It's the festive season where we may well find ourselves at parties dancing.
To get dance-move ideas you could always watch Ai Wei Wei do the Gangnam style.
But to see something more old-style go here where you can also listen to the entertaining NPR radio program that talks about Muybridge and his life and work.
Stephen Herbert has collected many more of these animations made from Muybridge's photographs and very much more (perhaps everything!!) on Muybridge and his work here
The BBC hosts a website that documents all paintings in public ownership-those paintings that lurk in council offices, libraries, and slide libraries as well as the ones we get to see in the major art galleries and museums! The portrait above that a recent Fine Art graduate painted of me is just one of the 212,000 piantings now online and viewable by location, artist name or title.
Here are the FAQ's that answer questions such as who is behind the project, why no watercolours and also crucially how many are on public display (20%)-a low figure which goes to show how valuable a service this website is...
Next time we have a Welsh Librarians' conference at the wonderful Gregynog Hall I am going in search of this fine specimen!
Wayne Gooderham buys secondhand books as they are cheaper than new ones. They also give him an added pleasure. For many years he has been collecting the inscriptions he finds within these bargain books. In fact he got so keen to collect more inscriptions that he now uses a network of friendly booksellers who alert him to particularly good ones when they come into their hands.Wayne blogs with images of the inscriptions here
an Example
To Robert, on his crucial 30th birthday -
hoping for a safe and speedy emergence from adolescence
1/9/1955
Frank & Jackie
One of his network of bookseller helpers from Skoob Books suggested to Wayne that he might be interested to see the collection of interesting things found left inside their second hand books. In their out of town warehouse Wayne was given permission to photograph some of Skoob Books' marvellously named 'Wall of Found' and you can read about them and see examples in another Guardian article by Wayne here
I have recently attended some very interesting side events for the Artes Mundi Exhibition. A small square leaflet lists these opportunities , there is a web page listing what's on and also the facebook page advertises Artes Mundi events. Following these information sources I was able to attend the National Museum this week when the police horses corralled the crowds gathered in the Museum foyer using crowd control techniques, I heard beautiful music in the space occupied by Sheela Gowda's empty tin drums for tar used by Indian roadworkers, I felt sorrow-full in the room with the memorials to the dead of Teresa Margolles as a Welsh Performance artist Kathryn Ashill counted in Welsh-was she counting the dead? When she stopped counting she whispered into our ears the words Memento Mori-'you too will die'.
I have also attended an artists parents evening where I was celebrated for my creation (an artist daughter) and talked with other parents of artists and Darius Miksys about art, science , child rearing and mermaids and I watched a play by Miriam Backstrom where 'a director' annoyed 'an actor ' beyond endurance in her efforts to make him be a character she could then reject. I watched two films by Phil Collins and heard him in converstaion about his work afterwards with his old friend Jason Bowman.
I am also signed up for the rest of my life to stand up for any immigrants I see treated badly and not to walk on by. I have a poster and a badge to prove it created by the artist Tania Brughuera.
This years Artes Mundi has afforded me the richest art experiences I have had for a very long time. The art in the exhibition is fascinating, affecting, and says important things. The side events have been stimulating and original. I recommend you go along and investigate yourselves. If you do go to the National Museum to see the work then try go round on one of the live guide tours. The live guides have all met the artists and know the work well and will engage with you in talking about what you see and what you think about it.Tours take place daily at 2pm.
Artes Mundi continues until January 13th 2013
The Special Collections at Cardiff University (SCOLAR) are a treasure trove worth exploring and . this year, SCOLAR is offering a pilot series of lunchtime workshops where you can do just that! http://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/ SCOLAR holds much illustrated material including literary, scientific, medical, and women’s periodicals and miscellanies, newspapers, children’s literature, art and architecture, novel, plays and poetry, travel literature, ballads and almanacs, and prints, posters and propaganda. There is a workshop on women’s studies Decmebeer 6th or 7th, with sessions on historical travel literature and World War One sources in the spring. The workshops are intended to raise awareness of the breadth of material available to support research in these areas, and as a general introduction to using Special Collections and Archives.
"The workshop on women’s history sources will be led by Assistant Archivist, Alison Harvey. Topics will include: biography; children’s literature; conduct/advice manuals; crime; diaries and autobiographies; education; fashion; health and medicine; international affairs; journals and magazines; literature and journalism; music; newspapers; politics, suffrage and the labour movement; travel; University history; witchcraft; and women’s societies". What a great menu!!
