Posts Tagged ‘artists’

Google opens music download store, welcomes artists to upload directly

Posted on November 16th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

Google has decided to join the rest of the online music party and begin selling music directly to users. The announcement came during the company’s Google Music event on Wednesday wherein Google announced various changes, improvements, and new features coming to its music streaming service. The most significant announcements, however, revolved around the fact that Google is finally getting on the music-selling bandwagon instead of referring its customers to content partners, and the company will even begin allowing musicians to upload and sell their music directly to customers through the store.

When Google Music went into beta earlier this year, it started out as a streaming-only service. Users could upload their music directly from their music libraries, which could then be played back via the Web to any computer or on any compatible Android devices. Google referred people who wanted to purchase new music to Amazon’s MP3 store, and Google-branded Android devices even began coming with the Amazon music store preinstalled.

Read the comments on this post

Read the original post on Ars Technica

 

“Not for the Squeamish: The History of Artists and Anatomists,” Lecture/Studio Class, Jonathon Rosen, School of Visual Arts

Posted on September 4th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

For all of you New Yorkers out there: friend of Morbid Anatomy Jonathon Rosen has just alerted me to an amazing sounding class he’ll be teaching as part of The School of Visual Art’s continuing education series. He has also asked me to give a lecture as part of the course, so maybe I’ll see you there!

This class is open and available to all; full details below. Hope very much to see you there!

Not for the Squeamish: The History of Artists and Anatomists

ILC-2196-A

T, Sep 20 – Nov 22

Hours: 06:30PM – 09:15PM

2.50 CEUs; $335.00

Course Status: Open

Location: TBA

Register for this class by clicking here!

Temple of the soul or soft machine? The human body is a place where art, science, culture, politics and medicine intersect. This lecture/studio course will focus on artists from ancient to modern who use the body as a point of departure for personal, political, religious or scientific commentary, and will provide an opportunity for students to do likewise. The influence of traditional medical imagery on contemporary art-making and pop culture will be explored through the lens of history, culture and aesthetics. Examples will range from medieval manuscripts and obscure Renaissance medical surrealism through enlightenment era wax-works, Victorian charts and medical devices to Damien Hirst, the virtual human project, Bodyworlds, and beyond. Aesthetic surgery, genetics, biomechanics, medical museums, anatomy in movies, French underground comix and anatomical oddities will also be considered. Your assignment will be to respond to the lectures with several editorial artworks that incorporate medicine or anatomy-be it personal or political, singular or narrative, 2D or 3D, static or moving. Students may use the medium of their choice; projects are not required to be anatomically correct. Prerequisite: A basic drawing, photo-collage or photography course, or equivalent.

Jonathon Rosen

Painter, illustrator, animator

One-person exhibitions include: La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; Adam Baumgold Fine Art; Studio Camuffo, Venice

Group exhibitions include: Triennali, Milan; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; P.S. 1, Contemporary Art Center; Kunstwerk, Berlin; Exit Art

Publications include: American Illustration Annual, Print, World Art, LA Weekly, Eye (London)

Books include: Intestinal Fortitude, The Birth of Machine Consciousness

Clients include: The New York Times, Snake Eyes, Time, Rolling Stone, MTV, Blab!, Sony Music, The Ganzfeld, Details. Journal drawings for Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton, director

Awards and honors include: Gold and silver medals, Society of Publication Designers; artist-in-residence, Harvestworks

Website: http://jrosen.org/

You can find out more–and register!–by clicking here.

Read the original post on Morbid Anatomy

 

Book review: The Map as Art, Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography

Posted on August 25th, 2010 • Filed under Uncategorized • No Comments

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon with essays by Gayle Clemans (available on Amazon UK and USA.)

Princeton Architectural Press writes: Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form.

Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.

Sarah Trigg, Frame 3, 2003

The British Library in London is running until mid-September Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art . The stunning exhibition demonstrates that ancient maps were far more than two-dimensional representation of geography, they were also instruments to intimidate, educate, or inspire pride. If that wasn’t enough for a piece of paper, each of them also ventured into artistic territory.

Today’s cartography is far more composed, and eager to present itself as objective. However, Harmon’s book establishes in 360 maps that maps, plans, atlases and other topographical depiction still inspire artists.

Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Paper plans are all over the book but so are maps made of artist’s hair, drawn on the body, printed onto the sand or turned into large-scale installations. Some maps have a clear activist agenda, others are infused with mental visions, covered with alien-abduction sites, etc.

