How do you make your iPhone act more like your SLR? Well, Chicago-based Ben Syverson has an app for that.
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MANILA, Philippines — Over the past few months, I’ve watched with envy as stunning museum shows have gone up in my old haunts in Los Angeles and New York. Thankfully, in recent months three museums have released exhibition-related apps for the iPad and iPhone. To see how they stack up, I reviewed three apps (CA Design HD at LACMA, AB EX at MoMA, Cattelan at Guggenheim) in their iPad incarnations. Here are my thoughts.
It’s a testament to the time in which we live to be able to walk through the brilliant halls of a white-walled, glass ceilinged exhibition hall, quietly perusing couture from one of the masters of modern fashion, Valentino Garavani, all in front of a computer screen.
The brainchild of Scott Ostler, co-founder of the image-sharing site Dump.fm, and Khoi Vinh, a former design director of NYTimes.com, Mixel is a free iPad app that may just be a game changer in the world of online images. Sure, we’ve heard it all before, another service that promises to change it all, but in the case of Mixel it may just happen.
Artist Patrick Smith’s Windosill, a Flash-based video game that’s playable in your internet browser, is a fascinating work both for its slow, subtle game play and its visual inspirations, namely proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s empty landscapes and Philip Guston’s still-life paintings.
Online exhibition space The State has a new show up: Jacob Broms Engblom’s “wShare” is a fetishization of those internet moments when we’re just caught waiting.
From ASCII sunsets to screen-flattened foliage, Artist Laurel Schwulst makes parks for the internet. In a temporary exhibition called Proposals For Future Parks shown on internet-based art space bubblebyte.org, the artist uses different media approaches, both online and off, to explore the abstract idea of a “park,” a loose term that for the artist might signify a constructed landscape that has been made for humans to experience. In this show of four parts, Schwurst designs parks that are meant to be experienced in the manner we are now most accustomed to — through screens, virtually and at a remove.
Count on Japanese software developers to bring us something so delightfully weird yet totally useful. Pose Maniacs is a website that serves as your very own personal figure drawing model, set to whatever pose you like for however long it takes. The site is even downloadable as an iPhone app.
Your day in poetically impossible tasks: New York-based illustrator James Gulliver Hancock pulls a Jason Polan in attempting to draw every building in our fair city, renderings townhouses and skyscrapers alike in day-glo colors and goofy, meandering lines equal parts charming and exact.
In another giant leap for art online, Google has released Art Project, a collaboration with a group of 17 international art museums, including New York’s own Metropolitan and Museum of Modern Art, to put their collections online. But this isn’t just a rehash of some online slideshow. Museums participating in Art Project can be digitally toured in two ways: as a Google Street View-style walking trip through the physical museum itself, as well as an artwork-by-artwork tour, with masterpieces of museum collections viewable in a slick image window. Here’s what Art Project does better than any other digital art viewer out there.
