Category: Innovative Technology

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Innovative Technology Museums News

MetPublications Now Online

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently launched a new feature on their website called MetPublications:

MetPublications is a portal to the Met’s comprehensive publishing program. Beginning with nearly 650 titles published from 1964 to the present, this resource will continue to expand and could eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals published by the Metropolitan Museum since the Met’s founding in 1870. It will also include online publications.

MetPublications includes a description and table of contents for almost every title, as well as information about the authors, reviews, awards, and links to related Met bibliographies by author, theme, or keyword. Current titles that are in-print may be previewed and fully searched online, with a link to purchase the book. The full contents of almost all other titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF, at no cost. Books can be previewed or read and searched through the Google Books program. Many out-of-print books are available for purchase, when rights permit, through print-on-demand capabilities in association with Yale University Press.

Currently, there are  368 titles with full text online, which can be read online in Google Books or downloaded as a PDF.

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Images on the Web Innovative Technology VRC

Art.sy: a New Online Art Discovery Tool

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

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums

Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art

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.

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Color Innovative Technology

Color Uncovered: Free App for iPad

Color Uncovered is a free app for iPad that explores various aspects of color:

How is Monet like a honeybee? What color is a whisper? Why is it so hard to find your car in a lamp-lit parking lot?

Color Uncovered features a wide spectrum of cool color-related topics to explore. Learn why friends shouldn’t let men buy bananas. Try your own color experiments on the iPad using simple items you have at home: a CD case, a drop of water, and a piece of paper. Discover how the iPad and other devices create color. Find out what causes afterimages—and more.

For more information, view the Exploratorium website.

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Exhibitions Innovative Technology Museums

Lichtenstein DotBot from the Art Institute

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. To promote this exhibition, the museum has unveiled DotBot — an interactive web application you can use to create a comic panel of yourself, Lichtenstein-style, complete with caption, bright color, and benday dots. All you need is a computer with a webcam!

Write a message, take a snapshot, and send your dotted self to friends and family as a quick hello, birthday greeting, or invitation to come to the Art Institute and see the exhibition. You can even post your DotBot picture on Facebook.

Give it a try here. For more information about Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, click here.

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Innovative Technology

3D Reconstruction of Vermeer

An interdisciplinary team in Dresden has visualized Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window in 3D. The project makes use of X-ray and microscopic examinations of the painting, computational reconstructions of 2D space depicted in the painting, 3D animations, scale and lifesize models, costume and makeup reconstructions, and more.

The reconstruction has been used to analyze various aspects of the painting and related works by the artist, including the construction of perspective and atmosphere in his paintings, the use of technical and visual aids, and Vermeer’s work and living environment.

For more information, see the project website.

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Innovative Technology Photography

Gigapixel Camera Unveiled

The prototype machine – dubbed AWARE2 – has the potential to take pictures with resolutions of up to 50 gigapixels, equivalent to 50,000 megapixels, according to the team from Duke University in North Carolina.

It works by synchronising 98 tiny cameras in a single device.

The machine is likely to be used first for military surveillance.

In its current state the researchers say it can take one-gigapixel images at up to three frames per minute.

Via BBC News. For technical information about the project from Duke, click here.

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Images on the Web Innovative Technology

Getty Research Portal

Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows)(Moscow, 1914), n.p., Vasilii Kamenskii, Vladimir Davidovich Burliuk, and David Burliuk. The Getty Research Institute.

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.

The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world’s art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.

Via ArtDaily.org.
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Images on the Web Innovative Technology

Using Pinterest to Organize Research

Pinterest isn’t just for bookmarking your home decorating inspirations and favorite recipes. It’s an online “pinboard” that allows users to organize and share images, video, and other web-based information, and could be used as an organizational tool for research.

How it works: once you’ve requested and signed up for an account, you can create various boards for organizing your pins. Boards act a bit like folders, because they keep images and sites together. Boards could be based on themes, research interests, current projects, and so on.

Once you’ve created a board or two, start pinning! Make sure to include the link to the original source, both for your own reference and for copyright reasons. Keep in mind that all boards on Pinterest are currently public. See Pinterest’s copyright page for more information.

While Pinterest is great for visually organizing web-based research and fostering ideas, it does not automatically capture sufficient citation information and should be used in conjunction with a robust citation management tool like Zotero. For more information about citation management tools, visit Regenstein’s Endnote, Zotero, and RefWorks spring quarter office hours on Mondays at 3pm at the TECHB@R.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Moving Images Museums

Performance Art Broadcast Online

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room is an innovative series of performances broadcast… online around the globe, as they happen.

The global audience [is] encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artists or curator… using Tate’s social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the Twitter hashtag #BMWTateLive.

US residents, enter the BMW Tate Live: Performance Room via Tate’s YouTube channel at 3pm on the designated dates below to experience the performances in real time. Artists who will perform include: Pablo Bronstein (April 26), Emily Roysdon (May 31), Harrell Fletcher (June 28), and Joan Jonas (date TBD).

Via Derivative Image.