeana yet. You can find them through the European Library search. Don't expect English everywhere but what is available in any language is amazing.

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

This exhibit from the summer of 2006 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases some of the weird and wonderful British fashions, mostly from 1976 to 2006. The descriptions of the really strange wearable? garments are quite straightforward - the fashions themselves are odd, to say the least. An added bonus of this exhibit is the "commentary on the evolution of British fashion" provided by Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon). His rant is not nearly as stiff as the description indicates.

My favourite designer of the group shown is Vivienne Westwood - mostly because I've thought that she knows she's putting us on. Her fashion collection pieces are much more outrageous than the clothing shown on her website: most of those are quite wearable.

Glass of the Maharajahs at the Corning Museum of Glass

The Corning Museum of Glass doesn't always have a lot of online content for its exhibits but for Glass of the Maharajahs which ran from May to November of 2006, there is a wide range of resources. What the Maharajahs had made of glass was furniture, and there is a good selection of 'objects' on view (objects being designs and the finished furnishing).

The New York Times Review gives a valuable description and history of the making of glass furniture.

Odetta

Odetta died on December 2, 2008, at 77. You can listen to short versions of her songs if you click on Pastures of Plenty on the iLike list to the right. Or, possibly, here.

I found a couple of recent interviews with Odetta. One, from the New York Times is a video interview from 2007 that the NYT used after her death. In it, she sings snippets from a few songs and talks about her life.

In an NPR biographical article from 2005 there is a shorter audio interview in which Odetta sings a short version of 'Home on the Range' which will give you an entirely different view of that song.

A Google search will find lots of links but the Wikipedia entry is pretty good. One of the better links there is Odetta's page (with video clips) at the Oral History Archive of The National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP). This site, by the way, is an excellent source of educational and informational material about and by African Americans

iLike Music on sidebar

I just added a neat widget to the sidebar. It's a playlist from iLike that plays 30 second song snippets. I hope that they decide to allow longer excerpts since the beginning of some songs don't really give an indication of the content.

I was really happy to find "I am Woman" by Helen Reddy in the iLike catalogue. Her website has full-length Flash copies of her songs so you can hear a 1990 copy of the song as well as the original demo.

Now I just have to figure out how to add to the playlist. I suspect that means joining iLike and having another password to remember.

Color Chart at MOMA

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is another of MOMA's really comprehensive exhibit websites.

There are several ways of looking at the exhibit, not all of them immediately apparent. For instance, you might think that "Listen to the audio tour: Full program" is a link to audio files. But, no, it's a link to a slide show which shows 17 slides with audio, most with commentary by the curator, and some by the artists. The link to "Download audio clips" takes you to a list of the audio clips from the slide show with tiny images of the pictures on the slides. This is not the way to go. And the link to the online exhibition on this page is a bad link.

Clicking on the link at the top of this post takes you to the main online website. From there, you can view the works by artist, medium, or timeline, and also see four installation videos. One word of warning - if you look at enlarged images, be sure to click to get back to the list of artists, etc., or you'll be starting over from the beginning.

MOMA has a pretty good presence on YouTube. The following video is one I found there of the the artist Niele Toroni painting his contribution to the exhibit. The video on the website is better quality.

Paul St.Amand's Parallels

This short film has just won the 2008 Short Film Festival at TriggerStreet which "was founded in 2002 by two time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey ...".

It has won several other awards and appeared at many film festivals, as noted here. And, best of all, Paul St. Amand is from Bedford, Nova Scotia.

As for viewing the film: TriggerStreet wants you to have a free account in order to log in and view their members' work. St. Amand's website has videos of this and other films at the link above. I found a good (larger) copy of the video at Metacafe.

The film is very good and says what I've been thinking - there are a lot of parallels between the U.S. presence in Vietnam and in Iraq. It is also very sad, in that we seem to have learned nothing in the intervening years.

Jessica Stockholder lecture

A few weeks ago, October 24th to be exact, I travelled to Halifax to attend a lecture by installation artist Jessica Stockholder. Since I live a few hours away, and I don't drive, this meant I had to take a shuttle bus, stay overnight in a B & B, and, of course, shop and gallery hop in the time I had left over. The fact that I got hopelessly lost wandering around the city (I finally found someone who said - "Go that way") meant that I visited only one gallery, but I did manage to cram a lot of shopping into the next morning.