Workshops will be held in Special Collections and Archives, on the lower ground floor of the Arts and Social Studies Library, Corbett Road, Cardiff. The women’s history workshop is scheduled for12-1pm on Thursday 6 December, and will be repeated at1-2pm on Friday 7 December.
Workshops are open to all, but places are limited, so if you would like to attend either session, you will need to emailHarveyAE@cf.ac.uk, stating your preferred time.
Girl Reading by Katie Ward comprises seven linked stories set over a period of over 700 years, from 1333 to 2060. Each is an imagined story behind a painting, photo or sculpture. The subject is always a girl, or young woman reading. The pictures are not shown in the book so I have given you the links below.
The stories are also concerned with the changing position of women and the choices they have had during those hundreds of years
Dutch art director Christian Borstlap created this film for the new Rijksmuseum project Rijksstudio. The film includes 211 artworks from the museum's online collection.
Video: Part of a Bigger Plan Music: 'Dreaming' by Allo, Darlin
The Rijksmuseum uses Rijksstudio to make more than
125,000 objects from the collection digitally accessible, free of charge. You can zoom in, share them,
and ‘like’ them. You can also create collections of your own, using your
favourite images and details. Not only that, but the Rijksmuseum is also
inviting you to use these images to create beautiful products.At this resolution, a single detail is still sharp
enough to decorate a car.
This pageshows some examples of other people’s creations and offers links to websites
that supply various forms of printing on demand. Using them you could order wallpaper
, decorate a scooter, have a vinyl foil for your phone, all of them featuring
works of art from the Rijksmuseum
UBUWEB
started out in 1996 as a website devoted to concrete poetry, but it has grown
to incorporate the functions of a virtual publishing house, record company and,
film distributor. Poet, university professor and amateur archivist, Kenneth
Goldsmith is the founder and main editor of Ubuweb. An underground project that
has no institutional backing or budget of any kind, Ubuweb is an influential
repository of avant garde material
Here you can find conceptual writing, dance, electronic music resources,
ethnopoetics, film and video art, visual poetry and many special features. Examples include all ten albums from Obscure Records , Brian Eno’s record label from 1975
to 1978 and Six Films by and about Pina Bausch(1975 - 2006)in UbuWeb's
new Dance section(Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim anyone?) There we can review works from the career
of Pina Bausch (1940-2009) including the beautiful Orpheus und Eurydike (1975) and
a documentary by Anne Linsel, Pina
Bausch (2006). Other delights include: Maya Deren's complete oeuvre, a
montage of Banksy doctoring Paris
Hilton CDs for last year's guerrilla art
stunt, interviews with Allen Ginsberg, poetry readings by Bukowski and a selection of
rare art films and performance videos by artists from Carolee Schneeman and Tracey Emin
to Samuel Beckett and ChrisBurden, video of BillieWhitelaw doing Beckett and excerpts from Peter Greenaway's series of
documentaries on modern UScomposers
Artes Mundi,Wales’s biggest contemporary
visual art show is back for its 5th exhibition in its new home,
the National Museum of Art, on the top floor of National Museum Cardiff. For
the first time Artes Mundi is in
partnership with organisations such as Cardiff-based multidisciplinary arts
centre Chapter, who will provide an additional venue for some of the works.
Exhibition: 6 October 2012 – 13 January 2013 The shortlisted artists were selected from over 750 nominations covering every continent in the
world except Antarctica. Their art has one
overriding theme in common; their work explores social themes, telling stories of lived experience and gives a platform
for commentary on the world today.
Bäckström’s ongoing interests
explore how history is told, and processes of creating and recreating memory
using photography, text, theatre and video.
Tania Bruguera (Cuba) Since the late
1990’s Tania Bruguera’s artistic practice has often reflected back on the
social, cultural and economic experience of being Cuban.
Phil Collins (England) Informed by the visual traditions
of cinema and television, Phil Collins’ diverse practice is based on close
engagement with place and community.
Sheela Gowda(India)
For Sheela Gowda the
social and cultural reality of India has formed the basis of her practice.
TeresaMargolles (Mexico) Teresa Margolles’ work focuses on the collective turmoil of the Northern
Mexican social experience where drug-related organized crime has resulted in
widespread violence and murder.
Darius Mikšys (Lithuania)
For Mikšys,
installations provide the opportunity to experiment, conceptualise, and re-imagine
processes of making, displaying and engaging with art.
ApolonijaŠušteršič(Slovenia) Artist and architect Apolonija Šušteršič has
focused on the social aspects of living environments manifested in art as well
as architectural contexts since the 1990’s.
