This project caught our attention.

Press Release

For Immediate Release
Frankfurt am Main, 26 July 2011

Film archives showcase their collections: The European Film Gateway is online

After nearly three years of preparation and development, the European Film Gateway – EFG –  http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu is now online. The Internet portal to the digital collections of European film archives and cinémathèques offers free access to currently about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials. By September, the number of digital items will increase to 600,000 from 16 film archives.

“The European Film Gateway creates a central online access to Europe’s film heritage for the first time. Previously, this remarkable record of 20th century European cinema had been dispersed on different national platforms,” says Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. “Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film.”

“EFG also provides access to material in film archives that was hitherto hardly known, and some is now online for the first time,” says project manager Georg Eckes. These include unique magic lantern slide collections from France, erotic films made in Austria in the early 20th century, advertising films from Norway, newsreels from Lithuania and a comprehensive film poster collection from Denmark. Hidden treasures can be discovered from 15 European countries. Cinecittá Luce from Rome, for example, contributes not only a famous Italian newsreel collection reporting on important film-related events and persons, but also a fine collection of early films by great masters like Rossellini, Antonioni, Comencini, and other famous names of Italian filmmaking. An extensive collection of set photos to films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder contributed by the Deutsches Filminstitut will be available for the first time online from August on.

Users of the portal can search for people, for example Marlene Dietrich, but also by film title or keywords. They get an overview of related digital objects from the film archives which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal always links back to the website of the relevant archives, and therefore also works as a search engine for selected digital holdings of European film archives.

The European Film Gateway as a building block of Europeana

EFG is a component of Europeana, the platform for the cultural heritage of Europe. EFG gathers the indexing and access information, so-called “metadata”, and provides it to Europeana in a structured form. By doing so, the European Film Gateway and Europeana bring together the collections of European film archives with holdings of libraries, archives and museums in Europe, and put them in a transnational and multicultural context.

I thought this could be of some interest for some museum people.

ElipseAR is a set of tools for Augmented Reality and Computer Vision development. Thanks to that toolkit features like image matching and tracking, 3D animation rendering, geolocation using the camera view, face recognition, … will be easy to integrate on your AR project. All those tools are free for commercial use.

Visit the site HERE.

Create your own digital silkscreen print, just like Andy Warhol would have with the Warhol: D.I.Y. POP app from The Andy Warhol Museum.

Using your built-in camera or a photo from your library as source material, you’ll learn the Warhol process step by step. Crop. Expose. Underpaint. Share. And print a virtual silkscreen. While you’re at it, meet artists and curators from The Warhol who demonstrate silkscreen printing and give you inside information on Warhol and his art.

Learn more about The Andy Warhol Museum and connect with us all over the web.

“In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
— Andy Warhol

Now available on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Click here to download now.

Get your Warhol in The Warhol.

To celebrate the release of our new app – The Warhol: D.I.Y. Pop – we are having a contest to give you the unique opportunity to have your creation on display in the Museum!
How it Works:

Starting on July 11, The Warhol will choose images created with the Warhol: D.I.Y. Pop app daily to feature within the Museum. Each image will be on display for 15 days.
To enter via Twitter:

1. Download The Warhol: D.I.Y. Pop app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
2. Create your digital screenprint
3. Use the ‘Share’ feature in the app and select ‘Share on Twitter’.
4. Post your screenprint to Twitter, making sure to use the built-in hashtag “#warholDIY” and @thewarholmuseum.

To enter via Facebook:

1. Download The Warhol: D.I.Y. Pop app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
2. Create your digital screenprint
3. Use the ‘Share’ feature in the app and select ‘Share on Facebook’
4. Post your screenprint to Facebook
5. Change your active profile photo to your screeprint
6. Post on the Museum’s wall at www.facebook.com/thewarholmuseum

Visit the site for more info: http://www.warhol.org/diypop/

Our lovely friend Helen Papagiannis did it again: what a nice new AR app! On her blog Helen writes: “I’d like to present the first AR Pop-up Book for mobile devices using image recognition (a.k.a. regular images to trigger augmented content, as opposed to the black and white square glyphs that are common in AR). Integrating image recognition in the design, the book can hence be enjoyed alone as a regular pop-up book, or supplemented with augmented digital content when viewed through a mobile device equipped with a camera, such as an iPad 2 or iPhone 4.

