Massive Change at Vancouver Art Gallery

d

14 October 2004 - Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future of Global Design has opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Curated by design guru Bruce Mau, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the dynamic future of design culture and the real choices we must make.The global project includes an internationally touring exhibition that will travel to three continents and seven cities. On view in Vancouver, B.C. until 2 January 2005. The show unfolds in a series of eleven general themes that address the fundamental role of design in all aspects of human life, from manufacturing and transportation to health and the military. In each area, visitors will encounter the objects, images, ideas and people that are reshaping the role of the world of design. Massive Change boasts an evolving website at massivechange.com

Mummy Returned to Egypt

d

27 October 2003 - The Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta has returned a mummy to Egypt some 150 years after it was looted. With the aide of sophisticated imaging technology, combined with the Egyptological information regarding the burial of Ramesses I in the royal cache, Egyptologists at the American museum believe the mummy to be that of Ramses I, a military commander, who become pharaoh circa 1290 B.C. Although he was on the throne for only two years, he founded Egypt's 19th dynasty, which included Ramses II, who ruled for several decades. Before its return to Egypt last Friday, the mummy was the focus of an exhibition entitled, Ramesses I and the Search for the Lost Pharaoh. While the show has closed , the web site remains open where visitors can follow the mummy's long journey from Egypt to Atlanta, Georgia, the physical evidence supporting its attribution and its return to Egypt where it will be housed in the Cairo Museum along with the other royal mummies. http://carlos.emory.edu/RAMESSES/

Plans for Ground Zero
Round Two

d

14 January 2003 - After a heavily criticized first round of draft proposals (see below: Plans for Ground Zero), The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has unveiled the second round of designs for the World Trade Center site. Visitors to New York can view the nine site design proposals at the Winter Garden, World Financial Center through 2 February 2003. Competing architects include Daniel Libeskind, Charles Gwathmey, Rafael Vinoly, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Sir Norman Foster, Barbara Littenberg and Richard Meier. The public is again invited to view and to comment on these proposals on the web at http://www.renewnyc.com.

CORSAIR on the Net

d

7 November 2002 - CORSAIR, the Morgan Library's online public catalogue, is now accessible through the Internet to scholars, researchers and the public. Named after Pierpont Morgan's yacht, CORSAIR is a comprehensive guide to the Morgan's collections. Within one database and using a single search interface, it provides unified access to over two hundred thousand records for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare books, literary and historical manuscripts, music scores, ancient seals and tablets, drawings, prints, and other art objects. About 90 percent of the Morgan's holdings are represented in the catalogue.
http://corsair.morganlibrary.org

"Carnivore" wins Golden Nica

d

27 September 2002 - This year's Golden Nica prize winner for net projects at the annual Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria was awarded to RSG (USA): "Carnivore", a project based on the FBI's surveillance software (wiretaps) for monitoring network traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) . The Carnivore project enables designers and artists to create their own visualizations of data flow on a network. The Carnivore software is available to anyone who wants to experiment with it and is available for download at: http://rhizome.org/carnivore/
.

Plans for Ground Zero

d

20 July 2002 - The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have unveiled six options for rebuilding the World Trade Center site and adjacent areas, focused on honoring those lost on September 11 and revitalizing Lower Manhattan. Not everybody is happy with the proposals. Some critics maintain the draft proposals seem motivated more by the interests of developers and businessmen than the concerns of Lower Manhattan or the memory of those lost in the September 11 attack. Notably, the designs would have to replace all 11 million square feet of office space in the trade centre. An editorial in the New York Times called the plans "dreary and leaden that fall short of what New York City -- and the world---expect to see rise at Ground Zero.".

The public is invited to view and to comment on these proposals on the web at http://www.renewnyc.com.

