US Holocaust Museum’s digital collection

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s digital collection — so far, that’s 217,630 records — is available to search online. There are some useful searching tips on the online collection homepage or try browsing within the three set “facets”: record type (e.g., oral history, photograph, document), language, or special collection. Other special features include links to over 3,800 streamable oral history testimonies (roughly 7,600 total hours), downloadable finding aids to over 8,200 archival collections, and over 4,500 films. There is also a link at the bottom of every record, should you need it, to ask a reference question. For more information on searching the collections, click here.

Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten

A Slate essay revisits the iconic Charles and Ray Eames nine-minute film Powers of Ten created for IBM and narrated by physicist Philip Morrison. Illustrated with the video and a “Making of…” slideshow, the essay discusses the ground breaking process behind the awe-inspiring still and aerial photography that captures Chicago.

Art|Architecture on Film series at UCSB

There’s a terrific series of films showing in the next couple of months at the new Pollock Theater on campus.  The series is co-presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Carsey-Wolf Center, and the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (formerly the UAM and ADC).

The series kicks off on Sunday, Jan. 15 with The Universe of Keith Haring (2008) at 1pm and Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, (2010) at 3pm.  There are two movies showing on each of the following Sundays: Jan. 15, 22, Feb. 12, 19, March 4 and 11, with a wine reception at intermission!  You can see the full schedule with synopses here:
http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/artarchitecture

European Film Gateway available online

European Film Gateway (EFG) is a web portal to selected archival material held in European film archives. EFG contains over 26,500 videos, 500,000 still images and 15,000 texts on filmmaking and film-related issues in Europe from the early days until today. You can browse by collection or search for specific videos or images. Most object titles and descriptions come in the language provided by the contributing archive but sometimes translated into English if not the original language.

Additionally, if you subscribe to My EFG, you can receive news alerts and have access to a free personal work space that allows you to bookmark, comment and tag objects within MyEFG.

Creating interactive images with Speaking Image

The online application Speaking_Image lets you create, edit and share interactive annotative images. After uploading images (those without copyright infringement), you can isolate and annotate areas of the image for your viewers. Students can also edit these images so they can create interactive and collective study guides as a group (edits are listed so everyone knows when and by whom an image is edited). For further information, check out video tutorials here and an example using Picasso’s Guernica.

New applications for social media in museums

More and more museums are now using social media and other new technology both to engage their existing audience in new ways and to bring in a new audience.   Forward-thinking museums are creating iPhone apps and Facebook pages with interactive elements, and posting myriad content on their websites.

There are also interesting new partnerships among museums.  One such collaboration is ArtBabble, a site with video content from 60 partner museums (including short curator talks, conversations with artists,  full  lectures, performance pieces, and more).

Some institutions, like the Guggenheim, are inviting video input which they post on their site YouTube Play.  A recent call for content received 23,000 submissions!

If you want to read more, there’s a good profile in the New York Times of  people directing innovative social media initiatives at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Experiencing the earthquake in Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai

Culture Monster has posted a video someone took during Friday’s earthquake while braving it out under a desk in Mediatheque cultural center in Sendai. As Christopher Hawthorne points out, both the length of the quake and the sway of the building are amazing to watch, especially since the structure seems to survive roughly intact.

Public domain newsreels and films online

Two wonderful sources for public domain film footage are available online

• Universal Newsreels: created between 1929 and 1967, these newsreels cover the major topics of the day.  They were put into the public domain by University City Studios.   (There are also many more recent pieces of news footage in this college.)
• Prelinger Archives:   a collection of “ephemeral” film: amateur, advertising, educational  and industrial material from a variety of government and commercial sources.

Try a search on “atom bomb” in either collection – in addition to several still-shocking film images, you’ll find the original “Duck and Cover” Civil Defense film.

Wiki-Art, and The Johnny Cash Project

Neal Gabler has a very interesting essay in the LA Times today about communal culture in art – from collage and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to music and film sampling, and the fine line between collaboration/sharing and appropriation.  He fears the loss and intangibility of authorship, while recognizing the seemingly limitless  freedom allowed through new technologies.

One currently active example of internet collaboration is The Johnny Cash Project (called a “global collective art project”), where contributors are given one frame of a video to re-interpret through online drawing tools.   The finished video will be made up of hundreds of  individual frames and will accompany the release of  “Ain’t No Grave,” Cash’s final studio recording.