Playful rhyming text takes you through the storybook where various ‘creepy crawlies’ (spider, ant, and butterfly) are awaiting to be discovered, appearing virtually as 3D models you can interact with. A tarantula attacks when you touch it, an ant hyperlinks to educational content with images and diagrams, and a butterfly appears flapping its wings atop a flower in a meadow.”

Helen Papagiannis is a designer, PhD researcher and artist specializing in Augmented Reality (AR). She is available for commercial work, commissions, consulting and speaking engagements. Helen has been working with AR since 2005 designing and building prototypes to explore the creative possibilities and theoretical implications for this exciting new medium. This blog documents a small sample of her work. Contact Helen to inquire about further work and collaborations.

Perhaps this announcement of Google today could be something for you:

“Today, we’re excited to announce a brand new tool to help your business get “mobile”-ized: Google Sites mobile landing pages.  With Google Sites mobile landing pages, you can build yourself a professional mobile landing page in minutes, for free — and without any coding experience.

Why use Google Sites mobile landing pages?

• It’s easy.  Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there’s no markup language for you to learn — just get started.
• It’s free.  Google Sites is one of many free products offered by Google.
• It’s measurable.  One-click Google Analytics integration allows you to monitor your site’s traffic.
• It’s fast.  Create your mobile landing page in minutes by starting from one of five pre-loaded templates.  You can also start from scratch with the custom template.

Restaurant            Local Business         Lead Generation              Social                eCommerce

Visit sites.google.com/mobilize to get started today!

Your Paintings is a new web initiative by the #BBC in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation. It aims to put the nation’s complete oil painting collection online.

“The UK holds in its galleries & civic buildings one of the largest collections of oil paintings in the world, a treasure trove of tens of thousands of individual works, including pieces by some of the world’s leading artists, from world famous names such as Picasso to Rubens to unknown local painters.

These paintings aren’t just of interest to art lovers, they also make up one of the biggest pre-photographic records of 600 years of British society, life and culture, a hugely important educational and historical resource.

And yet the public’s access to this incredible resource has to date been limited by physical constraints: some 80% of the works are in storage, or otherwise unavailable to view; those that can be seen are scattered around the country, looked after by a diverse range of institutions, from the major national galleries right through to individual council offices and even fire stations, with no way for the public to see the scale of the combined collection. The vast majority have never been published online before.

Now the Public Catalogue Foundation (a charity established to document and photograph this national collection) have teamed up with the BBC and thousands of galleries and collections right across the UK to make the entire national oil painting collection permanently viewable in one place for the first time, for free to the general public.

Our beta launch today showcases the first 63,000 of these paintings, covering works from over 800 collections by over 15,000 individual artists. This is the start of a rolling programme of releases – we’ll be updating the site with thousands of new paintings in the coming months, in line with the PCF’s photography and digitisation programme, with the ambition of having the entire national collection – some 200,000 paintings – online by the end of 2012.

We really hope you enjoy using the site, and we’d love you to contact us with any comments, suggestions or improvements.”

SOURCE: Mobile Audio Platforms

This Samurai Art iPad application shows ancient works of art in digital form on the iPad. It has a 20-Meter Ancient Japanese Scroll included. It’s featuring the Hosokawa Family Eisei Bunko Collection.

You can find the app here:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/id436760848?mt=8#

Nice audio guide:

Paulette has interviewed the greatest stars of the Louvre.
Listen to exclusive interviews with the Mona Lisa, the artist Raphael, the Great Sphinx and the brightest stars of the Louvre.
Paulette guides you with her little red arrow so you will no longer get lost in the corridors of the Louvre.
With My Museum, you learn about art history by playing detective and you could win ‘the Golden Paulette’!

MY MUSEUM LE LOUVRE HAS BEEN PRODUCED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX-GRAND PALAIS AND WITH THE SUPPORT OF LE MUSEE DU lOUVRE.