Documenta11

d

8 June 2002 - Held every five years, the Documenta is the most important event for contemporary visual arts worldwide. The 100-day exhibition confers considerable prestige and market cachet on the artists invited to show, and is very much the place to be seen for those in the art world. Moreover, each Documenta bears the stamp and clout of its Artistic Director's ideas and personal concepts—in this case that of Nigeria's Okwui Enwezor whose Documenta11 is comprised of five "platforms": four symposia and the current exhibition. The symposia, which clearly sought to address issues related to globalisation, took place earlier in Berlin, Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia in the West Indies and Lagos. In a first for Documenta, this year's symposia have been videotaped and are available for download or viewing in RealPlayer at http://www.documenta.de.

Guggenheim Internet Art Commissions

d

30 March 2002 - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum launched two new Internet art commissions on 18 February 2002. The two works, Mark Napier's net.flag and John F. Simon, Jr.'s Unfolding Object, have entered the permanent collection of the museum. For several years, the Guggenheim has been commissioning works of Internet art. The acquisition of these works represents the latest stage in the Guggenheim's efforts. A special introduction to these projects, and to Internet art in general may be viewed at http://www.guggenheim.org/internetart/welcome.html

According to the museum, the largest obstacle to collecting Internet art is the rapid pace of Internet evolution, which renders online art far more vulnerable to technological obsolescence than such media as film or video. The Guggenheim's approach to preserving online art, called the Variable Media Initiative (http://www.guggenheim.org/variablemedia/), prepares for the obsolescence of ephemeral technology by encouraging artists to envision the possible acceptable forms their work might take in future mediums. Along with the digital files corresponding to each piece, the Guggenheim compiles data on how the artwork is to be translated into new mediums once its original hardware and software are obsolete. To prepare for such future re-creations, the Guggenheim has created a variable media endowment, the interest of which is earmarked for future costs of data migration, emulation, and reprogramming.

The Redism Project

d

18 November 2001 - The Redism site, an on-line exhibition space sponsored by Bass Beers Worldwide, showcases up-and-coming creative talent in art and design, fashion, music, multimedia, film, photography and literature. Each month, entries on a particular theme are submitted and the guest editors choose the 10 best works to be rated and discussed by the site users. Guest editors include Hayward Gallery curator Fiona Bradley and celebrity portrait photographer Rob Gallagher. Each month, the most highly rated winning piece of work is featured on the site. The best entries overall are exhibited at Bass bars across Europe. Recent themes have included Space, Communication and Concrete.
The Redism Site

Pompeii on the Web

d

24 August 2001 - A rumbling sound of volcanic activity from Mount Vesuvius and a trembling homepage greet the visitor to the new official Pompeii web site. Published in Italian and English, the site offers a brief overview of the history of the excavations including archaeological site maps, image galleries, itineraries by topic (houses, temples, public buildings and venues, forum, villas, entertainment, necropolises) and tourist information for those planning a visit to Pompeii. In addition, the Superintendenza Archeologica di Pompei has posted past issues of its newsletter covering recent field investigations by German, British and Dutch teams, as well as new reciprocal agreements of collaboration between the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii and the American Museum of Natural History of New York for the restoration of high-quality frescoes recently discovered at the archaeological site of Terzigno, a Vesuvian municipality.
Pompeii Web Site

Pompei à Paris - A l'ombre du Vésuve: Exposition au Petit Palais

Mysterious Bronze Age Seal Found in Central Asia

d

18 June 2001 - University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert and American and Turkmenistan colleagues have found evidence of a sophisticated, Central Asian Bronze Age town, including an enigmatic stamp seal that may well be the first evidence of an indigenous written language. The new evidence, according to Dr. Hiebert, points to the existence of a complex pre-Silk Road civilization, circa 2300 B.C., featuring towns, cities, rulers, production, trade, and now, quite possibly, written language, thriving contemporaneously with the great early cities of Mesopotamia, ancient Iran and the Indus Civilization. According to Dr. Hiebert the enigmatic Bronze Age stamp seal excavated at Anau depe in Turkmenistan is evidence of an indigenous pre-Silk Road writing system.
Dr. Hiebert's Excavation Report of the seal's discovery (originally published in Expedition, Vol. 42, no.3, page 48.)