The Stockholder lecture was announced on the NSCAD news page and briefly in the local newspaper, but I haven't been able to find any other news coverage of the event. I'm more than a little miffed at that because the lecture hall was packed, and she is an important artist. Her art is probably not everyone's cup of tea, since she uses everyday objects in her sculptures and sometimes the meaning behind the work can be obscure.

I have wondered if she is poking fun at 'serious art' with her sculpture but I felt from what she said in the lecture that Stockholder takes her own work very seriously. She had a very good slideshow to go with her talk, although I would have liked it if she had shown a bit more of her recent work. And she had some really good slides of my favourite piece, which I can't find anywhere on the internet, of a wall of car bodies, and the surrounding landscape which she created.

I actually have some of Stockholder's works, sort of. A few years ago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago had a fundraising sale and I bought a package of Stockholder's contribution - a hundred paper placemats, which are photos of kitchen gadgets/containers sitting on placemats. In fact, the placemats are on sale again for Christmas this year. [corrections and site added November 16/08] One of these days, I'm going to do my own gadget/placemat photo.

There is a very good site for this artist on PBS's Art:21 website. There she describes her approach to her work. The YouTube video below is from this series.



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El Anatsui at the Fowler Museum at ULCA

In this KCRW podcast from August 2007 "KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour and Art Critic Edward Goldman speak with Museum Director Marla Berns" about El Anatsui's show at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and his presence at the Venice Biennale.

The Fowler Museum's website is well worth browsing around. Their online archives have links to some amazing online collections. The earliest online exhibits or 'photo tours' I could find are from 2006 but descriptions of exhibits go back to 2000.

El Anatsui's website provides some information about the artist and a few pictures, but I'm guessing it hasn't been updated for a while. A Google search found this exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art which is mentioned in the KCRW podcast. There are some good (but not excellent) images of Anatsui's sculptures and sound files of him decribing three of his works.

I didn't have a whole lot of luck finding good images of Anatsui's exhibit at the Venice Biennale. I did find a good set of images from the October Gallery in London, either here or here - there are different images in each collection.

It's Blog Action Day again

This year the theme of Blog Action Day is raising awareness of poverty. This means looking at not just the abstract concept of 'poverty' but realizing how it effects your neighbour - next door, down the street, on the street corner, around the world.

In the spirit of this blog, when I get around to posting, that is, I'm going to provide some links to organizations which try to put a human face on poverty.

Make Poverty History Canada addresses poverty more as a political issue, pointing to the impoverishment of people resulting from the action (or inaction) of governments.

Oxfam Canada points out a variety of issues that lead to poverty, and shows what you can do. Today, at least, and I hope on most days, the title picture on their website shows a variety of images following the theme "This is what women's rights look like". Women's rights are part and parcel of human rights, empowerment for everyone, and as the pictures show, a sense of community.

Tomorrow, October 16, is World Food Day, an event "established by FAO's Member Countries at the Organization's Twentieth General Conference in November 1979". Their 'History' page has posters going back to 1981.

I did a search on Google using World Food Day 2008 as my search term. The variety of events are quite impressive.

The Stephen Lewis Foundation "helps to ease the pain of HIV/AIDS in Africa at the grassroots level". It goes without saying that if people weren't dying with AIDS at such a high rate, if they had access to health care and food and necessary drugs, then maybe they could think about getting out of poverty.

... and then there was more

On Robert Horvitz' page about Jack Burnham, one of the articles referenced is Edward A.Shanken's The House That Jack Built... (PDF is here). In that paper, Shanken discusses the exhibition Software that Burnham curated at the Jewish Museum in 1970. The Museum has some archived past exhibits but they go back only to 1998. This site is worth exploring, especially if you can find the images that have the magnifying glass icon. There aren't many of them but the ones I saw did zooming in very well.

See, I've digressed again.

Next time, I'll follow a lead or two from the Horvitz and Shanken papers.