TheHouse of Illustration is the world’s first dedicated home for the art of
illustration; adverts, animation, picture books, political cartoons, scientific drawings, fashion design; they are a creative hub for emerging
and established artists working in every aspect of illustration.
The
House of Illustration put on exhibitions like their most recent UK-touring
exhibition, What Are YouLike?on at Bath’s Holburne Museum until October 17th.
Based
on a Victorian parlour game, the exhibition invited 45 people in the public eye
to create a self-revealing artwork by illustrating 8 of their favourite things
from a list of 12: their favourite animal, book, item of clothing, comfort,
food, pastime, place, possession, music, shoes, weather or pet aversion (the
thing they love to hate!).
The
House of Illustration also run competitions and organise events with some of
the country’s leading illustrators. They work in schools across London through the PICTURE IT education programme.
Friends of the Earth in their print journal 'EarthMatters' (July 2012) published a list of ten books thatthey believe changed the Earth. Actually there are plenty of other Top Ten Environment Booklists just try Googling it! There is a Cardiff based slant to this blog entry...I thought I'd check the list against Cardiff Met Library and Cardiff Public Library catalogues-here's the result . Information about how to join Cardiff Public Library is here. Follow the links from the book titles for more information.
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering
knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts. They now have a Facebook page. Why not 'Like' them? There are all sorts of snippets there already.
Here’s two of them!
Coveted
by Venetian noblewomen and creative inspiration for Parisian lingerie-makers,
these 16th-century needlework pattern books are among the rarest of early
modern printed books to survive intact.
The new
2013-2014 Scholars Program research theme, “Connecting Seas: Cultural andArtistic Exchange,” explores how bodies of water, far from being barriers, have
served as a rich and complex interchange in the visual arts. Previous Scholar Projects are linked on
this page
The image above is taken from the Spitalfields Life blog which today describes the amazing work of Adam Dant. Follow this link to see more images. Adam Dant’s map describes a journey
through London as if through the human digestive tract from the mouth in
Whitehall to the rectum in Whitechapel. You will notice that he has placed the
brain in Westminster, the liver in Fleet St, the heart at St Paul’s, the
stomach in the City and the genitals in the East End.
This is just one of series of maps of
big cities that Adam has depicted in such a way as to portray their essential
qualities, rendered as huge ink drawings of double-page plates from volumes in
the mythical Library of Dr London and executed
while touring around European capitals this summer . Other
volumes in this collection of giant books hold engravings and charts which
display Paris constructed from the bones of Liberty, several alternative versions of Manhattan, and Tokyo's subway system as a tangled knot of
'Shunga print' style figures.
The drawingswill be exhibited in a show which opens
tonight at Hales Gallery.
Adam Dant From the Library of Dr London
7 Sep - 6 Oct 2012
Private view: Thursday 6 September 6-9pm
Hales
Gallery
Tea Building
7 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA
T 44 (0)20 7033 1938
F 44 (0)20 7033 1939
After in-depth examination, one of the most popular works in the Stedelijk Museum collection, The Beanery (1965) by Edward Kienholz, will be fully restored for the first time by the museum staff working in its new facilities.
As the installation comprises a variety of materials – for instance, the artist coated the entire installation in a synthetic liquid resin – this will be a complex operation. In anticipation of the grand reopening on September 23, the Stedelijk is preparing and restoring a number of its best-loved artworks.
A short video about this project is available on ARTUBE videos about Art and Design the online video channel for art and design contributed to by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, M HKA in Antwerp, Gemeentemuseum The Hague, De Pont in Tilburg and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The videos will generally be produced by these museums themselves, and include interviews with artists , designers, and makers. Fiction and experimentation are also included, for example in the Boijmans TV series and in a number of unusual animation and remix films.
This video, by The Economist, features Andrew Dent, vice-president of Material ConneXion,sharing his thoughts on the evolution of material science.
Material ConneXion's online archive and material libraries, based in seven cities world-wide, feature over 6,500 of the world’s most cutting-edge materials all of them commercially available for use.
Andrew Dent believes Material ConneXion will help bridge the gap between science and design as we move from the “synthetic century” into a “biological century”, where intelligent, nature-inspired materials consume less resources and less energy.
An international panel of experts review 50 to 60 new materials for the library every month, adding only the best. The archive is organized in eight categories (see below) comprising the largest selection of sustainable materials and the only Cradle to Cradle materials library in the world: the 8 categories: Polymers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, Cement-based materials, Natural Materials, Carbon-based materials, Processes An online Materials Database is available at a price to Universities (not available at Cardiff Met).