Francis Bacon Studio

d

1 June 2001 - Francis Bacon's art has to do with the human body, sex, violence and strong emotions. The mews studio in South Kensington, London was the artist's home and working space for the last thirty years of his life and it was here that Bacon produced some of his best work. The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin removed the contents of Francis Bacon's London studio at 7 Reece Mews in August 1998. This operation was conducted by a team of archaeologists who mapped the space, and tagged and noted the positions of the objects. The reconstructed studio at the Dublin gallery features the original door, walls, floors, ceiling and shelves. Over 7,000 items were found in the studio and these were catalogued on a specially designed database before their replacement in the studio. With the aid of computer terminals gallery visitors can scan the contents of the database. Francis Bacon's studio and contents were donated by the Anglo-Irish artist's sole heir and partner in life, John Edwards. The relocated studio opened to the public on 23 May 2001.

Streaming Video Sharing Centre

d

30 Avril 2001 - Websites planning to enrich their culture content might want to consider AboveStream.com, an online arts and letters streaming video distributor. With a simple HTML cut and paste, websites can integrate one or more of AboveStream's 500 streaming videos on art, architecture, literature, cartoons, politics and history. Sites using Abovestream content do not incur additional bandwith costs, since the videos are served from AboveStream.com's servers. Based in New York, the company's catalogue covers the major art and archaeology periods from prehistory to modern and contemporary art, and includes more than 100 full-length interviews with major contemporary authors, from Toni Morrison, John Updike, and P.D. James to Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Maurice Sendak among others.
http://www.abovestream.com

La peinture nordique de 1400 à 1550

d

10 Avril 2001 - Conçue par l'Association des conservateurs du Nord-Pas de Calais, l'exposition virtuelle La peinture nordique de 1400 à 1550, accessible sur le site - http://www.musenor.org - rassemble environ 200 oeuvres issues des musées de Lille, Arras, Douai, Valenciennes, Saint Omer, Dunkerque et Calais. Cette collection en ligne permet aux internautes de découvrir des peintres comme Jean Bellegambe, Hieronymus Bosch, Dirk Bouts dont les oeuvres, peintes sur bois, trop fragiles pour être déplacées et admirées par le grand public dans le cadre d'une véritable exposition, ont été numérisées. Un parcours qui permet de resituer ces oeuvres dans le contexte de l'époque grâce à une frise chronologique, de mieux appréhender la peinture allemande et flamande des XVe et XVIe siècles ou encore de découvrir les techniques de peinture utilisées ainsi que les méthodes de laboratoire requises pour authentifier ces ouvres (découpes d'images des oeuvres afin que l'internaute puisse découvrir les tableaux avec trois niveaux de details). Sans oublier une visite consacrée aux commanditaires et collectionneurs de l'époque. Cette exposition restera en ligne pour une durée indéterminée.

CrossFade: Sound Travels on the Web

d

4 March 2001 - Tomorrow, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will jointly launch CrossFade: Sound Travels on the Web, an online initiative that focuses on the Internet as a performance and distribution space for sound art. Available on the Web site of each of the co-organizing institutions: www.sfmoma.org/crossfade, www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco, www.zkm.de and www.walkerart.org, CrossFade will act as an access point to sound-related artist projects and media essays in English and German by specialists in the field.

CrossFade kicks off with Ping by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer, a Web interface to the artists' installation in the exhibition 010101: Art in Technological Times (online since 1 January and now on view in the SFMOMA galleries) and Soft Music, an essay by German musician and cultural critic Golo Foellmer, which includes a series of links and streaming media interviews with musicians and sound artists.

