Tag: Museums

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Museums Photography VRC

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently released a new iPad app, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” to accompany a current photography exhibition.

Digital cameras and image-editing software have made photo manipulation easier than ever, but photographers have been doctoring images since the medium was invented. The false “realities” in altered photographs can be either surprising and eye-catching or truly deceptive and misleading.

Faking It is a quiz that asks players to spot which photos are fake and figure out why they were altered. Through fifteen sets of questions accompanied by more than two dozen remarkable images, the Faking It app challenges misconceptions about the history of photo manipulation.

Images in the app range from a heroic portrait of Ulysses S. Grant to a playful portrait of Salvador Dalí, and from New York’s glamorous Empire State Building to Oregon’s sublime Cape Horn.

The app complements the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (on view October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013).

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Moving Images Museums

Online Video Channel for Art and Design: ARTtube

ARTtube is the online video channel for art and design by museums in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, M HKA in Antwerp, Gemeentemuseum The Hague, De Pont in Tilburg and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam will now be publishing videos on ARTtube about art and design. The videos, which are all in high quality, will generally be produced by the museums themselves, based on their own expertise.

ARTtube includes exceptional interviews with reputable artists and designers, plus fascinating portraits of inspirational makers. The museums offer a peep behind the scenes – for example, setting up an exhibition or restoring works of art…

For more information, see ARTtube’s introductory video.

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Images on the Web Museums

National Gallery of Art Launches NGA Images

Designed by Gallery experts to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration, NGA Images features more than 20,000 open access digital images, up to 3,000 pixels each, available free of charge for download and use. The resource is easily accessible through the Gallery’s website, and a standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts.

With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images.

To read more about the NGA Images Open Access policy, click here. Images downloaded from the site also include basic embedded metadata with descriptive information about the artwork. Registration is not required for presentation-sized downloads, and images may be downloaded in groups to save time. Users of NGA Images may wish to sign up for accounts in order access advanced site features, including use of lightboxes (groups of images) for saving and sharing. Registration is also required for reproduction-ready downloads. See some of the most frequently requested images here.

 

Categories
Innovative Technology Moving Images

ArtBabble: New Videos, New Partners

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.

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Images on the Web Moving Images Museums

Cross Collection Searching at the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution recently released their Collections Search Center online tool which searches over 2 million records with 265,900 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian’s museums, archives and libraries. You can specify that the search return only results with online media. It is also possible to browse by topic, as well as by place, culture, language, and more.

A list of currently available collections is available here, and more collections will be added over time.

Above image: The Gopis Search for Krishna from a Bhagavata Purana, ca. 1780. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

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Museums

Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project

From the Steve Website:

“Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. We are a group of volunteers, primarily from art museums, who share a common interest in improving access to our collections. We are concerned about barriers to public access to online museum information. Participation in steve is open to anyone with a contribution to make to developing our collective knowledge, whether they formally represent a museum or not.