This pathetic video ...

is my first attempt at making something in Poser 7, now distributed by Smith Micro. The Wikipedia article about Poser has a good description of the program and its long and tortuous history.

I decided to put this video in my blog because I have once again bought a graphics/3d program that I might not use very much, same as the previous 5 or 6 versions I bought. So this is my attempt to at least make something and show it, as amateurish as it may be.

The skeleton started out as one of the included Poser anatomy figures. Then I squished it a bit and added hair - not a lot but then a skeleton wouldn't have very much hair, would it. The animation isn't very smooth but it's a lot better than it was when I started.

Testing Zemanta

I read Blogger Buzz for June 10, 2009 and saw that they recommended Zemanta, which is supposed to help enhance content. So I installed it and am giving it a test run. It should find relevant links and pictures but it didn't find the Buzz article. It did find itself though. It also shows images I might want to use, although I have to figure out what the copyright permissions are.

So now I'll try a few words - Cornwallis Park, Nova Scotia, is where I live. Zemanta found the Wikipedia entry, and also a rather useless Google Map so I deleted that.

University of Saskatchewan Library where I worked before I retired - Zemanta found a photo from Flickr which has a Creative Commons license. Note the little popup attribution for the photographer at the bottom of the picture, which doesn't actually link to his Flickr page where he has some very good photos of Saskatoon and the University.

Image by daryl_mitchell via Flickr

This is actually a good photo. The dark area at the bottom of the library is the loading dock. Oddly enough, Zemanta didn't find a link to the library website so I inserted that myself.

So we'll see how good Zemanta is at finding stuff about artists - Marcel Duchamp, for example. Found the Wikipedia article and some photos including this one from Wikipedia, which according to them is in the public domain.

Image via Wikipedia

It's a photo of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy taken by Man Ray in 1921. It comes from the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection and as far as I can tell is shown in several other places on the web.

I had to rearrange the photos so Marcel wouldn't be in the library space and vice versa. I'm still not sure how much help Zemanta is, but I guess I'll find out in future posts. It does tend to insert links whether they make sense or not and put images in odd places.

Connect the dots (or clicks)

So I'm trying to actually read Randall Packer's book Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. [July 29/09 - The website, which has lots of interactive material, disappeared temporarily and reappeared at the linked site. Part of the text of the book, just enough to whet your appetite, is on Google Books.] I have the paper copy and the website supplements it with audio and video and photos. Earlier posts in 2004 and 2006 discuss my progress, which isn't happening because I keep getting distracted.

As in I start to read the chapter by Dick Higgins, do a search for Higgins and find an interview with him from 1995. Then come across a mention of "a visual poet", Kenny Goldsmith, with a link to a radio station WFMU which I'm listening to right now - not always my type of music but it is different than the usual stuff on radio today. I did a search for Goldsmith on WFMU, found his page and listened to a bit of his program (which is just silly and hilarious and has some very different music).

Higgins' interview, by the way, has some quite relevant things to say about the internet, and I will explore some more of his links (remember this was 1995) and maybe report on them in another post.

Kenny Goldsmith, incidentally, is the founding editor of UbuWeb.

Courbet and the Modern Landscape at three galleries

The website for the 2006 show at the Getty, Gustave Courbet and the Modern Landscape
is well-thought out and detailed. Several of the sections have audio and video to accompany the images, which can be zoomed and moved around. The reproduction quality of the paintings is very good except at higher magnification. One warning: the audio pieces are quite long, so don't click away from them unless you really don't want to finish listening, or from the video pieces either, for that matter. There is no way to get back to a particular spot without listening to the whole audio file. The good thing is that they are separate from the image, so that you can listen and examine the image at the same time.

An article titled "A Burly Father of Modernism ..." by Roberta Smith in the New York Times reviewed the show of the same name at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Walters' web exhibit includes a video explaining the way the museum set up the exhibit and a selection of Courbet's work with accompanying music files. Not necessarily the kind of music I'd want to listen to while I was looking at paintings but at least there was original content meant to enhance the viewing experience.

Banksy in Bristol

and neither are billions of other people.

The real Banksy has just installed an exhibit at Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery. Evidently, the preparation was done in deepest secrecy, as thoroughly described in this BBC News article. Luckily, the article is accompanied by some very good video, image, and audio files. Banksy's site currently has only a link to a YouTube trailer for the show - I can only hope that in the future it will return to its former state and display his art.

Robert Adams at the Getty

The Robert Adams exhibit at the Getty Center in 2006, entitled "Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance" was accompanied by a website that contains text, photos that can be enlarged, and links to audio and one video file. The setup feels just a bit awkward - maybe separate pages for each section would have been better, but the linked files are all there even if my Internet Explorer really didn't like the RealPlayer audio files. Never mind, Chrome played them without whining.

The site follows Adams' theme of "joy" and "dismay" in the contrasts between beauty and ugliness, loneliness and community.

The Getty began accompanying their exhibitions with an online component in 2000, pretty much keeping to the same format. So kudos to them for keeping content online for up to nine years.

Incidently, I added a Google Blog search gadget to the sidebar. I'm not sure that it searches the blog very well (the search box at the top left does that better), but it does find some very good sources under the "Linked from here" and "Art galleries, etc." tabs.