Deconstructing, Reconstructing and Tidying Up Art

In this Wednesday's post, exhibit viewers re-choreograph Henri Matisse’s Dance II and a Swiss comedian cleans the floor of Vincent van Goh’s Vincent’s Room, Arles. Yes, you read that correctly, what I have to share today is as glorious and odd as it sounds. It has taken me quite some time to settle down long enough to write this post- I have been rather distracted by these projects and videos. I know you will be too…sorry in advance… Let’s first take a look at Intel’s newest project in its Visual Life campaign- “Remastered: A Visually Smart Production from Intel.” Showcasing the work of leading curators and innovative designers, the exhibit on display at London’s One Marylebone explores and pushes the boundaries between art and technology; more specifically, between “old art” and Intel’s newest processing technology. The result, you ask? A sound installation remake of Wassily Kandinsky’s On White II, an online application of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a moving image rendering of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, a food design and photography adaptation of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, a visual animation of J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed-The Great Northern Railway, and a stereoscopic, and 3D animation of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (a special favorite of mine), just to name a few. Collaborating with jotta, Intel’s curatorial and creative partner, the artists “remastered” select classic works of the world’s greatest masters using digital processes to give new meaning to “old art” for a modern audience.

…The exhibition unlocks the creative potential of technology and underlines how visual masterpieces can be created with simply a mouse as a brushstroke or a screen as a canvas.

Exhibitions like these generate much discussion in both the academic and professional art world, as the issue of the digitization of art remains a hot topic of debate. What is most inspiring about these remastered pieces is the beauty in the medium. As an art history student and Italian Renaissance aficionado, I am neither offended nor resistant to the digital world’s claim it can reproduce or master painterly qualities and techniques in its own medium. It is important to view these “remastered” pieces not as competitors of the original work, but as showcases of the power, potential and influence technology has in the modern artistic process.

If you are familiar with Turner’s oeuvre, be sure to view Eric Schockmel’s 3D animation of the painting, Rain, Stream and Speed- The Great Northern Railway. Known for his unsurpassed ability to render light, Turner’s work is an experience of the Sublime, an aesthetic theory originating in the 18th-century. Schockmel’s stunning remastering addresses themes consistent in Turner’s work. But can the advanced technology of 3D modeling, animation software, Adobe After Effects and sound design create an experience of the Sublime, a theory developed in response to a level of advanced and dramatic painterly techniques? Or is it unfair to project such standards and theories on the entirely unique and individual medium of digital art? Do we need to develop a new vocabulary with which to discuss it? The artists featured have contextualized the meanings of the “old art” in today’s modern and digital age. As jotta's head of creative, Ben James stated

The broad range of work and outcomes exhibited within Remastered help demonstrate how technology is being adopted practically and conceptually by artists and designers across all disciplines. The intersection of technology and art has gone far beyond its creation on a computer to a symbiotic relationship -- one where new technology offers new opportunities to the artist or designer who, in return, provides ever-evolving experiences and contexts to our relationship with technology.

If nothing else, each artist’s unique interpretation of the work makes viewing the remastered piece and accompanying videos a worthwhile activity on this midweek, midday Wednesday (Bompas & Parr’s redesign of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper is a good place to begin, it will surely amaze you).

Ok, on to my next obsession. Have you heard of Ursus Wehrli? No? It’s okay. I had not either before viewing his TED Talk. Since then, however, I am either always a) re-watching his talk or b) mentally rearranging and reorganizing the components and forms of any given painting into tidy stacks. My new guilty pleasure is the TED Talk “Ursus Wehrli tidies up art” given by Wehrli, a Swiss comedian, cabaret artist and

…the author of Tidying Up Art, a visionary manifesto that yearns toward a more rational, more organized and cleaner form of modern art. In deconstructing the work of Paul Klee, Jasper Johns and other masters into its component parts, organized by color and size, Wehrli posits a more perfect art world

Take your Wednesday lunch break with Wehrli as he taps into your confusions and Type A tendencies when it comes to viewing and understanding contemporary art. The talk will surely elicit laughter; proceed with caution when at work.

