After a period I cannot even fathom how long it was an official comeback on the blog. Sorry we have been away, and we even received kind messages of support, but we were very active setting up our new office over here. Since having started using Twitter, my approach to writing and blogging has changed.
However, MuseumLab has a place in our heart and we will try to revive things here, and move it to Non-fiction after I learn how to do so (please let me know if anyone has a plugin for this).
Back to the news. I wanted to share the exclusive story on the Guardian site that one of our favourite architectural firms Sanaa has been invited to design the new Serpentine pavilion. And while I am it, read about the Creative Spaces initiative at the BBC. It is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Join us at Non-fiction.
This entry was written by , posted on februari 24, 2009 at 6:24 pm, filed under Architecture, Heritage, Museum, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Rome, in A.D. 320, as depicted by Google Earth. (© 2008 Procedural Inc)
Rome may not have been built in a day, but a new Google Earth feature will soon allow you to take in a 3-D representation of the ancient city (circa A.D. 320) in a matter of minutes.
Of the 7,000 buildings in the 1.0 version, around 250 are extremely detailed. The others are sketchier and derived from a 3-D scan of data collected from a plaster model of ancient Rome at the Museum of Roman Civilization.
Plaster model of ancient Rome at the Museum of Roman Civilization.
The Google Earth feature could gratify tourists who are disappointed to find that the city’s ancient monuments are in ruins. Information bubbles in the Google Earth feature provide details for more than 250 buildings.
Watch this video to take a short trip to ancient Rome in Google Earth:
To experience Ancient Rome 3D, install the Google Earth software, open Google Earth and select the Gallery folder on the left side of the screen and then click on “Ancient Rome 3D.”
Read more (New York Times, November 13, 2008)
This entry was written by , posted on november 15, 2008 at 2:50 pm, filed under Architecture, Culture, Europe, Heritage, History, Media, Museum, Technology, Tourism, USA, Video, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
“Forget the red-light district, forget the tulip market, and don’t even think about rolling a joint in a coffeehouse. Amsterdam’s Museumnacht has so much to offer, you’ll never see Amsterdam in the same light again.”
English newspaper The Guardian has written an extensive introduction to the Amsterdam museumnacht. Every year, for one night, 41 museums remain open and offer more than 200 free activities to curious visitors. At 2am, when the museums close, the party begins in the nine clubs celebrating the event until dawn.
The even is focussing more and more on non-Dutch visitors, either foreign students and expats, or visitors from abroad. This has resulted a.o. in the new collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam and the cultural newspaper Amsterdam Weekly.
Read the full article, and see you for yourself at n8.nl. Have a great n8!
(disclaimer: as organisor of this event, the editor of this blog is not responsible for any misleading or biassed information. It is really a nice event. Really. Now shoot me)
This entry was written by , posted on oktober 29, 2008 at 4:34 pm, filed under Culture, Entertainment, Exhibition, Heritage, History, Media, Museum, Music, Science, Tourism, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Mind’s Museum in Rome addresses myths about mental illness with participatory exhibits and interactive displays.
Overturning preconceptions about mental illness is the leitmotif of the Mind’s Museum (Museo Laboratorio della Mente) in Rome. The museum reopened this month after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works mostly with interactive and video environments.
Originally, the museum followed a more traditional line, with objects and static panel explanations. But now, the former psychiatric hospital has embraced a dynamic approach and has become more participatory.
In one interactive installation, visitors try to synchronize recorded and mirror images of themselves. In another, visitors sit for a photograph that is projected onto a board along with photos of past patients at the institution, who recount their life stories in sad, lilting taped monologues.
According to the New York Times the Mind’s Museum is a more hands-on experience than other European psychiatric museums like the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium, or the Museum Het Dolhuys in Haarlem, the Netherlands. However, the latter is widely praised for its innovative and humane representation of mental illnesses, even winning a prestigious design award and attracting a lot of attention from both the media and the public.
