The City

Danny Easterbrook’s studio. photo copyright Spitalfields Life

Our Level 4 students are all exploring ways of making art from the concept of 'The City' this term. I have recommended the wonderful daily blog 'Spitalfields Life to them as an inspirational treasure chest of what a City can be when you look at it through its people. Posts have been categorised and can be searched by sections including  Night Life, Criminal Life, Past Life, Plant, Animal and Literary Lives to name just some. Today's blog is particularly magical. Read here about a musician and artist exploring the paintings of Giorgione by re-creating them in authentic materials in a beautiful studio in the middle of an abandoned tramshed in Clapton, London.

High Resolution Wellcome Images free to download and use

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Three Navajo men proceeding as war gods.
Silver gelatine print 1904 By: Edward S. Curtis
Published:   1904. 

Cardiff Met Electronic Library>Databases A-Z contains a link to the Wellcome Images  database. Wellcome Images is also available on the internet here.

Wellcome has just announced over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available to be used for commercial or personal purposes under a Creative Commons licence  if accompanied by an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website to be freely copied, distributed, edited, manipulated and built upon for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya. Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, says “Together the collection amounts to a dizzying visual record of centuries of human culture, and our attempts to understand our bodies, minds and health through art and observation. Using the advanced search you can search the collection by a huge range of different techniques including etching, ultrasound, silver gelatin print and my all-time favourites;  the exquisitely lovely 300+ transmission electron micrographs.

New link for images on Databases A-Z : Flickr Commons

Our Electronic Library at Cardiff Met contains over 100 databases and also includes links to quality websites. Go to the Electronic Library and click Databases A-Z (Cardiff Met users only).

Image taken from page 582 of 'The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government. [By various authors.] 

A new link on Databases A-Z will lead you to Flickr Commons.  The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives. Recently The British Library has added over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft . The images cover a wide range  of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams,  illustrations some beautiful or very colourful, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, landscapes, wall-paintings and  more.
Something to explore over the Christmas break...

London Sound Survey-Sounds of London

http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/projects/12_tones_intro/

There are over 1,000 recordings of London life on the London Sound Survey website, plus sound maps, historical references to past London sounds, and some original 1930s and 1940s radio broadcasts. 

All the recordings (which are safely stored in the sound cloud )are Creative Commons-licensed which makes them available for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY. All you have to do under the terms of the license is include an acknowledgement and a link to the London Sound Survey website at www.soundsurvey.org.uk.

Elements from the  London Sound Survey also feature  on These Are The Good Times LP published on the Vittelli label  and on  issue 6 of An Antidote To Indifference.

Ian Rawes who compiled the The London Sound Survey works at the British Library sound archive and this collection of sounds  is the result of his explorations of the world of Field recordings and acoustic ecologists . His own recordings employ a variety of professional, home made, and adapted devices .

Other websites featuring different ways of perceiving 'the city'
 urban75, Classic Cafes, Derelict London, Subterranea Britannica and Spitalfields Life



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Google Images taken to task

CEPIC, the Centre of the Picture Industry, submitted a formal antitrust complaint against Google’s use of third-party images before the European Commission on November 8th 2013.The complaint was supported by an unprecedented coalition of European and US trade associations representing thousands of photographers and picture agencies worldwide.

The complaint addresses Google’s various unauthorized uses of third-party images in its horizontal Web Search and its specialized services, in particular Google Images. Google increasingly uses on-line images without the rightholders’ consent, sometimes even against their explicit wishes. Since the redesign of Google Images in January 2013, the situation got worse: Google presents images in full size and high resolution on its site and enables users to download them without ever having to click through to the original website hosting the image.

According to CEPIC members, 85% of pictures found online by visual search systems are unlawful copies and 80% of those illegal images have been spread through search engines such as Google Images. By presenting images out of the context of their source page, without information on the author and a hardly visible copyright note, the new design of Google Images significantly increases this problem.

The picture industry would like an adequate balance between Google’s use of their content and the benefits they receive in return, in particular traffic on their websites. 

read a fuller version of this story here

For students Google images provides quick reference points for images. The ease of reuse of other people’s creations on the web is leading to some content creators and rights owners, such as the major image libraries, taking steps to protect copyright by using sophisticated image-matching robots to crawl the web and find where their images are being used without permission.

In the past 2 or 3 years many individuals, businesses and institutions, including Universities , have found themselves being issued with large bills for the use of such material on their websites without permission.

 For quality sites which append trustworthy  information Cardiff Met Library provides links within its Electronic Library. Excellent sites include Tate  Art and Artists, V&A Collections, MOMA NY,  Google Cultural Institute,  NYPL, Ubuweb (copyright clearance on this site is not certain) and databases for which we pay to have access to copyright cleared images such as Bridgeman Education and Worth Global Style Network

learn how to search the internet for legal Audio, Video and Image resources of quality

Learn how to use the Internet to find copyright cleared images for your work, Jisc who champion the use of digital technologies in UK education and research have created a free online tutorial covering al you need to know to become an expert image searcher.

Use this free, interactive tutorial to improve your image searching skills.

Two other tutorials cover audio and moving image resources, find them in The Virtual training Suite

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Adverts!!

Halloween BMW advert with lots of screaming! In the Top 5 at the moment, an advert by BSSP also viewable on their website here

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