And again, my apologies for any drastic drop in productivity at work or school as a result of time spent transfixed by the digitally remastered masterpieces or watching, and re-watching, Wehrli’s convincing contemporary art cleaning spree.

Building online community: sketchcrawl.com

Seven years ago Enrico Casarosa, an artist working for Pixar went on a pubcrawl. He writes that the spirit of community inspired him to create a community for visual artists that he called Sketchcrawl. The first Sketchcrawl happened in 2004 in over 20 locations in six countires. Since then, there have been 33 Sketchcrawls and the event has grown to almost a hundred locations in over 20 counties and now has a website sketchcrawl.com.  The community now has over 3000 members and is still growing.  At first, only Enrico was moderating, but Sketchcrawl has since grown to have numerous other worldwide administrators organizing participation and the community has strong leadership in both Asia and Europe as well as in North America.

A Sketchcrawl is a day predetermined thoughout the world, where artists young and old, professional and amateur pledge to sketch for anywhere from 20 minutes to 8 hours.  The results of the event day are posted online for the whole worldwide community to see.  There are  some true gems in these online galleries. Participants speak of both the reward and difficulty of committing to draw for an entire day.  They recount the lucidity that comes from a full day of observation and moving from subject to subject.  They also comment on the difficulty of focusing their attention for so long. Side by side, these artists are creating a community through a shared experience and their love of art. Alongside their peers the collection of images lead us through a sense of movement throughout the day and objects and people that once were ignored as mundane become visible and interesting.

This community, built through a mutual love of the arts, is a strong sign of the growth of the arts online and should give the arts community at large hope for the future in the face of declines elsewhere.  The next Sketchcrawl is on January 21, 2012.  It is easy to sign up and there are also multiple social network sites for the community at large and for individual city groups.

Crowdsourcing Creativity

At a TED talk earlier this year, Aaron Koblin, an artist “specializing in data and digital technologies”, began his talk by drawing attention to a tweet from a media theorist: “19th century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century culture by cinema, the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface.”

I need this blank space

Now let’s deter ourselves from contemplating how we live in a world where tweets have become the new medium for philosophic aphorisms. Instead, let’s contemplate the interface, which means “a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings.” Some thoughtful seconds later we can begin to comprehend the importance of the interface and how it has provided the world with numerous platforms for communication, the most important of them being the Internet.

Space

 need this blank space

And this overwhelming ability to interact and communicate has given rise to another interesting phenomenon; crowdsourcing. Essentially, crowdsourcing is a means of relegating a specific problem or a task to members of the public and it provides access to something that was virtually impossible in the pre-Internet, pre-interface era; the collective brainpower of the wired world.

I need space

So what does a digital artist like Aaron Koblin create in the era of the interface? How does Koblin proceed when it dawns on him that he can explore the creative processes of the online world? He proceeds by surrendering his own paintbrush and easel but providing a whole host of individuals electronic canvases, paints, and paintbrushes; Koblin crowdsourced his art, he crowdsourced creativity.

Space

More specifically, he used the crowdsourcing capabilities provided by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create art. For his first project, Koblin created a drawing tool and paid people 2 cents to draw a sheep facing the left. And thus he began collecting sheep, drawings and drawings of sheep, 10,000 sheep. At the end of the project, he created a website called thesheepmarket.com, where he sold a block of 20 sheep as a “one-of-a-kind plate block of lick-able adhesive stamps.”

Space

pace

And technologically acute, brilliant artists, such Koblin do not crowdsource just once, they crowdsource again, and again. Some of his other incredible projects are Ten Thousand Cents and a Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, both of which demonstrate the extent and power of human collaboration made possible today, notwithstanding the lack of context and monetary gain.

Space

The most recent of his pursuits is The Johnny Cash Project; “ a global collective art project”,  where people from around the world can contribute to making the music video for the song, Ain't No Grave, which was Cash’s final studio recording. In collaboration with a host of people, archival footage of Johnny Cash was used to create a video for Ain't No Grave, which was then cut into several different frames. More specifically, the footage was cut into eight frames per second, leaving people with an ample number of frames for, albeit mouse-driven, creative expression.

