Category: Innovative Technology

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Innovative Technology

Take an Emotion Walk

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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Innovative Technology Moving Images Museums Presentation

ArtsConnectEd

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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Aesthetics Innovative Technology

Automated Aesthetic Judgments

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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Innovative Technology News

World Digital Library

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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Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Moving Images Museums

Art Videos Online: ArtBabble.org

This week the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced the launch of ArtBabble.org, an interactive website dedicated to art-based video content.

It is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives… ArtBabble was created so others will join in spreading the world of art through video.

Videos are organized by Series (such as “Behind the Scenes at MoMa“), Channels (similar to subject areas, with a large number of videos about Contemporary Art), Artists, and ArtBabble Partners. Videos can even be exported as MP4s for offline play on computers or Ipods — just click on the Ipod icon beneath a selected video to download.

Contributing institutions include Art21, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The New York Public Library.

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American Innovative Technology Moving Images

Texas Archive of the Moving Image

Interested in film preservation, American cultural heritage, or Texas? Take a look at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).

TAMI is an independent 501c3 organization dedicated to the preservation of Texas film heritage. Every year, home movies, television programs, and locally produced films are lost as these visual records of Texas rapidly decompose or are simply thrown away. TAMI works to discover these “orphan” films and to educate the public about moving image history and contemporary preservation practice.

You can search TAMI’s Video Library for your hometown, famous Texans, historical events and more, or click on “Random Film” for a surprise. Contributions from the public are also welcome; if you see someone or something you recognize in a film, become a TAMI Tagger. Some of our favorite films include Paper and I (an educational film from the Texas Forest Service) and Knife Throwing Family, which speaks for itself.

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Innovative Technology Renaissance - Baroque

Searching for Leonardo’s Lost Battle of Anghiari

From Wired.com:

FLORENCE, Italy — Art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini has waited 30 years to get to the bottom of his biggest mystery yet: whether Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest lost fresco lies behind a wall in the Palazzo Vecchio here.

Seracini’s team of 30 will scan the palazzo’s 177-foot-long wall in mid-November, looking for the Battle of Anghiari, a work so magnificent it has been called the “school of the world.” The $1.5 million search expedition will jump-start a multidisciplinary conservation program at the University of California at San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

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Innovative Technology

University of Chicago in 3D

From cnet.com:

Virtual-worlds platform developer Multiverse Network is set to announce a partnership Tuesday [October 9, 2007] that will allow anyone to create a new online interactive 3D environment with just about any model from Google’s online repository of 3D models, its 3D Warehouse, as well as terrain from Google Earth.

The Cochrane-Woods Art Center and the Smart Museum will soon be in Google Earth. The buildings were recreated by Dale Mertes from NSIT. Google Earth is installed on my (Megan’s) computer. Please stop by my desk if you’d like to see our building “in situ”. Learn more…

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Innovative Technology

Slide Projection Table Lamp

We believed that slide projectors were no longer in production. The VRC was wrong.

Slide projectors like the one on the left are still being handcrafted in Lyon, France and distributed by Hammacher Schlemmer.

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Innovative Technology

Photosynth Software: 3D Imaging from 2D Sources

New technology will link digital images to create three-dimensional models with incredible zoom capabilities.

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo:

View Demo