Tag: technology

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Ancient Innovative Technology Museums News

Mummy Visualization Project in Sweden

Mummies are being imaged with CT scanners and 3D scanning technology to capture the interior as well as the exterior surfaces, colors, and textures of the mummy as well as the cartonnage and sarcophagus. Eventually these images will result in an interactive exhibition. The Guardian describes the project as such:

The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) in Stockholm, FARO and Autodesk have teamed up in a mummy visualisation project. The collection will be digitised using the latest 3D reality capture techniques and made available to museum visitors through an interactive exhibition experience.

Via The Guardian.

Categories
Exhibitions Innovative Technology Museums

The Getty’s Life of Art App

To accompany their recently opened exhibition The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display, the Getty released a mobile app of the same name. The exhibition, which opened in February, looks at only four objects in the museum’s collection, but it does so in extreme detail to encourage users to consider the entire “life” of the object, long before it entered the museum’s collection.

Their app of the same name allows iPad users to explore the same four objects in the installation, providing a 360-degree view of the objects as well as information about the technique used in the objects creation, the history and cultural context of the style, and any damage that came from the object’s use over time.

For more information, visit the Life of Art app or stop by the VRC to check out this app and many other art apps on our iPad 2.

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Exhibitions Museums Renaissance - Baroque VRC

The Getty’s Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance App

The Getty launched an app to go along with its exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance, which ran from November 2012–February 2013. The app explores 7 objects from the exhibition in depth, including slide shows, animations, X-Ray and UV photographs, and pan and zoom functionality.

For more information, visit the Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance iPad app, or stop by the VRC to check ours out!

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News VRC

VRC Winter Quarter Office Hours

The VRC is now holding office hours from 3-5pm on Mondays and Thursdays! VRC staff will be available during these hours for you to drop by with your questions about finding and using images in your research or the VRC’s scanning equipment.

In addition to these office hours, we are available for both drops in and scheduled appointments during our regular business hours of 8:30a–5p Monday through Friday.

Image: Hyde Park, 57th Street Art Fair, 1950. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf2-09219, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Categories
Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century

The Guggenheim and Whitney Libraries have collaborated to digitize selections from the personal libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana, the inaugural directors of the museums, respectively. The digital library—Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force—is available publicly via the Internet Archive. They describe how the collections were developed by Rebay and Force, female museum directors whose institutions were both founded in the 1930s:

Each woman acquired a considerable library during her tenure, collecting materials ranging from the uncommon (gallery announcements from New York and beyond, as well as rare and unusual periodicals and books) to the required reading of the day (exhibition catalogs and major monographs on contemporary artists). These important resources influenced the two women, who in turn influenced the vision and development of their respective institutions, which remain integral to the city’s cultural life today.

The museum libraries digitized selected volumes from each collection to display the materials together online, which helps highlight the similarities and differences between each collection. The Internet Archive, which hosts the collection, offers robust functionality including cataloging data, and the ability to view the fully digitized materials online in a book reader software or to download as a PDF of e-book reader file, including EPUB and Kindle.

To visit the project collection page for Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force, click here. For more information, please also explore project summaries from the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

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Color Innovative Technology

Visualizing Ambient Music with the Scape iPad App

Need a relaxing, ambient break from your studies? Check out Brian Eno’s latest invention, the Scape app for iPad:

[The Scape app] lets users pull together a variety of shapes, backgrounds, and color schemes – each with its own corresponding musical cues —to create their own visual and sonic landscape. There are no proxies to any sort of traditional music creation tools; everything is based on the abstract imagery and the sounds each visual creates.

The app is $5.99 in the iTunes store. Click here for a video demonstration.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology VRC

BnF Launches new Gallica iPad App

The Bibliothéque Nationale de France recently released an iPad app for their digital library Gallica. The app, also called Gallica, contains nearly 2 million freely available items from the BnF, including books, journals, manuscripts, photographs, prints, posters, cards, and music scores among many others.

The app allows you to search or browse through all digitized material available through the BnF, and each document can be viewed in its entirety. You can create a favorites list, view the full bibliographic record, download entire documents or individual pages, email links, or share the object on social media outlets including Facebook and Twitter.

You can download the app here, or stop by the VRC to check it out on our iPad!

Categories
Image Quality Images on the Web Museums News

Rijksmuseum’s Collection Available Online Through RijksStudio

Today, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdamn is launching RijksStudio, a digital collection of 125,000 works in the collection. We posted about the first installment about a year ago, and now they’ve fully unveiled their impressive new image platform.

All works in the RijksStudio are available for users to download for personal use as a high-quality jpeg image file. (Using images for professional and commercial uses is possible, but requires filling out a form to obtain permission from the museum). Depending on the type of use, print, and format, images can be downloaded either free or charge or for a fee.

 

In addition to browsing and searching the collection, you can create image groups or explore the image groups of other users. In depth content such as context about art movements, artists’ biographies, and other historical events is available when browsing through facets or when viewing an individual work. Images can be shared on various public media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. You can also easily order reproductions of the images.

The image records for objects in the collection contain an absolute wealth of information, including basic object data, exhibition histories, provenance, related artworks, copyright status, and a section called “Documentation,” which serves as a bibliography of the object with links to published references of the work including scholarly articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. When online content is available, the object data includes links—for example, links to JSTOR articles.

You can create an account using your email address or log in through your Facebook account. For more information or to start exploring, click here.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Image Quality Images on the Web Innovative Technology

HINT.FM’s The Art of Reproduction

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of the information visualization duo HINT.FM have looked at the problems of inconsistency in digital reproductions of fine art images.  Noticing how multiple reproductions of the same work of art could vary wildly in terms of quality, color, texture, and cropping, they started their project “The Art of Reproduction“:

For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.

The resulting compositions (which explore paintings, photographs, drawings, and detailed sections) visually demonstrate the discontinuities of the individual files, creating what HINT.FM calls “a tapestry of beautiful half-truths”. To view all the reproduction-compositions they created, click here.

And don’t forget—if you ever have any trouble finding, creating, or displaying the most accurate images possible, don’t hesitate to contact the VRC!

via HINT.FM

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Tech Support

New Service: Software Consultations at the TECHB@R

The TECHB@R (located on the first floor of Regenstein Library by the stairs) is now offering free Software Consultations to faculty, staff, and students looking for assistance with a variety of general computing and statistical software, including Photoshop, InDesign, and PowerPoint.

Weekly Hours for TECHB@R Software Consultations:

  • Monday through Thursday: 5–9 pm
  • Friday: 3–5 pm
  • Saturday and Sunday: 12–3 pm

Consultations are available for walk-ins but you can also schedule appointments by emailing itconsult@uchicago.edu.

For more information: Software Consultations and TECHB@R