Although the book presents mostly map art from the past two decades, the introduction has a brief (way too brief) timeline that inventories some of the most famous artists who have used maps in their works, starting in the ’20s with the Surrealists’ Map of the World.

Lars Arrhenius, A-Z

Map As Art is a well-documented, surprising and fascinating book. There is just enough text (lazy bloggers like me jump in horror at the sight of image-less pages): a general introduction to the volume, an essay for each chapter and a brief description of the artworks included in the book. The rest is images over images.

A few map-related works i discovered in the book:

At the heart of Enrique Chagoya‘s lithograph, Road Map lays an egocentric American point of reference that dwarves neighbours Mexico and Canada as well as the rest of the world. The map is populated with images of cultural and ethnic stereotypes as well as tankers, whales, fighter planes, religious figures, dynamite, submarines and oil wells. The two figures in the lower corners represent “Hope” and “Hopelessness”.

Enrique Chagoya, Road Map, 2003

Ingo Günther has been using illuminated globe sculptures as mean to investigate and represent “global” issues, from access to drinking water to rain forest leftovers, from nuclear explosions to death from tobacco use, etc.

Ingo Günther, Worldprocessor, 1988-2005 (image)

In June 2005 Francis Alÿs walked through divided Jerusalem leaving behind him a trail of green paint from a leaking can. His route was the Green Line, drawn on a map after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The Green Line has since been considerably altered, mostly by the Israeli invasion of 1967.

Btw, the best thing you can do if you’re in London,is to run and see his retrospective at Tate Modern.

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2007

Abigail Reynolds‘s Mount Fear series gives a physical, tangible visualization of police statistics relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.

Abigail Reynolds, MOUNT FEAR East London Police Statistics for violent crimes 2002-3, 2003

Harriet Russell sent herself 130 letters. Each envelope was a challenge for the Royal Mail, the address was written in an eye chart, as a colour blind test, a crosswords, on a hand-drawn map, in dot-to-dot drawings, experimental fonts, anagrams and cartoons. Only 10 failed to complete their journey back to her. (more images.)

Mark Bennett draws blueprint architectural renderings of the homes of American sitcom and film characters. For cult tv series The Fugitive, he broadened his field of investigation and tracked Dr. Richard Kimble’s relentless quest for the one-armed man all over the United States.

Mark Bennett, Home of Richard Kimble (The Fugitive), 1999

In 1988, Cheng installed a giant concrete roller on the beach in Santa Monica. The roller is engraved with inverse 3D plates that print a map of Los Angeles in the sand.

Carl Cheng, Santa Monica Art Tool, 1988 (image)

Related stories: Conflux 2008: notes from the panel Cartography of Protest and Social Changes, Situation Room, You Are Not Here, Exploded Views – Remapping Firenze, Real Time Rome.

Related books: Book Review – An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism.

Read the original post on we make money not art

 

Feature: Gnomon School of Visual Effects: training the next generation of effects artists

Posted on July 7th, 2010 • Filed under Uncategorized • No Comments

The Gnomon School of Visual Effects was launched on the premise that those who are actively working in the special effects industry would be in the best position to train others working in the industry, and a classroom setting where pros teach other pros would be the best way to bring about a grand sharing of techniques and ideas. Soon after the school opened for admission, however, it turned out that most of the applications were from folks who wanted to get into the industry—not people who were already in the business and looking to learn new skills. Furthermore, many students entered wanting to work in the world of video games, rather than television or movies. But if you’d like to do any of these things, there are few places better suited to build your skills and find a job.

I was invited to tour the school during my time in Los Angeles for E3, and I jumped at the chance to check out where the people who make games are trained. My tour guide was Alex Alvarez, the Gnomon’s founder and director. I said that I could give up a few hours early in the morning before E3 began, and the PR rep seemed a little taken aback. “Alex is an artist,” I was told. “He’s not going to like getting up that early.” Alvarez met me at Gnomon at 8:30 in the morning, bleary eyed, holding a cup of coffee as if it were a life preserver. 

The school’s stats are impressive: 350 students, and a 98 percent placement rate. The instructors are all working professionals from studios, so they know how the industry is now, not what it was like before they left it to begin teaching. “Every night they’re driving in from Sony or Blizzard or Activision,” Alvarez tells me. “Dreamworks, Digital Domain…” This is something that is constantly stressed: you are being taught by people in the industry.

Let’s take a look at what makes Gnomon School of Visual Effects so special.

Read the comments on this post

Read the original post on Ars Technica