NewYork, Bangkok, Beijing, Cologne, Daegu, Istanbul, Milan, Seoul, Shanghai all have physical Material Connexions libraries
Feature articles from Matter magazine (published quarterly by Material Connexions) are available to read online . Each edition of the journal follows a specific theme like the special issues on 'Wellness' and 'Technology' and all contain a wealth of information and images relating to innovative materials and their uses.
Thomas Heatherwick is a designer architect from London and the man behind
the Olympic Cauldron.
The cauldron was lit on 27 July at the end of the end of the Olympics
opening ceremony, which was directed by Danny Boyle. The design of the cauldron
had been one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the opening ceremony. When
the competing delegations arrived in London, they each received a copper petal,
inscribed with the name of their country and the words ‘XXX Olympiad London
2012’. They carried these petals into the stadium during the opening ceremony
before laying them down on the cauldron. When all the petals had been laid
down, the seven torchbearers each ignited a single tiny flame within one of the
copper petals on the ground, triggering the ignition of all 204 petals. The
Cauldron’s long, stainless-steel stems then rose towards each other and
converged to form one single flame. Lots more on Heatherwick here The cauldron being lit here
This Exquisite Forest is an online collaborative art project that lets users create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling trees.
To provide inspiration, eight artists whose work already hangs in the Tate Modern, including Olafur Elliason and Julian Opie, have created digital, animated saplings for others to grow, along with instructions (Elliason's instructions: "Be energy (not about energy); Use yellow often, but not always; Show that light is life; Exercise empathetic attention; Share this with friends.") These artist trees will be curated, with submissions vetted by Koblin and co, but "the rest of it's open: people can submit whatever they want and it will instantly go up," Koblin says.
The best animations will show on large video screens in the Tate Modern over the next six months in the collection galleries on Level 3 at Tate Modern, beginning on July 23, 2012. There is a digital drawing station in the Gallery or connect from your own computer (but.....do you have Google Chrome?!)
The project was conceived by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, and produced by Google and Tate. It makes extensive use of Google Chrome’s HTML5 and JavaScript support, as well as Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage.
SCALAR is a web based authoring and publishing tool that 'makes it easy for authors to write significant sized born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemblemediafrom multiplesourcesand juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required'.
Part of the SCALAR toolset is access to Critical Commons a repository of copyright cleared audio visual materials.
The largest subset within the Critical Commons media database is produced by a senior lecturer in Economics at Penn State University and author of the book Economics in the Movies, Dirk Mateer and comprises a huge collection of clips from popular culture that illustrate principles of economics, ranging from game theory to opportunity cost. Dirk's database is called the "Econ Media Library" . Go here to understand the concept of price elasticity of demand and leveraging elastic demand by laughing as Butters from South Park decides to sell hugs for $2 when he discovers that not everyone can afford kisses at the kissing booth for $5.
Critical Commons is well worth a visit whatever your subject area.
Would you like to take a journey on the Rhaetian Railway through the Swiss Alps? Or
perhaps you’d prefer to explore the mosaics of Pompeii in Italy. Or gaze upon
the nine-story Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. Or track down the Aboriginal
rock art at Kakadu National Park in Australia.
Google Street View
has left the road and photographed some of the world’s most impressive
monuments and parks. Launched at the end of May in Madrid, the World Wonders
Project is the latest creation from the Paris-based Google Cultural Institute,
a wing of the company that aims to spread culture and history to users around
the globe. To scan inside the Nijo Castle in Kyoto and traverse the
grounds of Stonehenge, Google had to ditch its typical car-mounted scanners.
Instead it created image-capture equipment suitable for adapted tricycles and
vertical trolleys that can be pushed around to capture indoor sites. These
trikes globe-trotted for a whole year, sailing down the Amazon River and
sitting atop the Glacier Express train in Switzerland.
To document 132 heritage sites worldwide, the Google team has
partnered with content providers such as UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, and
Getty Images The site
is geared towards educational uses , as both students and teachers can
download free lesson plans and presentations.
Another Google Cultural Institute project launched early last
year was The Art Project a collaboration with 17
museums and covering about 1,000 works
of art. In April 2012 , the updated version contained 32,000 artworks from 155
museums. The institute has also digitized Nelson Mandela’s archives, the Dead
Sea scrolls, and documents and photos from the Yad Vashem Centre for Holocaust
research.