Space

pace

As such, anyone anywhere in the world, could, and still can, re-create and render a frame from the footage using the drawing tools provided to them on the website. All of these frames become inter-weaved and form a final video homage to the great Johnny Cash that is cohesive yet disjointed, anonymous yet personal.

Space

Crowdsourcing, of course, is not limited to the field of artistic creation, for it can spark, even set ablaze, inspiration and innovation in almost any field.  Earlier this year, we read about how an entire opera production was crowdsourced! And ever since, the phenomena has only led to more sighs of delight, awe, and more recently, exclamations of eureka!

Space

The concept behind fold.it, a website where users “solve puzzles for science”, is none other than that of crowdsourcing. An article in the Smithsonian magazine takes note of some of the other organizations that have used crowdsourcing; NASA, Harvard researchers, and the European Space Agency. Yet another article in the Washington Post mentions how the Dead Sea Scrolls project by Google opens the door for “amateur detectives to seek clues that elude scholarly academics.”

Space

Even museums can no longer hide, not even behind their impressive forest of columns in the Ionic order, from the phenomenon that is crowdsourcing. The Concord Museum in Boston recently celebrated its 125th anniversary with the exhibition titled  “Crowdsourcing a Collection”, which was “curated by 25 selected individuals drawn from literary, arts, or political circles.”

Space

For arts organizations, crowdsourcing is a innovative way to engage, communicate, interact, and participate with your audience. So when faced with a vexing problem or task, why defer from asking the wired world to aid and guide you? If you were waiting for a call from the savvy technological beyond, here it is; crowdsource creativity, crowdsource innovation.

Online is the New Offline: Trends in Social Media

InSites Consulting is a European consulting firm with offices in Belgium, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Romania and a soon-to-be office in New York. The firm serves various industries from travel to media and retail to health and produces cutting-edge research focused on branding, customer experience, innovation, and marketing insights. I stumbled upon this InSites presentation (oh happy day), and subsequently, a selection of the firm’s previous presentations (look to the right of the presentation view for additional goodies). It is far too rich in its research, insight and empirical evidence to hoard for myself-it had to be shared.

Titled “Social Media Around the World 2011,” the presentation supports what we at Technology in the Arts continually emphasize for all organizations in today’s digital age and especially for not-for-profit arts organization: you can no longer ignore the power of social media.

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Even in the absence of raw data (for those of us who are skeptical of the methods used to collect the data and the empirical research presented) the message is more than convincing: with such a wide and growing audience, social media is the future of branding, marketing and networking. So, take a look at the presentation and once the shock-factor of what you just read settles, share with us.

With such a high percentage of people around the world already logged in and logged on, how can you maximize the utility of online social networking tools to brand and expand your not-for-profit arts organization?

What Makes Me, innovation from Down Under.

There’s a project going on in Australia that is the largest online digital storytelling project in the country. The project invites people to tell stories about what has made the arts special to them and how they’ve been touched by the arts. They tell their stories through audio, video and writing. The cool thing about it is, anyone in Australia can do it.  As of today, it has several thousand entries. The project was launched in July of 2010 and the results are aggregated into a into a giant, growing testimonial page with search-able contents by genre.

This website is called “What Makes Me”. There are three different sections: What Makes Me, What Makes You, What Makes Us. Each person claims a cube, a cleverly designed multimedia enabled object online and they decorate it with their images, video, and audio files.  Each one is very different. The first twelve entries talk about why each individual loves a certain art form or forms - whether it be dance, circus arts, graffiti or something else.  All of them are touching and told from the heart.  There’s a retired nurse that found out her next door neighbor was a circus performer and has since fallen in love with the circus. There’s a professional rugby driver who drives around looking at the graffiti all over the city. There’s a professional cook who while catering a party, discovered dance for the first time and has since developed a personal relationship with the choreographer.

The common thread that runs between most of these testimonials is the personal connection built with a specific artist or the arts in their neighborhood. It’s about relationships, rather than facilities, and community as the key to these relationships.

