My name in Processing

This is my first attempt at actually publishing a Processing sketch online. It's an assignment for a MOOC I'm taking - Creative Coding, so here goes.

Or maybe this:

Printed light at The National Gallery of Australia

One of the many things that delight me about the Web (and the reason I get back to this blog, even though very seldom), is that things sometimes stay where they were, even for seven or so years. 

Printed light: photographic vision and the modern print was exhibited from July to November, 2004, and the pages are still there! The introduction page is pretty unglamourous, but those plain-looking links lead to some very good things, most of the time.

The essay (links are provided at the top of each page to most of the other pages, including this one) explains the relationship between photography and printmaking, and includes one of my favourite images, [Grant’s], by Richard Estes.

Gallery leads to a short list of works with brief descriptions of the artwork shown and links to enlarged images, which, sadly don't have a magnifying glass for closer examination of details.

National Gallery of Australia http://nga.gov.au/Home/index.cfm

Check some more of the links - exhibitions, etc.

Artist Interviews Reached through video link http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Transformations/Default.cfm?MnuID=8&GalID=Vid

on Transformations page http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Transformations/Default.cfm

Once you find them, the videos are of artists describing their work. There are also images of the work that can be enlarged. I found it useful to look at the images in a separate window while I read the description. 

MOOCs and Me

A wonderful addition to the great entanglement that is the World Wide Web is the MOOC (either Massive or Massively Open Online Course, depending on the interpretation of the writer). MOOCs have become common enough that they are attracting detractors.

I can only say that, for me, they are totally marvellous and those who bemoan their advent are totally missing the point. After all, as with many new inventions, MOOCs may have unintended consequences, although I hope that at least some of the early promoters realized the potential within these classes to unite and connect people around the world.

While the primary intention is to assist with education, MOOCs provide a chance to communicate and virtually interact with professors, teaching assistants, and, most importantly, learners around the world. Students have many reasons for studying in this way, but I see it as an opportunity to learn in fields that I would never have had the time or money to include in my classes when I was getting a degree. Whether I do all the classwork, watch all the videos, or just audit the classes and download for future viewing, in my old age this is a much better use of my time than watching daytime TV, playing online games, or any other time-wasters. I love every moment of it.

Artistic Collaborations at MOMA, part 2

To continue on from my previous post (in October, so I'm not exactly a prolific blogger), I stopped exploring the introductory page, and headed straight for the multimedia page, (also the exhibition page), which turned out to have images for only about a dozen of the artists in the exhibit. So the exhibition checklist (see my previous post) turned out to have the better list of images from all the artists in the show after all.

To see other multimedia, probably totally unrelated to this show, click on the 'More Multimedia' tab to the upper right of the intro page. The content there seems to change often so it's total serendipity as to what you'll find - just another place to get distracted and find all sorts of interesting videos and audio descriptions of paintings (Edward Munch's 'The Storm', for instance).

Universal Limited Art Editions is the printmaking workshop that is the focus of this exhibit. The first page you will see here is quite unimpressive, but once you start clicking on links, you can wander around for hours. The History link gives a pretty extensive explanation about how the workshop came about and the almost invisible 'photo archive' button at the bottom of the page leads to some quite amazing photos (you can either use the text link or the grid, but I preferred the text simply because the surprises were more fun). Here you can find a young Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman in an apron and a tie, and a whole lot more.
Finish exploring the site.

Tatyana Grosman must be one of the few people without a Wikipedia entry but the Jewish Women's Archive has an obituary and there's a very good transcription of an oral history interview with her at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian - yet another website to get lost on.

Artistic Collaborations at MOMA, part 1

Sometimes being very far behind in exploring websites that I have found years ago ends up with many more trails to follow than I had started with. I started this entry back in 2007, likely with this article by Martha Schwender, Even in the Digital Age, a Strong Case for Printmaking, in the New York Times. Then I would have looked for the MoMA exhibition webpage for "Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years of Universal Limited Art Editions". The introductory page is just that, not a lot of detail, just some links and a short paragraph summarizing the background of the exhibit.

Once I started exploring the links from this page, I quickly discovered a wealth of information (and all this wonderful content is still on the Web six years later) about printmaking and the artists who incorporated it into their art. Before going to the exhibition site, outlined in red, I looked at the two links below, since they sometimes get forgotten, once you start viewing the main site.

To begin, I looked at the mundanely-named exhibition checklist. Here you will find thumbnails of the 88 prints in the exhibit, and this is where you can easily get distracted. There are four approaches to viewing the works - I chose single object after some experimentation, since it gives the most information about the prints in one place. Also, on some of the images, although on not nearly enough of them, there is a little magnifying glass image in the lower right corner, and this allows for closer viewing of the artwork.

The  "Related Events" link doesn't really go anywhere, but there are plenty of other avenues to explore related to this exhibit - I'll share what I find next time.