Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
The Noun Project presents visual symbols from around the world in a well-designed, easy-to-use online dictionary. You can browse by category and download high-quality images for use under individually-assigned Creative Commons licenses. The Noun Project mission:
The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.
Via Deep Focus.
The Oriental Institute Museum exhibition Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Middle East is on view through Sunday March 6th.
Exhibit curator Christopher Woods, Associate Professor at the Oriental Institute, said, “In the eyes of many, writing represents a defining quality of civilization. There are four instances and places in human history when writing was invented from scratch — in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica — without previous exposure to or knowledge of writing. It appears likely that all other writing systems evolved from the four systems we have in our exhibition.”
For museum hours, click here.
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) was made public this week. MAIA started as the result of a long-term effort to document and preserve the modern artistic works from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, most of which were lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. As the site shows, very little is known about many of the works, including their current whereabouts and their original location in the Museum. The lack of documents about modern Iraqi art prompted the growth of the project to include supporting text. The site makes the works of art available as an open access database in order to raise public awareness of the many lost works and to encourage interested individuals to participate in helping to document the museum’s original and/or lost holdings…
An exhibition of documents at Rome’s State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.
…He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.
To explore an interactive sample of the documents, see the recent article from BBC News.
The BBC provides digital tours of “five of the world’s most beautiful old maps,” including a Psalter Map from 1260 which shows the earth as a flat round disc and a satirical map from 1877 depicting Russia as an octopus (above). The same website also features maps of the digital world, including a map of blogging and a map of global data exchange.
Awhile back we blogged about ArtBabble, a website created by staff at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The site showcases art content in high-quality video format from a variety of sources and perspectives. Since our last blog post, ArtBabble has partnered with many more institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and, most recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click on the image above to watch a video documenting the installation of Catherine Opie’s photographic series Surfers and Icehouses, brought to ArtBabble by the Guggenheim.
Recently Smarthistory.org launched a fundraising campaign using Kickstarter. The goal? To raise $10,000 to fund 100 new art history videos as a free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook.
For more information or to donate to the project, click here.
via Open Culture.
The project Montada seeks the preservation and revitalization of traditional architecture… in the Maghreb by involving local communities, especially children. Toward that goal, it is developing online games that allow children from 6 to 11 years old to discover the basic principles of a traditional architecture while developing their creativity.
…A new game acts as a virtual workshop that allows children to explore geometric elements and ornaments in the homes of Sale and Marrakech, in Morocco. After finishing, children can print out their results as postcards.
Via Archnet News.
The National Archives has digitised thousands of unique images of Africa and published them on Flickr this week. The collection spans more than 100 years of African history, from as early as the 1860s, including images of people, places, national and imperial events, conflict and natural disasters.
As some of the images have minimal context, the public is invited to contribute to these historical assets by adding comments and captions, filling in knowledge gaps.
The collection is available in Flickr. Via National Archives News.
The Brooklyn Museum’s project Split Second aims to explore how an audience’s initial reaction to a work of art is affected by various factors. It begins with an online, interactive experiment and will culminate in a small installation of Indian paintings from the permanent collection.
Split Second begins with a three-part activity that explores the Museum’s collection of Indian paintings… The first stage explores split-second reactions… Next, participants will be asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a scale. In the third phase, participants will be asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside a typical interpretive text. Each part of the exercise aims to examine how a different type of information—or a lack thereof—might affect a person’s reaction to a work of art.
The installation will open on the museum’s second floor on July 13, 2011. To participate, visit the Split Second website.