All Things Visual

Have you ever found yourself waiting for passersby to move out of your viewfinder? Perhaps while trying to photograph architecture or other works of art? A free web-based filter allows you to remove tourists and other unwanted moving objects from your photographs. The aptly titled Tourist Remover even allows up to 100 MB of storage (and more with a paid upgrade).

Read more about how the tool works here. Happy 4th of July picture-taking!

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The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs includes 7,610 photographs, 230 glass lantern slides, and various other materials depicting life in Africa from 1860-1960. For the first time, thousands of these images are now available for free online, thanks to Northwestern University Library.

The collection chronicles Europe’s colonization of East Africa, including the work of explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officers, travelers and early commercial photographers. The collection’s website also includes information for educators, including image galleries of political leaders, animals, monuments, and more.

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Collections from London’s National Gallery are the first to ever be accessible via a downloadable iPhone application. iPhone owners can now explore the museum’s galleries from anywhere in the world using a free (for a limited time) Pentimento application called Love Art.

Making use of special iPhone features such as its large touch-screen, zoom, Rolodex and scrollable menus, Love Art offers a playful exploration of the collection, together with informative commentaries. The paintings are showcased to the best advantage using high-resolution images on the iPhone’s excellent-quality screen. Due to a tactile interface the experience gained through this application is not only highly enjoyable, but also lets you zoom in to see details that are often missed.

For more information, read this review from Applelinks, or see the National Gallery’s page about Love Art.

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London-based artist Christian Nold has developed a community project called Bio-Mapping. More than 1,500 volunteers in San Francisco, Greenwich and Stockport have been wired with what Nold calls a Galvanic Skin Response sensor (a lie detector connected to a Global Positioning System). Volunteers then walk around their communities while the devices record their physiological responses. This data is then annotated by participants and visualized in colorful maps, both online and in print. Nord’s next Bio-Mapping project will take place in Tokyo.

How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?

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The much-anticipated Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago is now open. Enjoy free admission through Friday, May 22, and don’t forget to contribute to the Greater Chicago Food Depository by bringing a canned good or nonperishable item along.

Click here for a peek at current exhibitions in the museum’s newest space, including recent work by artist Cy Twombly.

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The VLC Media Player is an open source multimedia player for various audio and video formats, as well as streaming video and DVDs. Free to download, it works well with both Macs and PCs. The media player includes a Snapshot feature (under the Video menu) which allows you to capture stills from video. Just pause at the suitable frame and take the snapshot. These snapshots may then be used in PowerPoint, Keynote, or OIV presentations.

For more information about the VideoLAN project (including the VLC Media Player), click here.

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ArtsConnectEd, a joint project between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, launched in Beta on May 4, 2009.

The new ArtsConnectEd is completely redesigned as a dynamic and social Web site that empowers teachers, students, and museum educators in the creation and sharing of content and ideas in the process of learning about art.

The new Art Finder offers an intuitive and powerful interface to the combined collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and Walker Art Center (WAC), encouraging both wide exploration and in-depth research.  Users can browse over 90,000 works of art, watch and listen to more than 1,000 video and audio records, and read thousands of articles and object labels.  All of these resources can be collected and arranged as interactive presentations for personal or classroom use, which can in turn be published for others to use.  ArtsConnectEd also allows users to enhance their presentations with video and photos from services such as Flickr, YouTube, and the new ArtBabble video site.

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How would you rate this image?

James Z. Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology, is one of the principal researchers on the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), a system that judges the aesthetic quality of digital images. Wang said this tool is a significant first step in recognizing human emotional reaction to visual stimulus.

ACQUINE, which has been in development since 2005 and was launched in April 2009, can be found online at http://acquine.alipr.com. Users can upload their own images for rating or test the system by providing a link to any image online. The system provides an aesthetic rating within seconds. more…

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Located in London, England, the Wellcome Library is one of the world’s top research facilities for the study of medical history. Their online image collection contains thousands of images with themes ranging from social history to contemporary biomedical science.

Images on the site are freely available for download for research, teaching, or personal use. Browse by Highlights, Illness & Wellness, Life, Culture, Nature, and War. You can also narrow keyword searches to historical or contemporary images, and an advanced option allows searches by date and technique.

If you prefer not to download images but would like to group them for later reference, you can register for a free account. The grouping function in Wellcome’s image library is called “My Lightboxes.”

Whether it’s medicine or magic, the sacred or the profane, science or satire - you’ll find more than you expect.

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The Library of Congress, with the help of UNESCO, recently launched the World Digital Library, an online collection of primary source materials. Contributions have been made by partner institutions in many countries. Content includes, but is not limited to: maps, manuscripts, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and recordings. The site functions in seven different languages and can be browsed by Place, Time, Topic, Type of Item, and Institution. Browsing results within the Arts & Recreation topic, for example, can then be narrowed by place, time, additional topics, item type, or institution.

Objectives of the World Digital Library include:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

Many high-quality images are available for download. Some rare books are also scanned in their entirety and available as PDFs, including this second Augsburg edition of Aesop’s Fables.

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