Launching on 10 March, a 100-day project with Yoko Ono's SonicFlux: Yoko Ono, will allow online visitors the chance to interact with an Ono score. In April these works will be joined by a second essay, Music and the Net: Musaic, by Dutch sound artist and theorist Josephine Bosma, an expansion of a lecture on the state of the field that includes links to many current sound projects. Projects planned for May include works by composer Anthony Moore and San Francisco-based artist Chris Salter with the art-and-research collective Sponge.

www.sfmoma.org/crossfade

Related - see below- Seen on the net - 8 June 1998: New German Center for Art and Media

The City Beneath the City

27 December 2000 - A marble statuette of the Greek goddess Athena from the 2nd century A.D. , a black-figure cooler (500-475 B.C.) and a jug in the shape of a boy's head from the 4th century A.D. are among the 10,000 objects found from excavations for the Metropolitan Railway of Athens. On view until December 2001, the temporary exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens features 500 objects unearthed during the metro dig and attempts to document the evolution of daily life in Athens from the Mycenean to the Byzantine period (17th century B.C. to the 8th century A.D), although the majority of pieces date from the Classical - Hellenistic period. Organised according to subject matter: public life, religion, burial customs, the exhibition covers the area where the ancient city lay, in and around the fortification walls, including the cemetery of Kerameikos and the so-called north-eastern cemetery located beneath modern-day Syntagma Square. An exhibition catalogue is available in Greek, with and English edition currently in press.
http://www.cycladic-m.gr/temporary/temporary.htm

Ancient America on The Archaeology Channel

d

30 October 2000 - The Archaeology Channel features streaming videos in both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player formats on archaeology and indigenous peoples from around the world. Launched recently, the channel is the work of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), an American not-for-profit research and education corporation based in Eugene, Oregon. "ALI was founded to bring the benefits of archaeology to a wider constituency and to improve communications among archaeologists, indigenous peoples, and the general public," said Dr. Richard Pettigrew, ALI founder and President. "We believe that archaeology has important messages to deliver to people worldwide about our common heritage, where we all come from, mistakes we have made in the past, and lessons learned as we face important decisions about our future."

Current programming on The Archaeology Channel focuses on Native American archaeology and includes Ocmulgee: Mysteries of the Mounds (Georgia); Mesa Verde: Legacy of Stone and Spirit (Colorado); the Gila Cliff Dwellings (New Mexico), the ancient pueblo known to the Apache as Besh-Ba-Gowah (Arizona), and the 2,000-year-old Legacy of the Mound Builders (Ohio).
http://www.archaeologychannel.org

Looting of African Archaeological Artefacts

Pillage des objets archéologiques africains

d

13 August 2000 - In an effort to fight against the illicit traffic in African artefacts, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has posted to the internet a list of eight categories of African archaeological objects affected by looting and theft. The Red List of endangered archaeological artefacts has been distributed to museums, art dealers, auction houses and collectors. http://www.icom.org/redlist/

Related features and virtual galleries on African Art and Archaeology:
The Magical Faces of Africa

Magies, Power Objects of the Peoples and Kings of Africa

Sudan, Kingdoms on the Nile

Art Market: Auction Sale of African Art


Afin de lutter contre le trafic illicite des biens culturels africains, le Conseil international des musées (ICOM) a publié une liste de huit catégories d'objets archéologiques africains particulièrement victimes du pillage. La Liste Rouge a été distribue aux musées, salles des ventes, marchands et collectionneurs. http://www.icom.org/redlist/

Articles et galeries virtuelles sur l'art africain et les objets archéologiques africains:

Magies: Objets de pouvoir des peuples et des rois d'Afrique

Visages Magiques de l'Afrique

SOUDAN: Royaumes sur le Nil

Marché de l'Art: Record Mondial en Art Africain

Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America

22 June 2000 - This photographic collection of James Allen and John Littlefield, currently on view at The New-York Historical Society, documents lynching in America from the 1870s through the 1950s. During this period, mobs - mostly in the southern states but sometimes as far north as Minnesota - lynched thousands of African Americans (and the odd Italian immigrant) without fear of accountability for their deaths, and often with the tacit complicity of the press and local governments. Judging from the widely circulated postcards and momentos on view, lynching in America transcended mere ritual racial killing to become a form of entertainment for some Americans. (The negative for one postcard was etched with the legend, "Coon Cooking"). The collection also presents a record of the anti-lynching movement through books, pamphlets and placards.