One thing leads to another ...

which is exactly why I never finish reading a book on computer art. I have to go off on one tangent or another, and then I find another book or article or web page. If it's online it has links that I have to follow. If I have a paper copy, then there are references which I have to search online.

The following is a case in point. I found a thesis on the history of computer art at the University of Western Australia. In the first paragraph of the introduction the author, Grant Taylor, mentions the problems caused for artists and curators by their involvement with computer art. The endnote for this point refers to Jack Burnham and an article he wrote in a book by Kathleen Woodward, titled The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. The book is available in many libraries and if you want to follow up, then enter the title in the WorldCat search box in the side column.

I searched Google for Jack Burnham and found many links. A very good site, with more links, is Robert Horvitz' Node for Jack Burnham. More next time on what I found there.

And for the original CGW article ...

just check out the Computer Graphics World website. The url for the article is impossibly long so I'm not linking here. Besides, it's more fun to browse through the issues which go back to 1999. Directions for finding the 25 years retrospective ... article are in my September 26 entry.

Of course, finding the correctly formatted article on the magazine website sort of takes the shine off finding it through my local library, but I still think that databases of magazines and journals available through libraries are a wonderful resource.

Fibonacci animation from Computer Graphics World

I found a reference to this animation in an article entitled 25 years retrospective: from humble beginnings, computer art transcends traditional media: part 1 digital art in the January 2002 issue of Computer Graphics World (vol. 25, issue 1 (p. 18).

I had printed off the article in 2002 while I still had access to InfoTrac at my workplace (University of Saskatchewan Library). There were no graphics included when I had the article emailed to me. When I came across it again today, I decided to see if my local library had a copy on InfoTrac. Well, it did, fully accessible to library card holders, and with both PDF and text copies. The PDF is pretty awful, and the text copy has small pictures but between the two and my original text-only copy, I can figure out what text goes with what picture.

The article provides a good overview of computer art as found in Computer Graphics World. I wanted to see if I could find better copies of some of the art so I went Googling and found this animation at video.google.com. What is really neat is that it was created at a construction company.

One hundred and one shades of gray

Once upon a time (1999), John Maeda wrote a book, Design by Numbers, which was meant to assist readers in "acquiring the skills necessary to write computer programs that are themselves visual expressions". The "programming system" that he developed, DBN, is still available at Design By Numbers. It's a Java program run from a DOS window, so it starts from a .bat file, if you download it to use on your computer.

In the book, Maeda allows the reader to construct simple programs using straightforward commands. As the book progresses, the commands become more complex, involving a lot of typing if you want to follow his instructions exactly.

The first program consists of only one command - Paper 0, Paper 1, etc., up to Paper 100. Each program, when run, shows one "sheet of paper", consisting of whatever solid colour, or shade of gray, plus black and white, is requested. While the program will do this faithfully, it doesn't provide a way to show this result, except in the display area.

This animation is my attempt to show the 99 shades of gray, plus white and black, by using a program which will produce and display them more or less properly. Not as easy to do as I first thought, since I had to find a program with a colour set option for black to white, with 1-increment steps, which could then export to a video file which could handle the subtle changes of shade. I used Corel Rave 3.0, which I don’t believe is being made anymore - I got it as part of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. Rave has a very convenient colour palette named ' percent grey' which shows all 101 shades that I wanted.

The next problem was to find a format to save in that would show all 101 shades. Flash works well but Blogger didn't like it. A .mov file doesn't show the shades. So I chose .avi, even though it is a large file, and the numbers are blurred a bit. A lot of fussing, I know, for something that is sort of 'geeky' but I like doing finicky things.

DBN wasn't developed any further than beta version 4, although I could find only version 3.01, but Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions" sort of carries on the same idea in colour. I like the simplicity of DBN though, or I will until it gets too complicated.


This is a screen shot of the program in action. Very simple and very quick.

Such a Small Spider

These photos were taken last July with a macro setting on my Canon Digital Rebel XT.

The spider is Araneus diadematus. The Nick's Spiders website says that it is an orb weaver, common to Britain and Europe, and also, obviously, to Nova Scotia since I took this photo outside my front door. His pictures of spiderlings reminded me of the multiple baby spiders I've swept from my balcony and front entrance.