The iphone application ‘My Museum’ is a fun-audio guide which invites you to
visit the Louvre in a fun and original way.
The user helps Paulette, a friendly and impish guide, to solve the riddles in a treasure trail. Paulette has the power to make the masterpieces speak and uses this gift to ‘interview’ 25 artworks in an open and friendly tone.

25 MAJOR ARTORKS
Discover the stars of the Louvre on your iphone. My Museum invites you to plunge into the heart of the collections of the most prestigious museum in the world. From the Italian Renaissance to the French schools, via Ancient Egypt, the whole history of the Palace of the Louvre is recounted by its famous tenants.

PAULETTE MAKES THE MASTERPIECES SPEAK
Paulette is a very special journalist with the unique power to bring to life the stars of art history.

A STROLL ROUND LE LOUVRE
Make a date with My Museum at the world’s largest museum in the heart of Paris. The Louvre is open every day except Tuesdays and national holidays.
Download from your iphone application and meet your personal guide.

THE VOICES OF THE MASTERPIECES
The Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the artists Raphael and David all reveal their secrets to Paulette in exclusive interviews!

In My museum le Louvre, discover who survived on the ‘Raft of the Medusa’, listen to the painter David own up to enlarging Napoleon, find out about the Mona Lisa’s family. Paulette knows how to get a good scoop!

THE RED ARROW
It’s difficult not to get lost when you visit the Louvre; its sheer size and complexity quickly transform it into a labyrinth.

My Museum allows you to find your way around the rooms and the corridors without getting lost. Simply follow the flashing red arrow on your iphone.
The arrowed screens of My Museum will lead you straight to the artworks.

THE TREASURE TRAIL
Learn about art history by playing detective. Paulette invites you to discover the extraordinary story of the palace of the Louvre through the events and turns of its eight centuries. Set out on the trail of 15 of the museum’s works of art. Each key you find opens a door which leads to a mini-game related to the works or the history of the museum. The total number of keys you find will win you a golden, a silver or a plastic “Paulette”!

ANIMATIONS
All the works presented in My museum le Louvre have been transformed into original animations. Watch the ‘Seated Scribe’ scribbling, relive the nineteenth century discovery of the Venus de Milo or the staging of Napoleon’s coronation! My museum helps you to understand the works and the story behind them.

INTERNET PUBLICATIONS
Your treasure trail score can be posted on your Facebook wall so you can share with your friends your ‘Golden Paulette’ award, or the silver or…the plastic Paulette!
You can also share your visit with your friends by posting one of the poetic postcards offered with the application onto your Facebook wall.

THE STARS OF LE LOUVRE ARE MULTILINGUAL
Over 8 million people visit the Louvre every year. The Louvre welcomes tourists from all over the world and so My Museum offers guides in 3 languages with Spanish available in October 2011.

iPhone Screenshots

Arts and cultural organisations are being given the opportunity to apply for a share of a half-a-million-pound fund to harness new technology.

The Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture was announced today by Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).

It follows a speech by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey in January where he called on cultural organisations to embrace new technology and the opportunities it offers.

“Our lives are increasingly defined by how we engage and interact with the world digitally and cultural organisations can’t afford to be left behind,” Mr Vaizey said. “Too often finances, structures or traditions can constrain the arts from making best use of the technology which now sits at the heart of many people’s everyday lives.

“This programme seeks to show how digital technology can revolutionise our cultural engagement, helping people to derive greater value from cultural activities and to find new ways to generate income.”

Organisations that are eligible to apply to the programme include visual and performing arts organisations, cultural organisations in England including arts and cultural archives, literary organisations, museums and galleries, libraries, commercial arts and cultural organisations and creative industry businesses. Applications will be open until 2 September 2011.

Further information

• Arts Council England website
• AHRC website
• NESTA website
• What we do: funding for the arts

Polymer Vision 2011 Rollable 6-inch SVGA display

comment by mobcommand :
” I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this is one step closer to making the perfect synthesis of tradition printed books and economical eBooks. If we can in some way double layer the displays and have them constantly rotating to get the feel of turning pages without ever running out you have the best of both worlds!”