Journal E has published on the Net photos and documents from this exhibition and its companion book. Net visitors can view this information as a Flash movie with narrative comments by James Allen, or as a virtual gallery of photos. Either way, the images are devistating and vividly document a sordid and degenerate form of American popular culture. http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/index.html

SFMOMA Webby Prize

14 May 2000 - The first San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art has been awarded to the Belgium-based team of Michaël Samyn (Belgium) and Auriea Harvey (USA, currently residing in Belgium) for Entropy8Zuper! (http://www.entropy8zuper.org). The prize was presented by video artist Bill Viola at the Webby Awards 2000 ceremony, held at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco on 11 May. The duo will share $30,000 in prize money. Three artists, Ichiro Aikawa (Japan, based in Seattle), Young-hae Chang (South Korea) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Canada/Mexico) received honorable mentions and $6,500 each. Launched earlier this year, the annual SFMOMA Webby Prize attracted 336 entries. The winning artists' work, as well as additional links to sites containing Web projects by the three honorable mention winners, notably to the amusing irony of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries: The Struggle Continues and "Samsung" veut dire: Jouir ("Samsung" means: to come), are featured in e.space, the on-line gallery housed on the SFMOMA's Web site, www.sfmoma.org.

Nazi-Stolen Art

12 April 2000 - The Federal Government of Germany and its Länder have posted to the Internet a list of several thousand art works stolen from museums and Nazi victims across Europe in an attempt to return them to their owners. Published in German, English and Russian, the Lost Art Internet Database is a searchable database of stolen art and cultural artifacts such as antiquities, rare books and coins stolen or purchased under questionable circumstances by Nazi leaders and dealers during the Third Reich. Victims included museums, clerical institutions and private collectors, notably Jews, whose property was routinely confiscated during the Nazi era. The list which also includes art works taken from Germany by the Russians at the end of the war, is often referred to as the Linzer Liste (Linz List) because Adolf Hitler, a native of Linz, Austria, had visions of a Führer's Museum filled with art works which reflected Nazi ideology. Entarte Kunst, or "degenerate" contemporary art, which offended Nazi sensibilities, was also seized from museums and private collectors and sold to dealers. German officials hope that the Lost Art Internet Database will enable victims and their heirs to advertise, search for, and find their cultural property.
http://www.LostArt.de./

British museums and most recently the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have also published lists of art works of questionable provenance. Last year, the Louvre returned five paintings including a work by Tiepolo to heirs of their rightful owner, a Jewish art dealer.
Stolen Art : French Government Under Fire

Art Volé : Les autorités Françaises sur la sellette

Histoire d'une fouille: Le tell d'Hârsova

17 mars 2000 - Intitulé Vivre au bord du Danube il y a 6500 ans, ce site web bilingue (français, roumain) nous transporte vers le cours inférieur du Danube non loin du littoral de la Mer Noire à l'époque chalcolithique. Grâce à une documentation iconographique largement commentée, des illustrations et schémas originaux conçus spécialement pour le site web, des anecdotes, la vie des villageois du tell d'Hârsova est évoquée de façon intelligente. L'internaute trouvera egalement une présentation et des repères sur les périodes Néolithique et Chalcolithique dans les Balkans, grâce à une chronologie ainsi que plusieurs cartes. Il prendra connaissance des méthodes et techniques (fouille stratigraphique, analyse fine des données) et des recherches pluridisciplinaires mises en oeuvre depuis près d'une dizaine d'années dans le cadre de la coopération qui associe, sur le chantier école d'Hârsova, le Musée national d'histoire de Roumanie, le Musée d'histoire nationale et d'archéologie de Constanta et le Ministère français de la culture et de la communication.
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/harsova/fr/index.html

