Finally Tate has bundled its vast archive of talks, performances and videos into a neatly constructed video application. The BT Tate Player is yet another example of a site specific YouTube alternative - other good ones are TED and Fabchannel.Tate was one of the first museums in the world to record and archive its events online, but never had a good infrastructure to display this rich collection. The Tate Player encompasses audio and video of Tate’s events, and adds new Tate Shots and existing audiovisual works from the Tate Modern collection, such as videos by Gilbert & George, and interviews with Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt.

Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media, said: “It’s an exciting project with limitless potential and we’re delighted to be able to share with a broader audience the original audiovisual content of the Tate Archive.”

The new design and interface is a major improvement, however the search function remains complex. Search results are expected to be related to the Tate Player, but instead give links to the whole Tate Online site. Hopefully Tate will see this flaw in the logic of the service and it will correct this. Other than that, it is yet a step forward to opening up the museum.

Tate Player

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A live Madagascar hissing cockroach; a giant blue nose that sneezes spray at visitors; an I-beam on which visitors precariously perch; chronicles of epidemics; creatures that sting and bite; Imax footage of Hurricane Katrina hitting the bayou: These are the signs of an aggressive and sometimes distressing world that emerge at the ambitious $109 million transformation of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

The center, which reopened yesterday after two years of construction, has been rethought and reshaped, with the goal of doing nothing less than reinventing the science museum.

Read full article (New York Times, July 20, 2007)

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62 years after its liberation by the Allied Forces The Bavarian concentration camp Flossenbürg opens as a museum:

An estimated 30,000 prisoners lost their lives at Flossenbuerg in the southern German state of Bavaria. Many of them were from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including Jews from Hungary and Poland, as well as political prisoners from Germany.

From its founding in 1938 to its liberation on April 23, 1945, by American troops, more than 100,000 people were detained at the camp and its more than 90 external branches.

“I bow my head in front of you,” Bavarian Governor Edmund Stoiber said in a speech to the 84 former prisoners who participated in the ceremony. ”We will do everything to make sure that you will never be forgotten.”

Read full article (ynetnews.com, July 22, 2007)
Flossenbürg on Wikipedia