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)

The Lebanese-based organization Hezbollah has denounced an Israeli project to build a museum on the site of a Muslim cemetery in west Jerusalem. Last week, the Supreme Court of Israel decided to give the Museum of Tolerance the go-ahead. The court found that the cemetery dates back 300 to 400 years but fell into disuse after Israel gained statehood in 1948. The court said that since there had been no objections in 1960, when the city built a parking lot over part of the cemetery, it would not block construction of the museum on the same property.

According to Agence France-Presse, Hezbollah spoke against “the profanation of a historical Muslim cemetery in occupied Jerusalem, a profanation authorized by the [Israeli] enemy, which has allowed an American company to build a museum on the site.” The Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein, also denounced “a serious decision” by the Israeli Supreme Court and noted that the building will destroy a Muslim holy site.

Ironically, the Center for Human Dignity - Museum of Tolerance, which has been designed by Frank Gehry, is to be dedicated to promoting tolerance among peoples. The official website calls it “a place that will remind us that greater than any external threat is the internal divide that separates us”. The 3-acre campus will include two museums, a library-education center, a conference center and a 500-seat performing arts theater. The estimated cost of the project is $250 million

Artist’s rendering of Frank Gehry-designed Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem

Take a virtual tour of the museum

Read more:
Israeli court OKs Museum of Tolerance’s controversial branch (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008)
Hezbollah against Gehry Museum in Jerusalem (Artforum.com, Nov 3, 2008)
Arabs rally against building Tolerance Museum atop Muslim cemetery (Ha’aretz, Nov 6, 2008)
Palestinians protest at Israeli plan to build museum on Muslim (Independent, Nov 6, 2008)
Palestinians protest against Museum of Tolerance planned over (Telegraph.co.uk, Nov 6, 2008)

Vanitas Still Life (1650) by Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor is one of Damien Hirst’s personal picks from the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

To accompany the exhibition Hirst has chosen a personal selection from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of 17th-century art, including a haunting vanitas still life. Each painting is accompanied by a personal commentary by Hirst explaining the reasons for his choices. Themes in the exhibition range from the quest for immortality to the inevitability of death, all of which are frequently reflected in the art of the Dutch Golden Age and in Hirst’s own work.

In an attempt to collect the widely differing opinions of those who have actually seen the exhibition, the Rijksmuseum has launched a special website. On their way out, visitors are invited to leave a video message by speaking into a camera. The website shows Hirst’s skull as the shining center of a solar system and a cloud of mug shots of visitors which is orbiting the skull like little stars. Clicking on one of the faces enlarges it and automatically starts the video message.

Van Gogh Museum director Axel Rüger responding to the exhibition on the website of the Rijksmuseum.

Among the ‘talking heads’ are actors, tv celebs, artists and other VIPs, including the director of the neighbouring Van Gogh Museum. In his message (in Dutch) he praises the Rijksmuseum and stresses the historical relevance of Hirst’s work, but he also seizes the opportunity to urge people to visit the other museums in Amsterdam.

Obviously, he is reffering to the Van Gogh Museum itself where they have various depictions of skulls and skeletons on permanent display, including Van Gogh’s hilarious ‘Skeleton with Burning Cigarette‘. On the website of the museum they jokely invite you to come and see ‘their’ skull. That is a clever move, because morbid humor always sells..

Selection of works by Vincent van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum Collection, including ‘Skeleton with Burning Cigarette’ (1886) in the center.

For the Love of God opened to the public on 1 November and remains at the Rijksmuseum for six weeks.

“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)

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.

In a time when everything seems turned up side down, perhaps the museum can even become a place for Americans to come to grips with their own failing financial system. Next year the Museum of Modern Art in New York will stage a solo show of work by Dutch video-artist Aernout Mik, including a film that shows the aftermath of a turbulent day of trading on Wall Street.

Video still from ‘Middlemen’, 2001, by Aernout Mik

In “Middlemen” (2001), standing on a trading floor covered with paper, stockbrokers - some of whom are doubled with dummies - stare off into space with empty expressions. In a lavishly constructed set, Mik stages a swarm of latently catastrophic scenes with tragicomic undertones. The museum as a mirror for disillusioned Americans?

Der Spiegel Online reports that a team of archaeologists, scientists and software programmers has created a 3D virtual model of the city of Cologne as it was 2,000 years ago. Though not yet online, the program allows visitors to navigate a virtual “flight” around the city, where they will find authentic sights, such as the massive city wall and its monumental gates, the forum, the over 40-meter-high (130-foot) Capitoline Temple, the forum with its semicircular portico and the proconsul’s palace.

COLONIA|3D, as the program is called, is the joint initiative of several German universities and Cologne’s Romano-Germanic Museum. Hamburg and Berlin already have 3D city models that allow users to take virtual flights through the cities using Google Earth. Virtual models of other historical places also exist — for example, for Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum — but in a different form. Those were more like computer-generated animations rather than large-scale models that you could navigate.

Go to the Photo Gallery of the 3D Virtual City Model of Roman Cologne.

A European billionaire and contemporary art collector wants to convert an old fingerprinting station on East Fremont Street into a museum that would house his extensive collection. The Finnish born billionaire Poju Zabludowicz owns one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world and already initiated and funded Project Space 176 in London’s East End.

His proposal for a 23,000-square-foot Las Vegas Museum of Contemporary Art also includes a club and restaurant. Terry Murphy, a local consultant representing Zabludowicz (pronounced “zah-blue-DOH-vich”), said the museum would help the city move toward its goal of developing a vibrant downtown and reversing its image as a cultural wasteland.

Read more (Las Vegas Sun, October 10, 2008)

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

CENTQUATRE, a former state funeral parlour at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in north-east Paris will reopen this weekend after being transformed into the city’s most daring modern arts centre. It is the latest attempt to make up for 50 years in which Paris has slipped from a world arts capital to a museum city lacking in dynamism, where exasperated artists live in squats or flee to more vibrant scenes in places such as Berlin.

Photo by Jo

Centquatre will offer cutting-edge workshops, studios and film-sets for artists from all over the world, from directors and sound-sculptors to comic-strip artists and fashion designers. The only pay-off is that they must allow the public to wander through and inspect them at work. Some warn it could become an “artists’ zoo” but others hail a revolution in contemporary cultural workspace.

Go to website CENTQUATRE

Source: The Guardian (October 8, 2008)