The idea around this project was to counteract the perception that the arts in Australia are “associated with images of snobbery and inaccessibility”.   The project is run by a company called Wanted Digital and initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts.  The participants of What Makes Me are cooperating to build something together- it’s a game.  A game that is getting the attention of philanthropic organizations in the US.  Wolf Brown recently used this interactive project as an example of participation in the arts in their recent study commissioned by the Jame Irvine Foundation “Getting In On the Act - How arts groups are getting opportunities for active participation”.

What Makes Me is worth taking a second look at. The project engenders enthusiasm that isn’t created from simply being a spectator.  Anyone in Australia can be a part of it and there is a hefty presence on the site from diverse populations with Aboriginal people, the disabled, and immigrant communities being well represented. Participants post links to their cube, to their facebook, to their twitter, to other social media sites. The individual act of creation combined with the community have a ground swell effect and foster even deeper love for individual artists and the arts contributions to the community.

Hear Art Everywhere with Locally Toned

It’s a curse of our society. Modern innovation has led to the grotesque abomination, the “cell phone ringtone”. Obnoxious and pervasive at best, invasive and stupid at worst, you will hear them anytime, any place, and might hear one even now (you should get that – I’ll wait). Consider, though, what if cell phone ringtones were art? Sounds can be art, so why can’t the sounds coming out of your phone be works of art? T. Foley, a Pittsburgh based artist, tackles that question with her “public art/original ringtone creation project”, Locally Toned. Users can create and download unique ringtones for free from the Locally Toned website, and to date 11,103 ringtones have been downloaded. I had a chance to speak with Ms. Foley on her work with the ubiquitous ringtone…

Locally Toned Collaborator Krista Martin poses with a ringtone creator at the Uniontown Poultry Association's fall show

Can you speak a little on how your work democratizes art? Why is this important to you? How do you see the Internet as a component of it?

Thanks for visiting with me, Rachael.

I have a background in media literacy, so I’m interested in people having access to a wide variety of media, and the skills and tools that allow them to produce and analyze media for themselves. Locally Toned democratizes art because it’s produced with others and for others. I’m not an artist working alone in a studio producing ringtones to sell to others. I collaborate with people to turn sounds that are meaningful and/or interesting to them into ringtones. This past weekend I went to the Uniontown Poultry Association’s Fall Show in Fayette County to capture bird sounds with the help of that community. And I collaborate with technologists such as Deeplocal and other artists, Encyclopedia Destructica, to get the tones to the public/onto phones. Deeplocal  built the technology for the project; Encyclopedia Destructica helped me to design distribution techniques (the ringtone art cards). Unlike paintings or sculptures for sale in a gallery, which many people can’t afford, people may own and share these works free-of-charge.

An example of the ringtone art cards

As conceptual artist Robert Smithson expressed in a 1972 essay entitled “Cultural Confinement,” for Artforum, some works of art, when placed in galleries, loose their charge. Locally Toned is that type of work--one may listen to the tones online, but the real audience for the project exists anywhere a user who’s downloaded the tones receives a call on his/her cell phone. The work performs itself at unexpected times and in unexpected places, outside traditional art spaces (galleries and museums).

My boyfriend likes to say that Locally Toned gives people a “sneak-attack” ability. When some of the more unusual tones go off in public, it creates a little scene. For example, the LRAD tone went off one day on my phone at Deeplocal. The CEO assumed it was a fire alarm and told everyone in to exit the building. I let them know it was a false alarm--I was just testing out the sonic canon ringtone.

The tones function as conversation starters. I often use tones from the Bayernhof Museum. When they go off in public, strangers ask me to identify the sounds. Then I tell them about the nearby museum for mechanical musical instruments. The conversation is usually short, but there’s an unexpected exchange that occurs as a result of the tones.

Ringtones are an invention of modern technology, what drew you to use them as a medium? Is there a benefit to using ringtones in your work as opposed to other technologies?

