Department of Art History, The University of Chicago
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has developed a new platform for its online journal. The online version of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historials (JSAH) will support video, dynamic images, virtual modeling, and digital mapping. JSAH Online will only be available to SAH members during 2010, with independent subscriptions beginning in 2011. A sample article showing some of the journal’s capabilities is currently online. See Inside Higher Ed for more information.
TateShots is a podcast from the Tate Modern which presents a selection of short videos each month about modern and contemporary art. The next TateShots series, called Sound & Vision, will feature musicians who cross boundaries into visual art: Talking Heads front-man David Byrne; The Fall’s Mark E. Smith; Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle; anti-folk singer and cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis; performance poet Lydia Lunch and the prolific Billy Childish – who will be shown interviewing himself. For a preview of the series, click here. To be sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe to the podcast.
A new film airing on PBS’ Independent Lens called Between the Folds chronicles the lives of ten modern paper folders. As the PBS website describes: “Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.” On this site, you can also test your origami knowledge by matching folding patterns with finished products, or even printing out patterns to try yourself. Explore the site further to learn about the artists and discover facts about the history of origami.
Looking for high-quality movie clips online? Try MovieClips, a free website which offers more than 12,000 scenes searchable by actor, title, genre, occasion, action, mood, character, theme, setting, prop, and even dialogue. You can save clips as favorites, add and answer trivia questions related to movie scenes, embed clips on your own website, and share clips with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and more. MovieClips is only available in the US and Canada, and right now clips are available from six major Hollywood studios: 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.
Currently in beta, MovieClips also welcomes feedback, including suggestions for movies that you’d like to see added to the collection.
The Smithsonian Institution recently released their Collections Search Center online tool which searches over 2 million records with 265,900 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian’s museums, archives and libraries. You can specify that the search return only results with online media. It is also possible to browse by topic, as well as by place, culture, language, and more.
A list of currently available collections is available here, and more collections will be added over time.
Above image: The Gopis Search for Krishna from a Bhagavata Purana, ca. 1780. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
The Bayeaux Tapestry, one of the most important chronicles of its day, offers a vivid depiction of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. A video available on YouTube from PotionGraphics brings the tale to life through animation and sound effects. The clip begins about halfway through the tapestry, at the appearance of Haley’s Comet, and ends at The Battle of Hastings.
Video discovered via Open Culture. The entire scroll is available to view here.
The Database of Virtual Art seeks to document and ultimately preserve the evolving field of digital installation art. The database is intended for both researchers and artists, and digital media artists are encouraged to post content themselves. The web-based resource is free and allows browsing by artist name as well as keyword. Works, literature, people, events and institutions may also be searched.
Pictured: The Living Web by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, 2002.
More than 1,500 historic American television commercials from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in the Duke University Special Collections Library are now available on iTunes U. This collection is called AdViews. Videos are free to download, and can be viewed at the computer or on video-capable iPods.
Most of the 1,500 currently available videos date from the 1950s and 1960s. A keyword search for “coffee” brings up eight albums, including a Yuban Coffee ablum with more than seventy commercials.
The total collection comprises 12,000 commercials and librarians at Duke hope to finish digitization by the end of 2009. Click here for more information.
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.
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.