Sale of Sunken Treasure on the Net

8 December 1999- Part of the treasure from the SS Central America was to be sold at Sotheby's in New York on Wednesday 8 December and then on the Internet on Thursday 9 December 1999. Sale of the treasure has been stayed by the United States Court of Appeals. The shipwrecked gold and artifacts, salvaged by the Columbus America Discovery Group of Ohio, include coins, ingots, nuggets and gold dust.
http://www.sothebys.com/auctions/

Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids

25 May 1999- The selection and presentation of the items on the official site of Paris' Grand Palais exhibition, Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids (until 12 July), give an idea of the diversity of Egyptian art, but one often has the feeling of looking at a CD-Rom arranged in a straight line. The idea of zooming in on details of the pieces is interesting, but it is not entirely necessary to comment systematically on certain items that are not themselves intrinsically interesting (the stomach of the kneeling Scribe does not really tell us anything about Egyptian civilization, other than that one probably ate well ... among the rich). At the same time, one might have expected that the Réunion des Musées Nationaux would have regularly offered a translation of the hieroglyphics.

The general commentary takes popular appeal into account while avoiding any controversial statements. The links offer a connection to the site of the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin, which makes it even more astonishing that there is no mention of the German contribution to Egyptology in the catalogue of this important exhibition.
http://www.expo-egypte.com/

Click here for a review of the New York showing of Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids,

Visual Database of Work by Artists with HIV/AIDS

2 January 1999- The Museum of Modern Art in New York has launched a visual database of work by artists with HIV/AIDS. Entitled The Virtual Collection, the on-line database features 3,000 high-resolution images of works by 150 artists who have died of AIDS or are living with HIV/AIDS. The Virtual Collection can be accessed via the MoMA Web site at http://www.moma.org or http://www.artistswithaids.org, and through other museums and institutions around the United States. Museum directors consider that the internet-based collection will make available a large body of art that might otherwise be lost or widely dispersed. Artists with work in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art who are also represented in the The Virtual Collection include Joe Brainard, Scott Burton, Keith Haring, Frank Moore, David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong.

The on-line collection was organised by The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a program of The Alliance of the Arts, and by Visual AIDS. Patrick Moore, the Director of The Estate Project sees the virtual collection as a valuable historical record of the human impact of AIDS.

Urban power forces and "post pets" on the Net

14 September 1998- The highpoint of last week's annual Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria was "Cyberarts 98", an exhibition of Prix Arts Electronica 98 winners. Some 1,700 artists, scientists, and entertainment companies from more than 50 countries submitted projects for awards worth a total of 1.35 million Austrian schillings. Prizes were awarded in four categories: music, interactive art, animation/visual effects and.net.

This year's Goldene Nica prize winner for net projects was awarded to the Austro-German group Knowbotic Research. Their network project, "10_Dencies" ("tendencies") combines the physical, local dynamics of a Tokyo neighborhood with the flux of virtual networks. Selected zones of intensity are represented in a Java applet. where varioius types of urban power forces such as information and traffic flows, economic and architectonic forces can be displayed using bit streams.
By using special tools ("attractors"), Internet users may intervene in these force fields. Every modification in these zones changes the flows, and these interventions are displayed immediately. However, users see not only the changes and consequences of their own interventions, but also the interventions and desired changes effected by other users "working" in the same hypothetical urban area.
http://www.khm.de/people/krcf/IO/

Meanwhile, Japan's Kazuhiko Hachiya received an award for excellence in the net category for "Post Pet", a kind of "e-mail tamagotchi". Unlike conventional e-mail, the message that is sent does not simply disappear from the screen, but rather the delivery is taken over by a cat or a teddy bear called a "Post Pet". The cuddly e-mail creatures pick up the message from the sender, who can watch it set out on its way to the recipient. The "Post Pet" appears on the recipient's screen and delivers the message "personally". Now the recipient is not only obligated to treat the "Post Pet" well, to feed it, care for it, play with it, but also to respond to the message so the "Post Pet" can find its way back to its owner. There are already homes on the Internet for lost "Post Pets" and "Post Pet Hotels", to which owners may entrust their pets during their absence. According to the creators, "Post Pets" transform the purely technical, impersonal and difficult-to-perceive process of data transmission via Internet into an emotionally bonding experience.

