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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/im...

Here's a better link

Very cool!

Take your laptop, the freedom to transfer your photos locally, and ready internet access with wifi will make it worthwhile. There are internet cafes around, but it'll be more fuss to find one and time out of your vacation, rather than just packing a power convertor and changing your wifi settings.

Other things you might want to do in London could include:

• The Tate Modern
• The London Eye (book in advance!)
• The Science Museum

Of course, there are many other things too as people will list below, London is a big place with lots to see and do, enjoy your trip!

-- Pete.

"The Variable Media Network proposes an unconventional new preservation strategy that has emerged from the Guggenheim's efforts to preserve its world-renowned collection of conceptual, minimalist and video art and that is supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. The aim of this affiliation is to help build a network of organizations that will develop the tools, methods and standards needed to implement this strategy."
http://variablemedia.net/

"Matters in Media Art is a multi-phase project designed to provide guidelines for care of time-based media works of art (e.g., video, film, audio and computer based installations). The project was created in 2003 by a consortium of curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from New Art Trust, MoMA, SFMOMA and Tate. The consortium launched its first phase, on loaning time-based media works, in 2004, and its second phase, on acquiring time-based media works, in 2007."
http://moma.org/explore/collection/conservation/media_art
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/

"From March to December 2003, the archive team of V2_Organisation (a center for culture and technology in Rotterdam, the Netherlands) has conducted research on the documentation aspects of the preservation of electronic art activities -- or Capturing Unstable Media --, an approach between archiving and preservation."
http://capturing.projects.v2.nl/

"DOCAM's main objective is to develop new methodologies and tools to address the issues of preserving and documenting digital, technological and electronic works of art."
http://www.docam.ca/en/?cat=17

"Inside Installations: Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art is a three-year research project (2004-2007) into the care and administration of an art form that is challenging prevailing views of conservation."
http://www.inside-installations.org/home/index.php

It was Merda d'Artista and a simple search for "artist shit" on Wikipedia would've sufficed, no need to risk Tubgirl links on Google ;)

But the most interesting thing about it was that the people who bought it *weren't* idiots. According to this article, the can was originally priced the same as gold, but had you bought gold instead your $37 investment would be worth $374 today, a far cry from the $25.000-35.000 estimated value for the art world's favorite poop can, let alone the $67.000 the last one sold for.

It remains to be seen, however, if the same will happen with this app.

I was at an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London called Global Cities a few weeks back and it was based around one simple fact:

For the first time in human history, more than 50% of Earth's population lives in cities. They figure by 2050 it will be up to 80%.

Hey that's unfair! My "Shopping list written in blue crayon #1" drawing is due for exhibition in the Tate Modern starting Spring 2007.

Book early to avoid disappointment.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Did Lewis really mean for the Chronicles of Narnia to be a parable of chrisianity?

Yes.

Whether he did or didn't is irrelevant, what matters is what the reader chooses to believe.

Nonetheless, that was his intention, and I'd contend that it's not irrelevant. Many works of art and literature require you to consider the context in which they were created, and you're going to understand more about Narnia if you consider the time it was written, Lewis' aims and beliefs, his arguments with Tolkein, etc.

Even minimalist visual art -- designed to be completely unrepresentative so that the viewer can ascribe their own meaning -- is more interesting to me when I'm told about the art culture of the period when the work was created.

When we see Dali's lobster telephone today, we thing "ooh, that's sort of surreal; a lobster telephone; it's like the sort of thing you'd see on a psychedelic album cover". It's instructive to learn about the shock the piece provoked when it was created.

Modern works often come with instructions about how they should be exhibited (in fact some works don't exist except as a concept -- the gallery implements the concept from the artist's "recipe" -- e.g. Sol LeWitt's "Six Geometric Figures.

So if a painter delivers a triptych to a gallery with the instructions "all three panels to be aligned horizontally, positioned 3 feet from the floor, against a white wall, with 2 inches between each panel", how is that different to "I would prefer you to listen to this piece of music in its proper context, alongside the rest of the pieces on the album"?

Do you think he has any say in how the public interacts with his art? I wonder if he even knows what Chicago is doing, or if he'd be able to stop it?

So I guess I'll never win the Turner Prize with my 7337 combination of The GIMP/Script-Fu and GD/Freetype.

Well, some of the conceptualists of the 60's, 70's and beyond were working on these exact topics: What is an, "original". For example:

Mike Bidlo Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1969), 1991 is basically an exact copy of a piece Warhol made, although Mike specifically says that it's not.

Here's what has to be understood: unless the computer understands a concept of the work, it'll never understand what could be an original, or a fake. That may take a bit of AI :)

Also, I think Campbell's never sued Warhol (or waited a really long time) because his paintings actually helped sales of Campbell's soup.

Warhol got famous on those paintings, and promptly got sued for his poppy paintings by the original photographer.

William Blake held Isaac Newton up as an example of stale, dry, Atheistic reason. The famous drawing I have linked to here is that of his conception of Newton, sitting in a dry desert, playing with a compass.

What would have been if Blake would have read some of Newton's writings on theology, I wonder?

You might want to look at Harold Cohen, the author of AARON. You might also be interested in a talk he did after retiring at the Tate (real format). I don't think that it's entirely clear whether the paintings are the work, or the program is the work.
AARON however, was capable of creating representation images, which requires AI work in of itself. I am not sure (without perusing the code) much K++ is intelligent.

This is an emotional, post-modern exploration of our memories in a digital context. I am very moved indeed. This will, prehaps, give birth to an entire new genre of digital art, that of Graphical User Interface Nostalgic Fantasy. Perhaps we could open an exhibition at the Tate Modern?

This reminds of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's remarkable art installation 40 Part Motet, which represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the Millennium Prize at the National Gallery of Canada.

Cardiff recorded Spem in Alium nunquam habui, written by Thomas Tallis in 1575. The piece is unique in that was designed for eight choirs of five people each. Cardiff made her recording by capturing each voice separately and on its own track. The piece is then played back over a circle of forty speakers in the installation space (here's how it looked at the Tate). I saw it when it was at the National Gallery, where it was set up in the Gallery's Rideau Chapel.

The effect is breathtaking - from outside the room it sounds like a normal choral piece, but once inside your perspective changes. By standing in the middle of the circle you can feel the voices blend and wash over you. You can then walk up to each of the speaker sets and hear that group's harmony. Step closer and you can hear each individual voice. By moving around the room you can experience different parts of the sound sculpture.

When the piece ends there is complete silence. After about a minute you can hear rustling and whispering from speakers as the choir gets ready, and then the piece begins again. You have to hear it to understand.

The end result is a complete immersive 3-dimensional aural experience that, like the organ, would be completely impossible to replicate with one, two, or even a handful of speakers.

Someone should sue this guy. Really.

Modern art has always confounded me. This is on display at the Tate gallery. I think I've seen this somewhere before... hmm....