Shaun Ivory's Spiders website has more information about Araneus diadematus, including a really large photo at the bottom of the page.

Past exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition archives for the Metropolitan Museum of Art go back to 2000 [1999, actually, as of March 2011]. While not all archived exhibits have accompanying online media, most of them do. The Met has a generous and clear "terms and conditions" policy so that I can, for instance, show this sketch of Franz Liszt by Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)

Franz Liszt, 1839
Graphite with white highlights on paper; 12 1/8 x 9 in. (30.9 x 22.8 cm)
Richard Wagner Stiftung, Bayreuth

as long as I cite it properly and include the complete caption - which wasn't as hard to do as I thought it would be. The website for the Ingres exhibit, which ran from October 5, 1999 to January 2, 2000, is http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/ingres/ingres/html/el_ingres_inter.htm. This exhibit has 16 images of art by Ingres, with details of each, along with supplementary material.

Other archived exhibits have audio files as well as images. For example, Richard Avedon: Portraits has sound for some of the photographs along with the transcripts.

The Met is one art museum which takes its online presence seriously. There are comprehensive exhibits in many cases, and there's no searching around for image files, like there is with sites which provide only podcasts of the audio which a viewer would hear if she or he were in the art gallery. The Met's podcasts allow you to subscribe, listen on site, download episodes, and read the transcripts.

Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings / Lords of Creation

This exhibit has two online web pages - and two titles. According to the New York Times review by Holland Cotter "Mayan Treasures at the Met: Passing Strange Communications From the Beyond", the show first appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as Lords of Creation. The online exhibit is excellent, although I would have wished for larger images, or a magnifying tool. The presentation is in Flash, and once you enter a section, the only way to get back to the main page is the little curved arrow to the left of the exhibition title.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art called their exhibit Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings and it's presented in their standard format - some text and some pictures. It's not fancy but their Past Exhibitions start in 2000, with images of the works appearing mid-year. The pictures can be enlarged, but not magnified.

The end (?) of Netscape

Netscape has been officially discontinued, or will be by March 1. I like Netscape, especially Netscape Composer that was available up to version 7.2. I've been using Firefox for some time and find that it is very similar (of course), even has the same tendency to refuse to work when I've viewed one too many videos or played one too many interactive games.

Wikipedia has several good articles on Netscape, the company, and Netscape, the browser. Just don't click on the Netscape.com link unless you want to visit AOL.com with it's numerous cookie windows.

Invasion of the Podcasts - New York Times

When this New York Times article was written back in May of 2006, many art museums were placing excerpts from their audio tours on the web, sending them out as podcasts. They continue to do so, likely in greater numbers and with coverage from many more galleries and museums than are mentioned in the article.

I find that the podcasts I subscribe to have varied levels of usefulness and I use them as a reminder to visit the website and see what is there to supplement the audio file - after all, a description is useless without being able to see the art work being described. Of course, some of the podcasts are now of video files as well as audio. It is still worthwhile to visit the websites to see what else is available.

SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) podcasts are available with(M4A), or without (MP3), video . If you subscribe to the podcast, you'll get both. You can also download your preferred file format from the site. The wonderful extra content on this page is provided through the little white-bordered box to the right - here you find interactive features - I couldn't get all of them to work, but the ones that do are very well done.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has done 22 podcasts as of February 2008. One nice feature is that you can read the transcript of the interviews. You can subscribe, download or listen to files, and some episodes have extra content. Locating the art or the exhibit being discussed can take some work though so be ready to use Google and then go on some cyber side trips.

The podcasts from New York's Museum of Modern Art require a bit of work to co-ordinate online viewing and listening. Subscribing to the podcasts means that you get short audio files, and can then find the art or artist discussed on the website. MoMa's search feature is quite good but it's likely best to use the advanced search or you'll end up with much more than you want. On the podcast page there is also a list of special exhibitions with information about the exhibit and other audio programs which may, or may not, include in one audio/video slide show most of the short audio files along with images of the art. Whatever way you decide to explore this website, there is a huge amount of audiovisual material to be found.