I had always wanted to make ringtones for my phone, and a “call for artists” from Deeplocal inspired me to develop this project. I was also motivated by a strong dislike for music industry and pre-installed ringtones on cell phones--I wanted to make tones that were more interesting or beautiful. Then I became curious about what other people would do if they had the opportunity to make ringtones. And with my media literacy background, I wanted to model that it’s possible to make and share homegrown ringtones.

I use technology to connect and share with others--recording equipment to make the tones, photography to document the sounds, the Web site to distribute the ringtones, and the Blog to promote the stories behind the sounds that are created. Technology helps to extend my work and ideas out into the world. I like what Lawrence Lessig says about on- and off-line sharing economies in his book Remix (http://remix.lessig.org/).

“Gifts in particular, and the sharing economy in general, are thus devices for building connections with people. They establish relationships and draw upon those relationships. They are the glue of community.”

Locally Toned is public art through service to the community—a series of production, promotion and distribution interactions between the public and myself. New social interaction spaces (physical and cyber) are developed around the making and sharing of these tiny aural documentaries, or soundscape snippets. The tones serve as audio identifiers for members of various communities. A person might identify as a cyclist and download Erok's Bicycle Bell Tone for use on his/her phone. The tones are also plotted on a ringtone map.

Do you see your work moving into other technologies in the future? If so, are there any technologies in particular you would like to explore?

I like to exploit tools that are easy for people to access and use. Recently I’ve created a live and online performance work with Hector, a shy ventriloquist dummy. In The Dummy Is Present, my re-interpretation of Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, 2010, Hector appears on Chatroulette with an audience behind him. The audience appears in the work as spectators and as part of the show. People may sit behind us passively, watching Hector interact with others online (my computer is projected onto a big screen during the performance), or they may become part of the interaction. Some of the people we encounter online say, “Is this for real?!” Audience members respond by shouting or waving a hello, and they may applaud if the other party on Chatroulette performs for us. The performance has been described as voyeuristic, riveting, and magical--it’s all those things and more. I made the work because I wanted to draw attention to contemporary notions of public and private space, and to consider what it means to have an online presence. The Dummy Is Present is part of a larger body of work, Easy Pieces, a series of live and recorded performances featuring a ventriloquist dummy and myself. I’d like to find an interesting application for Twitter within the larger project, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

With Locally Toned and the work with Hector, I use a particular technology so that I may say something about our experiences with it. And I enjoy making work that evolves and changes over time. With both projects, I never know what’s going to happen next--and that’s really fun for me.

The Dummy Is Present - Photo by Larry Rippel

Do you think Locally Toned will ever reach a conclusion?

Locally Toned is an ongoing project. I’m not a Web developer, but I want to be a good shepherd of the project’s technology so that the archive will remain accessible to the public and so that I may add to the collection for years to come. I’m presently seeking funding to make improvements to the Web site, and to release all the tones in the iPhone format. Within the next year, I’d like to identify other cities to collaborate with. The tones are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike code, and they show up on other folks’ Blogs. It’s great to see people point back to Locally Toned, and see them re-tell stories about the origins of the sounds.

Ms. Foley is also looking for some Pittsburgh local help with her next project,

Who wants to make a ringtone? This month, I will receive a grant from The Fine Foundation to create a new series of tones from the Pittsburgh region. I’m looking for collaborators. People can contact me by email: locallytoned@gmail.com.

And if you thought her Chatroullete dummy performance sounded cool, Pittsburgh has another opportunity to see it live:

The next performance of The Dummy Is Present will take place at The Warhol Museum on the evening of January 6, 2012. More info can be found at the Ventwittoquisms Tumblr.

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So what are you waiting for? Go customize your phone with some art!

IBM: A Century of Avant-Garde Thinking

If asked whether data can be beautiful, many of us in the art world would give the questioner a quizzical look. We would then proceed to answer along the lines of “In the art world, we do not ponder over the beauty of data.” But if we were to pose the same question to IBM, they would nod affirmatively. And it bodes well for us to listen to those at IBM because after a century of trial and error, they have agreed to share some of the reasons behind why data is not only beautiful, but also powerful and astonishing. In celebration of a century of avant-garde thinking, the aptly named IBM THINK exhibit is on display at the Lincoln Center in New York. One of the most striking displays is found at the entrance itself; an incredibly beautiful, 123 foot, digital data wall that “visualizes, in real time, the live data streaming from the systems surrounding the exhibit, from traffic on Broadway, to solar energy, to air quality.”

