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.
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We’ve all wished we could break into an art collector’s house at times, just to take a look at the wealth of objects out of the public eye. Aside from being awesome aggregations of unique things, collections also communicate something about a person, their aesthetic tastes and their own preferences. Collectionof is a new website that brings the private stashes of some cultural figures to public view. Here, you can check out artist Cory Arcangel’s magazine choices or Brooklyn musician C. Spencer Yeh’s CD rack. Of course, some of it’s for sale, too.
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If you didn’t catch the project’s announcement Tuesday on ArtFagCity, Ryan Trecartin (video artist extraordinaire, Youtube star) and David Karp (founder of Tumblr) have launched riverofthe.net, a crowd-sourced video project that strikes a balance between social media site, contemporary art piece, and documentary archive. The website collects videos ten seconds or less in length, uploaded by users, and crowd sourced. Videos are tagged and aggregated by a maximum of three terms, terms that are collected at the bottom of the site’s homepage in an ever-expanding, lo-fi html list that visually recalls sites like Craigslist.
So far, the list is a kind of Ryan Trecartin-inflected stream of consciousness, complete with everything from “sexy feet” (a video of someone pulling off a sock in a sultry manner), the omnipresent “Lady Gaga,” and “bitches be @ the club,” which links to a video of giraffes fighting, violently. Your guess is as good as mine, but that’s Trecartin’s style for you.
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The BP Deepwater oil spill disaster has sparked a tremendous amount of creative outrage, some of which we’ve been exploring on Hyperallergic LABS all week. In addition to various protests and performances, not to mention some satirical Twitter feeds, there have been numerous attempts to critically appropriate BP’s logo.
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Personal computing may have begun in the 1980s but the history of computer art started much earlier during a period when only a few visionaries sensed the impact computers were going to have on our lives. The Slovakia-based Translab has posted a good online archive of early computer art from names that aren’t widely known but were important for their early work with computers.
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Recently on Hyperallergic, An Xiao’s “Cover Art, or Vito Acconci Gets a Follow Back,” made the case for artists who choose to directly reference or re-stage existing artworks. She draws a comparison between derivative works and cover songs. This may be an apt comparison, but she glosses over an important fact: most cover songs are terrible.
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An Xiao organized a 40th Anniversary tribute to Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece” (1969) for @Platea, the social media art collective she performs with. She likes to call what she did a form of “cover art” and she explains why.
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In his latest edition of Hypermedia, artist Artie Vierkant explores ideas of surveillance and sousveillance in the work of artists Jill Magid, Steve Mann, Josh On, Ryan McKinley, and Trevor Paglen.
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Hypermedia: Critical Issues in Contemporary Media Art is a column written by artist Artie Vierkant for Hyperallergic. Each article discusses an existing or emerging theme in practices at the intersection of electronic media and the arts, drawing from the contemporary and the historic, the pervasive and the obscure.
The Internet has bred a certain degree of cultural democratization — citizen journalism, revolts aided by the use of Twitter, the rise to fame of Soul’ja Boy, etc. The same is true to a degree in art, but for the most part older methods of working stay cribbed in older methods of distribution.
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