Once again a nice initiative by Jim Richardson, SUMO: Picture a Museum Day. This ia s one day global event on Twitter and Flickr. Museums and visitors can participate.

The project aims to give behind-the-scenes access to the world’s museums. “On March 17th 201 1 we will capture the fascinating collections and the exciting activities that happen in museums and galleries and share them with the world. Photograph your museum and share your pictures of museums through the hashtag #MuseumPics on Twitter and in the Flickr group #MuseumPics.”

Have fun and join http://www.museumpics.com/

If you need the Picture a Museum Day logo, just email jim@sumodesign.co.uk and he’ll send you a copy

NEW: Great article by Daniel Terdiman: The art of making Google Art Project (Q&A)

For me the 17 special gigapictures are the greatest benefit of this project! It’s better than being on location where often light conditions are very poor (to preserve the paint quality of the art work of course).

Vlad Savov from Engadget: “Google’s been hard at work over the past 18 months on something not many of us have been paying attention to lately: art. Specifically, the search giant has hooked up with 17 art museums around the world to offer tours of their internal galleries, using its familiar Street View tricycles, while also doing high-res images of 1,061 artworks that may be viewed on the newly launched Art Project web portal. Also there, you will find 17 special gigapixel images — 7,000-megapixel versions of each participating venue’s proudest possession.”

From the press release: “1st February Google unveiled the Art Project, a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

Over the last 18 months Google has worked with 17 art museums including, Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum. The results of this partnership, which can be explored at www.googleartproject.com involved taking a selection of super high resolution images of famous artworks, as well as collating more than a thousand other images into one place. It also included building 360 degree tours of individual galleries using Street View ‘indoor’ technology.”

Watch behind the scenes footage of the Street View and high resolution captures from the Art Project.

Visit the project: www.googleartproject.com

The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition, the first report in the series to look at emerging technologies for museum education and interpretation, was released today by the Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), the museum-focused branch of the NMC. Like the flagship Horizon Report released each January, this edition identifies six key emerging technologies for the next one to five years and describes trends and challenges surrounding their adoption. The technologies to watch for museums include mobiles, social media, augmented reality, location-based services, gesture-based computing and the semantic web.

The annual report is produced by The New Media Consortium. The report focuses on emerging technology and its applications to museum education and interpretation. This year is the first year of publication for the Horizon Report: Museum Edition.

Horizon.Museum is a project that applies the process developed for the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project with a focus on emerging technologies for museums. Members of the Museum community involved in education and interpretation are encouraged to follow the Advisory Board’s progress as the discussion unfolds and to use the wiki as a resource and reference tool.

Arts marketers who utilize new technology and social media must possess a working knowledge of intellectual property and union contracts. It can be tempting to leave legal issues solely up to the business manager, but arts marketers work with rapidly changing technologies on a daily basis. Therefore, they must know how current laws and emerging legal trends will affect their online marketing plans and be prepared to advocate within their organi tions for obtaining distribution rights.

-Amelia Northrup
Strategic Research and Development Assistant
Center for Arts Management and Technology

Read this important report here:
Download pdf:
Social_Media, Video_Footage_and_the_Law
(licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0)

Very nice videoclip! Find out more about the iPad app at http://www.moma.org/abexapp

Creative Spaces is an online community where users can share their ideas and experiences of the museum collections for their own creative purposes. Users can search across the nine partner museums and gallery collections British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum and Wallace Collection and discover what inspires them. Using virtual notebooks, users save and share items that they have found through search or uploaded themselves; these items can be text, images, videos or web links, about anything from paintings through to family history. Creative Spaces users can make connections with people of similar interests and form online community groups around specific topics with museums as a continuing space of creativity.

Visit the site!

You don’t have to buy one of those high-end 3-D televisions or pay the extra bucks for tickets to a 3-D movie to spend a little time in that third dimension.

You can go online to the State Museum website, southcarolinastatemuseum.org, to explore some 3-D history.“Post Civil War Images of South Carolina,” a new online-only exhibit, focuses on stereograph card images from South Carolina just after the war.

via Museum website takes history to a new dimension – Local / Metro – TheState.com.