The IBM Think exhibit is on display at the Lincoln Center in New York until October 23

Once inside the exhibit, which is a veritable visual feast, visitors watch a 12 minute film about “awe inspiring stories of the past and the present”; in essence visitors learn about how the advancements made at IBM have shaped the technological course of the 20th century and the opportunities that lie for “making our world better, today.”

The exhibit concludes with an interactive experience, where visitors can delve into the collective knowledge of the scientific and tech world, from “clocks and scales to microscopes and telescopes, RFID chips and biomedical sensors”, on 40 seven foot screens. Through its data visualization techniques and compelling interactive experiences, the IBM THINK exhibit achieves a rare balance between data analysis and beauty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVrXAsYd1Wk

But the overall theme of the exhibit is not limited to the dissemination of data, rather it poses a grandiose and rather formidable question; how do we use the breakthroughs in the fields of science, technology, and leadership to make the planet a smarter place? So while the BMW Guggenheim Lab experimented with making metropolises better, IBM’s sets its sights on the well-being of the entire world. Is that an audacious quest? Not quite, because if IBM were a person, they would have on their resume, a century of experience in changing the world, written under qualifications.

In fact, not only has IBM propelled the world into the 21^st century, it continues to build up storms in the ever restive sea of our scientific and technological present. For instance, it’s hard to ignore Watson, the IBM self–contained computer system that proves that computers too are capable of placing themselves in jeopardy.  This is because Watson can process natural language and hypothesize between answers, until it arrives at the right answer through weighing different algorithms and determining its confidence level. And Dr. David Ferrucci, the Principal Investigator for the Watson project, is convinced that computer has potential to transform industries such as business and health care.

Let’s also take a look at a technology that may not have created a storm, but perhaps ripples in the much smaller lake of the art world. Earlier this summer, IBM helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art make quantum leaps in art preservation when it installed wireless environmental sensors called Low-Power Motes. These sensors will help the Met monitor the micro-environment through real-time 3D data that will “measure temperature, humidity, air flow, contamination levels, door positions, light levels, and more.” The sensors will help the museum scientists develop correlation models between environmental conditions and the reactions they have on works of art, eventually leading to better models for art preservation.

So in the end, let’s not move forward but backwards. Let’s rewind our clocks back to the year 1911, when IBM’s successor the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation sold products such as employee time keeping systems, punched card equipment, and of all things, automatic meat slicers! Compare meat slicers to Watson or Low-Power Motes and we can begin to appreciate the beauty of data analysis techniques and technological advancements. We can finally begin to nod in unison with IBM.

The Warhol: Art – An App for Droid, iPhone, and iPad

I don’t want to shock anyone, but since my last post, another art museum has released another app. The Warhol: Art is a production of the Andy Warhol Museum and Toura, and perhaps the sarcasm was unwarranted. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that a museum dedicated to such an influential part of pop culture stays on top of the latest pop culture mediums. Andy is a Carnegie Mellon University alum, so I plopped down my three bucks on the Droid Market for this application (available on the Droid, iPhone, or iPad) and proceeded to check it out. This is the Andy Warhol Museum’s third app, and The Warhol: Art is focused on informing the users about the life and art of Andy Warhol, as well as helpful information about the museum itself. The app is useful for those who would like obscure information about Andy’s life (such as his Carpatho-Rusyn heritage) at a moments notice, and great for art history buffs. The Warhol: Art is described as a “behind-the-scenes glimpse” at some of the Warhol’s works of art, especially pieces which are lesser known. Users can explore the life and times of Andy Warhol through sections divided by years in his life. Each section comes with a selection of related art works that he created during the time period. There's a neat "Favorites" function that allows users to star the pieces they like best from these sections. The starred items list can be accessed easily from the first screen of the app, allowing users to check out their favorite pieces quickly. A few select pieces have curator commentary buttons, which I really enjoyed. The Warhol: Art commentary buttons, however, do not actually appear on the pieces that they describe. For example, while viewing Mao, 1972, I clicked on “Curator’s Insight”, only to hear a curator discussing Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series.