Not unstrangely, there are people out there devising a mixamotosis-type bug which will protect them from the invasion of "Post Pets".
http://www.postpet.de/

Online display for dual exhibition in Holland and New Zealand

22 July 1998- A double exhibition on view simultaneously at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand examines the ways in which cultures and ethnic groups differ in a world becoming increasingly 'smaller' because of modern means of communication. Entitled "Under Capricorn - The World Over", and on display until 18 August 1998, participating artists include Byars, Art+Com, Mullican, Dadson, Watson, McCahon, Smithson, Dibbets, Simmons, Paik, Shaw, Viola, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Van Elk, Schum, Kinoshita, Baumgarten, Tremlett, Tillers, Delvoye, Parekowhai, Scholte, among others.

An alternative online show of "Under Capricorn - The World Over" includes Internet and electronic art works which have been set up by the artists themselves in a connecting frame by Willem Velthoven of Mediamatic and include works by Laurie Anderson, John Hurrell, Giovanni Intra, Peter Struycken, Merel Mirage, Netband, Rob Scholte, David Tremlett, Gerald van der Kaap and others. http://www.stedelijk.nl/eng/index.html

New German Center for Art and Media

8 June 1998 - The Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, which opened last fall, hopes to encourage convergence between modern and contemporary art and new media. The former munitions factory includes two museums, one concerned with the media, housing the Institute for Music and Acoustics, the other devoted to modern and contemporary art. The 13,000 square meter space also boasts a media library and a "digital salon" for on-site entertainment. .

Asked whether multimedia and the internet posed a threat to museum visits, Heinrich Klotz, the founding director of the new ZKM, replied that "simulation neither replaces the original, nor does it have the aura of the original". The ZKM aims to explore the creative potential of new technologies, assess their impact on contemporary art and attempt to define their current and probable influence on our lives.

In April, Professor Klotz handed over his responsabilties as head of the ZKM to Dr. Gerd Schwandner, and is currently concerned with the development and planned opening in the fall of 1999 of the ZKM's 16,000 square-meter Museum for Contemporary Art.

The ZKM web site can be accessed in German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese and Chinese.
http://.www.zkm.de

200 years ago in Egypt

22 April 1998 - Museum web sites are improving. Currently on view until 6 July 1998 in the Grande Galerie de l'Evolution of Paris' Natural History Museum is an exhibition devoted to the 154 scientists and scholars rounded up and ordered to accompany Napoleon Bonaparte on his Egyptian campaign (1798 - 1801). While the choice of images for the virtual visit could have been better, the site design is attractive and functions as a good teaser for a visit to this show. Timelines, concise texts, images, a bibliography and a Rosetta Stone quiz attempt to give a general idea of the exhibition as well as a glimpse of the early days of French Egyptology and the Institut d'Egypte in Cairo. The museum authorities were unable to say when the English version link on the homepage would be active, but the java-scripped giraffe and owl search icons are well worth the click to Paris.

Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle
Il y à 200 ans...Les savants en Egypte
until 6 July 1998
http://195.212.162.143:8082/Evolution/Gge.nsf?OpenDatabase

Art & Archaeology of Ancient Near East

16 March 1998 - The Research Archives of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago have published an on-line version of its Recommended Reading on the Ancient Near East. An update of material originally published in 1996 as a Resource Guide to the three-volume-work (Life in Ancient Egypt, Life in Ancient Nubia, Life in Ancient Mesopotamia), Recommended Reading serves as a guide to the art and archaeology of these three key cultures. Topics include Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions, architecture, mummies and mummification, the invention of writing, art theory, science, literature, law, warfare, the role of women among many others.
http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/RECREAD/REC_READ.html

