Many of us have been reflecting on the work and spirit of Mike Kelley after his passing earlier this week. He presented a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 1988. Photos from this exhibition, as well as images of other works, are available to the public in the Renaissance Society archive in LUNA.
Author: arybin
Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
A copy of the Mona Lisa has been discovered in the Prado which was painted in Leonardo’s studio—created side by side with the original that now hangs in the Louvre. This sensational find will transform our understanding of the world’s most famous picture.
Via The Art Newspaper.
A recent article in Salon (originally published in Imprint) includes high-resolution images of 1920s Chicago Transit Posters. The article compares these posters to advertising for the London Underground.
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Malaysia Design Archive
Malaysia Design Archive is a project to map the development of graphic design in Malaysia from the period before independence (1957) until now. It is a space to trace and document Malaysian ‘endangered’ design legacy, to preserve our historical past, as well as to create a resource of Malaysian design work.
This is also another way to protect our history, provide us with space to question its meaning, recurring imagery, icons used, ideas, and how it is connected to the our political landscape at the time. This project aims to highlight the importance of archiving as a way protect and preserve our own visual history.
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NYPL Labs: Stereogranimator
NYPL Labs is proud to bring you the Stereogranimator, a tool for transforming historical stereographs from The New York Public Library’s vast collections into shareable 3D web formats. This site is all about your participation, so have fun with it, experiment with it, and let us know how we can improve it. In fact, this project wouldn’t even exist if it hadn’t been for a user like yourself getting creative with library collections. Here’s the story of how that happened…
Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses images to search the Internet. Not long ago Google introduced their reverse-image search to the web; the concept of Google Goggles is similar, but takes functionality even further. For example: not sure who designed that famous building you’re seeing as a tourist in Rome? Having trouble translating that Italian dinner menu? Want more information about a book, logo, bottle of wine, or painting? There’s now an app for that!
Additionally, in collaboration with Google, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 76,000 two-dimensional works of art from their collection accessible through Google Goggles. If you want to know more about a work of art exhibited in the museum, you can take a picture and search for it via Google Goggles to quickly see authoritative and contextual information from the Met. This information will also display if you see a work belonging to the Met in a book, on a banner, or elsewhere in the world. Check out this video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an illustrated introduction to the partnership.
The app is free and available on both iPhone (iOS 4.0) and Android (2.1+) platforms. If you’ve already downloaded iOS 5.0 for iPhone, the app won’t work, but we hope that a fix for this is under development!
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recently released Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. These standards define visual literacy as “a set of abilities that allows an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media.” As you might expect, this aligns closely with the VRC’s mission to help instructors and their students find, create, and display images.
The seven standards listed below, as well as performance indicators and learning outcomes, are detailed in the report:
- The visually literate student determines the nature and extent of the visual materials needed.
- The visually literate student finds and accesses needed images and visual media effectively and efficiently.
- The visually literate student interprets and analyzes the meanings of images and visual media.
- The visually literate student evaluates images and their sources.
- The visually literate student uses images and visual media effectively.
- The visually literate student designs and creates meaningful images and visual media.
- The visually literate student understands many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding the creation and use of images and visual media, and accesses and uses visual materials ethically.
Contact the VRC to discuss how we can help your students meet these standards!
Via Derivative Image.
For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures with a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called “Eye of America”. Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet, and are so large that windows must be used as lightboxes to examine them. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall.
Via PetaPixel. See their article for a video introducing the camera and a video introducing the project.
The Guggenheim has digitized 65 art catalogs and made them available online, free of charge. These texts include introductions to artists such as Kandinsky, Calder, and Munch as well as thematic introductions to modern art. Many of them contain full-color images.
If you have trouble using the online reader format (which includes an interactive page-turning feature), you can download PDFs and other versions at Archive.org.
Via Open Culture.
Do you have an image that is out-of-focus? The Sharpen tool in Photoshop can help!
Open the image in Photoshop. Zoom in (Select View from the menu and go to Actual Pixels for best results).
The image, at 100% zoom, looks blurry. The letters appear fuzzy.
To sharpen, go to Filter > Sharpen, and select Sharpen or Sharpen More.
As you can see, the edges are crisper and the legend is easier to read after sharpening. You can sharpen as many times as is necessary, but make sure that the image doesn’t begin to look pixelated. This is a sign of over-sharpening.