Yes, I see and understand how those pieces are related. Yes, I enjoyed the commentary on the piece because I am a huge art nerd. Practically speaking, however, were I a museum patron standing in front of Mao, 1972, hoping to hear more about it, I would be disappointed and perhaps upset to receive commentary on a completely different piece.

I believe mobile applications are quickly becoming a new way to encourage museum patrons to interact with the art, and I applaud the Warhol for encouraging this effort. The Warhol: Art is an informative app chock full of information and great art, including many lesser known and not on display pieces. However, I found some features tedious (see above), while others just did not work (none of the videos would play for me, and I could not zoom in on any of the works – this is could be due to user error).

Overall, this app is great for those who’d like to learn more about Andy Warhol in an informal setting. The Andy Warhol Museum certainly is not alone is releasing an app for art history fanatics, which begs the question: is the next wave of art history coming through our smart phones? Is this the future of education? What do you think?

A Collaborative Affair: When Art Meets Business

One doesn’t often find commonalities between the world of art and luxury automobile technology. While it is common for businesses in different industries to create partnerships, joint ventures, or mergers, the idea of collaboration between businesses and art organizations was often dismissed on the grounds of artistic and monetary differences. But in a world of ever increasing  intersections and interconnections, this notion is fast becoming obsolete and arts organizations are no longer insular entities that are oblivious to their formidable counterparts in the business world. The mutual desire for collaboration between the art and the business world is becoming stronger because one can provide business acumen and technical expertise while the other can leverage its strengths in creative thinking and critical analysis. Hence, when the world of art opens the doors of collaboration to different industries, the results can be unexpected, intriguing, and just plain extraordinary.

A museum that is clearly benefiting from strategic partnerships with companies in the world of business and technology is the Guggenheim. It made headlines in 2010 when it collaborated with YouTube, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard to create A Biennial of Creative Video. Essentially an homage to the world of online video, the biennial enabled Guggenheim to showcase extraordinary videos created by ordinary people in the YouTube community.

A year has passed but the Guggenheim is not one to take an innovation vacation, it has recently partnered with BMW to create the BMW Guggenheim Lab. The lab’s name may lack inspiration but the crux of its efforts will most certainly revolve around the axis of innovation. In fact, the lab is “a mobile laboratory travelling around the world to inspire innovative ideas for urban life.”

Over a period of six years, a team of interdisciplinary vanguards “in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability” will travel to a total of nine cities in an effort to resolve the issues surrounding urban life. The lab will center around a specific theme for each two year cycle, the first of which is Confronting Comfort. The journey has already begun in New York City, where the lab has been hosting a series of free programs and experiments designed to help the public not only confront but also improve comfort in the quintessential metropolis. Next it will travel to Berlin and finally, Mumbai, concluding the first two year cycle with an exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2013.

If you do not happen to live in a sprawling metropolis, you can still play Urbanology; an online game that helps you ideate your dream city after asking you a series of questions that will gauge your societal, moral, and sustainable compass. You can also follow all the events on their blog and read intriguing posts such as “ten tips on using your city as an engine for joy” or “your brain on commuting.”

Apart from the games and interesting events, let’s hope the initiative’s denouement will result in change, both inside and outside the realm of the Guggenheim, because we all know that the power to act on issues that arise in metropolises, such as those of transportation or pollution levels, rests primarily in the hands of the government.

Doubts aside, the Guggenheim BMW lab certainly is a novel and unique project that exemplifies the synergies that arise when two unlikely organizations team up. Earlier this year, an article in the Economist argued that businesses have much to learn from the world of art and the opposite is no less true, the possibilities for mutually beneficial relationships are endless. As for the many arts organizations and corporate businesses that regard each with an air of mere acquaintanceship, it’s time they sat down to have a cup of tea.