Paleontology without Walls

4 March 1998 - While the Berkeley-based University of California Museum of Paleontology is essentially a research facility with the odd public exhibit or lecture series, its comprehensive website includes a top-notch on-line exhibit area entitled "Paleontology without Walls" consisting of three major "wings" of the museum: Phylogeny, Geology, and Evolution. Clickable icons, keyword searches and a web lift bar help guide the visitor through major taxa, well-designed pages and virtual spaces devoted to extensive data, images, graphics and catalogues concerning geological time, evolutionary theory, fossils, dinosaurs, viruses, paleobotany, Pacific Rim biodiversity among numerous other topics.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/

Words of Art

23 February 1998 - Compiled by Robert J. Belton of The Fine Arts Department at Okanagan University College in British Columbia, Canada, Words of Art is a highly practical on-line glossary of theory and criticism for the visual arts. Hypertext links abound within the lexicon and the A to Z navigation is straight-forward. Since Canada is a bilingual country, what a shame the glossary is not available in French too.
http://www.arts.ouc.bc.ca/fiar/glossary/gloshome.html

Sculpture in Münster

11 February 1998 - Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 97 (Sculpture. Projects in Münster 1997), a summer exhibition devoted exclusively to sculptures and installations in public spaces within Münster, is held every ten years at the same time as the Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany. The show's third edition is now available for consultation in German and English on the Web. The electronic catalogue of the 1997 show contains some 1,500 pages and nearly 3,000 reproductions. Moreover, the site's data base includes information, reproduction and press reviews of the 1987 and 1977 exhibitions.
http://www.artthing.de/muenster

Painting By Numbers

f

30 January 1998 - Based on an opinion poll of some 1000 Americans taken in late 1993, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, dissident artists from the former Soviet Union empire came to the following conclusions: sixty-seven percent of Americans prefer "dishwasher sized" paintings; eighty-eight percent prefer landscapes and the colours blue and green are the two most favourite colours. In their study "Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art " (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. New York), the conceptualist Russian duo provide an amusing and informative glimpse of American tastes in fine arts. Lest you think that this study was limited to American cultural norms, polls were also taken in France, Russia, Kenya, and China among other nations and the artists' data can be accessed at: http://www.diacenter.org/km/surveyresults.html

Paris Photo

f

6 December 1997 - XXX-Ray by Robert Gligorov is one of several works recently on view at the Paris Photo Exhibition at the Carrousel du Louvre. The Macedonian-born artist's images can also be viewed at the Trieste-based gallery Lipanjepuntin.

C'est Byzance !

f

27 November 1997 - With over 26,000 possible subject terms, the visitor to the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University gains access to the largest iconographical archive of medieval art in the world with records for some half a million art works and over 200,000 photographic reproductions. The Index focuses principally on the art of the European Middle Ages from early apostolic times up to 1400 A.D. According to the unclearly formulated Princeton web pages, access to this database is only available in Princeton but an internet application with a limited number of records is available at the four sites where copies of the index have been deposited. At present, this internet site has 26,000 Subject records, 2,000 Work of Art Records and 9,000 Bibliographic Records. Complete details can be found at: http://www.princeton.edu/~ica/database.html

The four copies of the Index of Christian Art available for consultation in Europe and North America are: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University in Washington,D.C., the leading centre for Byzantine studies in the United States; the Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Steppe into Mongolia

f

18 November 1997 - Mongolia, The Legacy of Chinggis Khan, an itinerant exhibition which opened at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco last year, was the first exhibition to bring secular and religious works of art from the museums and State Library of the Republic of Mongolia to the United States. For those unable to visit this show in San Francisco, Denver or Washington DC, a virtual exhibition complete with Apple QuickTime VR Panoramas is on view at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco web site. Themes include Nomadic Life, Bogdo Gegens, Mongolian Pantheon, Buddhist festivals, among others and attempt to illustrate the legacy and signifcance of the Mongols following the conquests of Chinggis Khan in the thirteenth century.
http://www.sfasian.apple.com/mongolia/home.htm

No Waiting

d

18 November 1997 - Travellers to New York can now purchase entrance tickets to the Museum of Modern Art on the Internet. Payment is by credit card and the tickets can be picked up at the Museum's Information desk.
http://www.moma.org