Materials are Poetic: Mtrl

holographic glass

In order to reach out to the design community, ASM, a US-based Materials Information Society, has set up /MTRL. Chris Lefteri Design was commissioned to provide a range of materials from the ASM collection, complete with extensive information and images, as a free on-line material database . So far, the database consists of 250 materials presented in a way that specifically targets designers and their needs.

I've seen many image databases in my time and  this one is a real find and especially useful as all our courses at Cardiff become  increasingly concerned with the physical  experiences of Materials and Making.

Mtrl is great fun and at the same time hugely informative. It is  crammed with well organised images and facts about materials and their properties. Here you can choose to search for images and information about materials by their 'form' (eg firm, powder, resin) 'personality' (eg dynamic , extreme, honest ), different types of ceramic, glass, plastic etc etc etc. It includes a section listing an unbelievable amount of 'additives and ingredients' (Floam anyone?).

Lightben transparent honeycomb core panel

It is  a lot more entrancing and unusual than you might expect of a materials database and is  at the same time of immense practical use. The database offers links from each type of material in the database to suppliers and also  gives  its eco standing (biodegradable/recyclable/renewable?)), its key features, all physical features,  its price range, major applications for use and  engineering properties. A veritable  alchemists shopping list..........

the world's best free online learning resources

Paul Andrews is the new head of Newport University's Centre for Digitally Enhanced Learning (CDEL) .  He is an advocate of getting things done cost effectively and more often than not, with no cost at all and as such runs a successful website  that showcases the world’s best free online learning resources. For a site/service to be included on the website  it must be free, easy to use and produce high quality resources that can be used on any web enabled platform. Well known resources such as Twitter and Flickr are in the company of many many more you will not have heard of. Categories include sound and music, images, mind mapping, game creation, digital scrapbooks and collages and sound recording and editing. Something for everyone here...have a look!

The Lively Morgue launched on Tumblr

The Lively Morgue For many decades, most of the photographs housed in the newsroom archive of The New York Times — known affectionately as “the morgue” — have been hidden away from the public eye in filing cabinets and manila folders.

The newspaper actually does publish  archival photographs every day and features photos in Lens the NYT photography blog in the 'Lively Morgue feature, an occasional series introduced in September 2010. So far, they have published 17 collections including a fabulous collection of 19 dance shots.

The morgue has at least 10 million frames in all. There are five million to six million prints and contact sheets, each sheet representing many discrete images. There are also  300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches. The picture archive also includes about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery on each of 13,500 DVDs.

The NYT has now started to publish the images in greater quantities, again as “The Lively Morgue,” on Tumblr  the social blogging site. On the Tumblr, each photograph can be flipped over so that viewers can see notations on the reverse side, which explain the photos’ path at The Times over the years and there are notes about how to interpret them.

visit Tumblr to see the first images in an ongoing series.

Van Eyck in detail: The Ghent Altarpiece

 

The Mystic Lamb of 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, known as the Ghent Altarpiece, recently underwent emergency conservation within the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent.

Every inch  of the altarpiece was scrutinized and professionally photographed at extremely high resolution in both normal and infrared light.

The photographs were then digitally “stitched” together to create highly detailed images which allow for study of the painting at unprecedented microscopic levels. The website itself contains 100 billion pixels. These high-definition digital images are now available on an interactive digital website, “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece”

The website features overall photographs of the polyptych in its opened and closed positions, and from there users can zoom closer into the details of individual panels of the altarpiece, down to a microscopic level.  Scrolling and zooming features are guided by a thumbnail image to indicate the location and size of the detail on the altarpiece. Users are also able to open two windows simultaneously to compare any two images from the site.

This project, funded by the Getty Foundation ran from April 2010 through June 2011 and consisted of three main segments: an urgent conservation treatment, an assessment of the current condition of the altarpiece, and a campaign of technical documentation. Its goal was to establish whether a full restoration treatment of Van Eyck’s famous polyptych was necessary in the near future, which indeed turned out to be the case.

Hirst and money? here's Deller and Joy in People

Jeremy Deller opens at the Hayward today with a show entitled Jeremy Deller: Joy in People.The exhibition incorporates almost all of his major works to date including installations, photographs, videos, posters, banners, performance works and sound pieces and is curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery.
Jeremy Deller  won the Turner prize in 2004 without having taken even O-level art at his London public school. He emerged after the Young British Artists, who began exhibiting together in 1988, many of them wrapped up in the rising art market and collected by figures such as Charles Saatchi.
Sometimes his work – a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, one of the fiercest clashes of the miners' strike, or organising the ladies of the Women's Institute to show flower arrangements at the Tate – did not look like art at all.

His mum said "I tried to explain his work to the Queen when Jeremy took me to a reception at Buckingham Palace. I don't think she quite understood, but she was too polite to say."
Rugoff declares of Deller that he , "brought up questions of value" in his work. “ He has rarely made work that can be bought or sold straightforwardly. He has, said Rugoff, "heralded a new chapter when artists work as catalysts, producers, curators and collaborators … and with his interest in folk art and the creativity of everyday life he has brought attention to what other people have done".
There are some great events planned to accompany the exhibition including a David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller DJ Night on Friday 4 May 2012. Jeremy Deller’s interest in the social character of pop music is far ranging. The enthusiasms, rituals and passionate loyalty of fans have all provided the artist with inspiration. Our Hobby is Depeche Mode reflects on how people intimately embrace pop culture and embed it in the fabric of their everyday lives.The exhibition  runs until 13^th May

Damien Hirst, (eco-) property developer

ARTIST Damien Hirst who has been valued at £215 million has unveiled plans to build more than 500 landmark eco-homes in Ilfracombe, which he hopes will regenerate the town and provide a national blueprint for environmental housing.
The plans involve utilising land at Winsham Farm, which has been owned by Hirst for the past ten years, as well as nearby Channel Farm and Bowden Farm.
Mr Rundell said the houses would be modern in design and could incorporate state of the art environmental features such as photovoltaic panels, concealed wind turbines in the roofs and increased insulation.
"If we are committed to doing this as Damien wants it, it will happen. Damien is a man who gets things done."

Damien Hirst's latest exhibition, The Complete Spot Paintings, will be held at all 11 Gagosian Galleries across the world. Here's a selection of the works, which the Guardian has provided in a slideshow here

Post Modern work of art or Copyright Violation? Richard Prince in court

Richard Prince sometimes takes photos and changes them. The original is usually easily recognizable. This activity tends to break Copyright (if the creator of the original has not been dead for 70 years) and infringe the Moral Right that dictates an artist has the moral right to be recognized as the author of their work (Prince never acknowledges his sources) . In fact in a recent court case versus the photographer of the Rastafarian above Prince declared himself positively un-interested in any original that he takes and changes. His defence was that he needs other people’s works as raw material to "critique, dismantle, [and] transform..."  

Read more here