This entry was written by , posted on oktober 28, 2008 at 6:04 pm, filed under Business, Europe, Exhibition, Museum, Technology, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands is a website set up to preserve the memory of all those who were persecuted as Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War and who did not survive the Shoah. The Digital Monument is an initiative of the late Professor Emeritus Ies Lipschits, but the responsibility for it was transferred to the Jewish Historical Museum.
Each individual has been given his or her own personal page to which photographs, documents and biographical information can be posted. The Monument also helps surviving relatives to explore their roots and visitors to the website are invited to send in corrections to any mistakes and to provide any additional information they may have.
The home page has been designed to look like a real monument to commemorate all those whose names are included in the Digital Monument. Every coloured dot stands for one person. The colours indicate whether the person was a man (blue) or woman (red), a boy or girl between 6 and 21 years of age (green and yellow, respectively) or a child under 6 years of age (light blue or pink). Clicking a dot opens the personal page of the person concerned.
Members of the same family have been placed together. For most of the families, addresses are known. Clicking on a family’s address will take you to the address page for that family. To the left and right you will see the Jewish families who lived closest to them. Clicking on the address of one of the ‘neighbours’ will take you to that family. In this way you can take a virtual walk down the street or through the neighbourhood, village, or city.
The page of Ruth Emilie Sollinger lists several of her personal documents from the Documents Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum. You can also go on a virtual tour of the house of the Jewish De Jongh family lived at 133 Spanjaardslaan in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, before their deportation to Auschwitz in November 1942 where all family members died. The virtual tour allows you to roam through the empty rooms, and provides an overview of all objects that were listed in an inventory before being removed by the Nazi’s.
Go to The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands
This entry was written by , posted on oktober 12, 2008 at 1:08 pm, filed under Culture, Ethics, Europe, Heritage, History, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
“Anatomy of an Angel” (foreground) by Damien Hirst on display at Sotheby’s in London. (Click to watch a video on the website of Sotheby’s)
One thing about the hyped auction of new works by Damien Hirst next week at Sotheby’s in London is immediately impressive: its sheer scale. It would be wrong to compare this to a private gallery show held in an auction house. The size of it, 10 large rooms and more than 200 works, is more like a major career retrospective at Tate Modern.
It feels about the same dimension as the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Tate this summer. But that contained the work of a long lifetime while this is all signed and dated 2008. Nonetheless, joining Rembrandt and Michelangelo in the Pantheon seems to be the final goal.
Interestingly enough, Sotheby’s stock fell 8.4 percent yesterday amid concern that the global art market can absorb only so many dead animals in formaldehyde.
Luckily, museums and their collections are not (yet) publicly traded.
Read more Hirst-news on Bloomberg.com
Watch an interview with Damien Hirst on Bloomberg News Video
Visit the website of Sotheby’s
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Update 16.09.2008 by Juha van ‘t Zelfde
On the day the global financial markets are rocking in the turmoil of a Wall Street meltdown, Damien Hirst is rewriting the economic rules of the art world with his auction of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever , a ‘greatest hits sale’ at Sotheby’s. According to the Guardian, the first night sale brought in a staggering £70.5 million.
Read more at the Guardian and Artforum
This entry was written by , posted on september 12, 2008 at 12:22 pm, filed under Art, Business, Europe, Exhibition, Museum, USA, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Würsa (à 18000 km de la terre) by Daniel Firman, 2006-2008,
installation view, Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau
The Palais de Tokyo in Paris has occupied the Château de Fontainebleau, once the royal residence of King François I, with an exhibition of contemporary art works. The exhibition is dubbed “Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau” and features fifteen artist interventions, including a swing by Roman Signer and an elephant that is hanging from the ceiling by Daniel Firman.
