All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

BuzzFeed recently reinterpreted several of Eadweard Muybridge’s time lapse motion study photographs as animated GIFs. Muybridge photographed examples of animal locomotion in the late 1870s and 1880s using multiple cameras to capture an “instantaneous” sequence. For example, the image below of an ostrich running was created using 24 camera that each took a photograph.

The GIFs BuzzFeed posted take those individual images and animate them:

Click here to see the rest!

Image Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Via Deep Focus

Previously, JSTOR allowed users to limit results by image—while this feature isn’t going away, it has changed in their most recent update. In order to search images, users will need now to key-word search on the caption field from the Advanced Search page. The drop-down menus to the right of the search boxes have a “caption” option, which will return content with images.

The screen shot below shows JSTOR’s advanced search page with “captions” selected from the drop down menu:

 The results from this search all have images with a caption that contains the keywords.

If you have any questions about finding images in JSTOR or elsewhere, please feel free to contact the VRC!

Last summer we announced that the Renaissance Society Archive was made publicly available through LUNA, and now we are pleased to announce that as of this week, it is now available in ARTstor as well.

ARTstor and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago are sharing nearly 2,400 images of contemporary art and exhibition installation views in the Digital Library. This collection features painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and multi-media work by seminal contemporary artists who exhibited at the Renaissance Society, including Nancy Spero, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Alÿs, Eva Hesse, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, and others.

From its opening in 1915, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago has been a leading space for innovative contemporary art and programming, exhibiting important and challenging work by leading contemporary artists, often early in their careers, before they are shown in major museums and galleries.

You can view the collection in ARTstor or LUNA, and click here for more information on the ARTstor collection or about the Renaissance Society generally.

Via ARTstor Blog

Above image: Thomas Struth. Hörder Brückenstrasse, Dortmund, 1985. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Today, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdamn is launching RijksStudio, a digital collection of 125,000 works in the collection. We posted about the first installment about a year ago, and now they’ve fully unveiled their impressive new image platform.

All works in the RijksStudio are available for users to download for personal use as a high-quality jpeg image file. (Using images for professional and commercial uses is possible, but requires filling out a form to obtain permission from the museum). Depending on the type of use, print, and format, images can be downloaded either free or charge or for a fee.

In addition to browsing and searching the collection, you can create image groups or explore the image groups of other users. In depth content such as context about art movements, artists’ biographies, and other historical events is available when browsing through facets or when viewing an individual work. Images can be shared on various public media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. You can also easily order reproductions of the images.

The image records for objects in the collection contain an absolute wealth of information, including basic object data, exhibition histories, provenance, related artworks, copyright status, and a section called “Documentation,” which serves as a bibliography of the object with links to published references of the work including scholarly articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. When online content is available, the object data includes links—for example, links to JSTOR articles.

You can create an account using your email address or log in through your Facebook account. For more information or to start exploring, click here.

Via ArtDaily

Interested in information visualization and/or 19th Century American culture?  Explore “A Handsome Atlas,” a recent project by the Brooklyn Brainery, which displays reproductions of the Statistical Atlases of the United States of America from 1870, 1880, and 1890. Although these maps, charts, and graphs were created more than a hundred years ago, they are surprisingly modern in their display of information.

While the images are all available online through the Library of Congress and a long list on the US Census website, A Handsome Atlas provides a much more elegant interface image viewer that allows for easily viewing the contents of each atlas and zooming in on individual plates. Users have the options to filter by countless subjects pertaining to life in the US—including liquor, lumber, and Lutherans among many others—or to filter by specific categories of visualization devices, including pie charts, radar charts, and treemaps.

Users also have the option to view each plate on the Library of Congress website and to freely download image files in high, medium, or low resolution.

Additionally, the 1880 and 1890 Statistical Atlases were undertaken by Henry Gannett, largely considered to be the father of American mapmaking. The David Rumsey Map Collection contains more than 170 government-sponsored maps, charts, and geological surveys by Gannett. Click here to view.

Via Information Aesthetics

The New York Times wrote yesterday of a new start-up called Art.sy, which is digitizing works of fine art to catalog in its database, called the “Art Genome Project”. Their service is similar to Pandora, which mapped a “music genome” in order to encourage user discovery of new songs, or Netflix, which uses algorithms to predict and suggest films and movies a user might like.

Art.sy already has 20,000 images in their database, is partnering with galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions to increase their catalog. In addition to traditional subject, genre, and period/movement based descriptions, Art.sy’s team is also tagging works with categories that their system will use “to make connections that are seemingly from different worlds.” These categories include ideas such as “focus on the social margins,” or “personal histories,” and “private spaces.” The system will also search for images that are most similar in terms of composition and color, providing yet another way to access different images.

For more information, see Art.sy’s blog or visit the Art.sy website, where you can request a login or browse the beta site.

Via New York Times

For years Rembrandt’s paintings have been the subject of many exhibitions and publications and a specific focus of technical research, which has produced an extensive and wide-ranging body of information and documentation. This material is preserved in various museums, research institutes, archives and laboratories around the world. The documentation is generally difficult to access, still unavailable in digital form, and not yet organized as a coherent and interrelated body of material.

The Rembrandt Database is a sustainable repository of existing information and documentation that is made available in a technologically advanced way. This service does not aim to replace the study of original objects or consultation among colleagues, but rather to speed up and facilitate research.

For more information and to explore the database, view the website.

The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral—some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.

This virtual year-long exhibition explores the sometimes extraordinary and sometimes banal circumstances behind the loss of major works of art. Archival images, films, interviews, blogs and essays are laid out for visitors to examine, relating to the loss of works by over 40 artists across the twentieth century, including such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Willem de Kooning, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin.

Jennifer Mundy, curator of The Gallery of Lost Art, says: “Art history tends to be the history of what has survived. But loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of. Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections. But this exhibition focuses on significant works that cannot be seen.”

 

The virtual exhibition launched on July 2, 2012, and will be available online for only one year before it too is “lost.” A new artwork will be added each week for 6 months.

The Netherlands Institute in Turkey has recently released the first installment of digital images from the vast photographic archives of Dutch historian Machiel Kiel.

A former director of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT), at which this project is now implemented, Kiel is a scholar whose career has revolved around the study of Ottoman-Islamic architectural monuments in the Balkan countries — an area of study that he pioneered. His archive represents an invaluable source for researchers of this heritage. Created for the most part between the 1960s and 90s, it contains visual documentation of many monuments that have not survived, or have been significantly altered in, the second half of the twentieth century. The publication of Kiel’s archive by the NIT is hoped to significantly advance international research on this heritage.

Images are available for publication free of charge (with attribution). For more information, see the FAQ section of this page.

Art.sy is a new way to discover art you’ll love, featuring work from leading galleries, museums and private collections around the world.

Art.sy is powered by The Art Genome Project, an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics (we call them genes)—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

One interesting option is to view works of art in a room, as shown above. This gives a vivid sense of size and scale. Art.sy is still in beta testing, and available only after requesting invitation.

Via Core77.