Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Whats Happening in the World of Arts

Unconventional Art
Today’s TED playlist exhibits art that transcends the museum wall. These speakers, all artists or creators, talk about their unusual means to remarkable ends. Jonathan Harris creates digital artscapes out of Eskimo feasts, balloon wishes and the Internet’s feelings. Robert Lang revolutionizes a centuries-old paper pastime through simple (or maybe not-so-simple) mathematics. Vik Muniz finds art supplies in unlikely places — dirt, chocolate, diamonds, clouds. Miru Kim explores massive abandoned underground places — and then photographs herself in them, nude, to bring these dark spaces into sharp focus.
http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/11/unconventional-art-todays-tedtalks-playlist/
John Cage and Contemporary Art

BALTIC Curator Alessandro Vincintelli talks to artists Graham Gussin, Katie Paterson and Sam Belinfante about the new Cage Mix exhibition and the influence of John Cage on contemporary art practice.
http://www.balticmill.com/podcasts/

Silent Animation

This website gives online access to the UCLA archive of animations from the silent era of cinema. At May 2010, 11 vintage films from 1900 to 1928 are freely available for online viewing. Also available are commentaries from the preservationists involved, film notes, and information on the historical context. A Study Guide is available for download in PDF format. Films are also available for download in either MPEG2 or MP4 format.
http://animation.library.ucla.edu/
Roomle

Roomle is an online design tool which allows you to create floor plans, room layouts and designs simply and easily for free.
http://www.roomle.com/
Digital Comic Museum
Digital Comic Museum is a very large website archive of U.S. comic books known to be in the public domain. As such, it includes a wealth of high-quality scans of vintage comics, freely available for reading. Most comics are from the 1940s and 1950s. Some newspaper comic strips are also included. Files are in the standard CBR (Comic Book Reader) format, for which Comical is possibly the best free viewer. Free registration is required to download the comics, but not to search the website. The Digital Comic Museum will be a valuable resource for those researching the history of comics in the U.S., as well as for those interested in the dynamic hand-made typography of the medium, the depiction of stereotypes during the 20th century, and the ways that the standards and politics of the time were presented to children.
http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/
AdViews

AdViews: a digital archive of vintage television commercials' is an online collection from Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The archive contains "thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s ... created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles". Videos can be browsed or searched, and viewed via iTunes service. The archive seems especially rich in animated U.S. adverts from the 1950s and 1960s. It will be useful for those interested in branding, product design, post-war typography, mass media depictions of stereotypes, commercial animation, and the history of advertising in the USA.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/

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