Instead of a “confrontation” with the castle, the exhibition creates a resonance with the castle’s architecture, painting collection, and furniture. “Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau” is the second chapter of an ongoing collaboration between the castle and art institutions. Initiated last year by Bernard Notari, the director of the castle, the project began with the exhibition “Picasso at Fontainebleau.” The current show will run until November 17.
Chateau de Fontainebleau, France
This entry was written by , posted on september 11, 2008 at 12:03 pm, filed under Museum, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
H BOX installation view at Tate Modern in London (Photo: jamesapallister)
Mobile galleries are a current fad sweeping exhibition hubs around the world, like a travelling circus for the cultural crowd. It started with Chanel’s Mobile Art Pod and continues apace with French luxury brand Hermes’ H BOX: a travelling screening space for newly commissioned video art. After the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Musac in Léon and Mudam in Luxembourg, H BOX is currently making a stopover at Tate Modern’s turbine hall, before it will travel to the Yokohama Triennale in Japan.
Designed by artist, architect and designer Didier Fiuza Faustino, the unique structure hosts a rotating, diverse programme of commissioned videos by Alice Anderson, Yael Bartana, Sebastián Díaz-Morales, Dora García, Judit Kúrtag, Valérie Mréjen, Shahryar Nashat, and Su-Mei Tse.
Consisting of two entirely collapsible modules constructed of aluminium and plexiglas, H BOX can be assembled, disassembled and transported as required. Ten people at a time fit into the screening room, which shows the eight videos in succession. The cutting-edge sound and image technology draws viewers deep into the projected art.
H BOX runs till August 17 at Turbine Hall Bridge, Tate Modern, London.
Interior of H BOX at Tate Modern in London. still from film - midway by judit kurtag, 2007 (Photo: jamesapallister).
Watch a clip from the film by Dora Garcia, a Spanish-born, Brussels-based artist, whose work combines video, writing and performance. (Wallpaper.com)
This entry was written by , posted on augustus 4, 2008 at 3:01 pm, filed under Architecture, Art, Asia, Culture, Europe, Exhibition, Media, Museum, USA, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans (as if this city didn’t have enough problems), stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet swarming with giant cockroaches and watch dung beetles plow their way through a mound of waste.
And then you can engage in the museum’s most brilliant interactivity by joining in the line of eager visitors prepared to munch on a handful of crunchy Cajun-fried crickets or scoop up some wax-worm stir fry. Can you imagine eating roasted lion at a zoo or filleted dolphin at an aquarium? But here the admired creatures are served in elaborate dips and sautéed dishes.
Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
Read more: New York Times (August 2, 2008)
This entry was written by , posted on augustus 3, 2008 at 9:14 pm, filed under Environment, Museum, North-America, Science, USA, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Italian bishops and government representatives think Kippenberg’s ‘Zuerst die Füße’ is provocative.
A one-metre high sculpture of a crucified frog, holding a mug of beer and an egg, at a modern art museum in Italy has stirred controversy in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Bolzano. ‘Zuerst die Füße’ by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger is part of an exhibition at Bolzano’s Museion, which opened last May.
Kippenberg, who died in 1997 aged 44, was a painter, sculptor and photographer. Several exhibitions of his work have been held posthumously, including a show at the Tate Modern in London in 2006. His alter ego “Fred the Frog”, who appears on canvas and in sculpture alike, is at the same time a comic stand-in for Jesus, and as a spoof on all religious fervor. In this case Fred the Frog is hammered (literally and figuratively) to a crucifix with a beer stein in his hand.
No matter his cult hero status, the controversy around his sculpture continues unabated. As Der Standard reports, Franz Pahl—an elected government representative for the South Tyrol regional government—is continuing a hunger strike to protest the work’s continued exhibition at the museum’s new facilities According to the newspaper, Pahl promises to end his strike only when the sculpture is removed.
Read more on Artforum.com
This entry was written by , posted on juli 31, 2008 at 12:16 am, filed under Art, Ethics, Europe, Exhibition, Museum, USA, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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