Books from Guggenheim Museum

image

From this page you can download about 200 art books about the art of the ‘900, in PDF or ePub format.

The texts were made available by the Guggenheim Museum.

Instructions:

  1. click the text you are interested in
  2. a page opens where you can see the cover and the data of the book (below)
  3. on the right of the cover there are two icons: one with 4 arrows (opening) and a lens (search in the book)
  4. click the 4 arrows icon to show the book in full window; here you can browse it
  5. immediately above there is a PDF/ePub button: click it, choose the format and the download starts.
  6. enjoy

Miri Kat

Miri Kat’s debut EP brings ephemeral collages, in turns frenetic and and lyrical, in a unique brand of glitchy grindcore for a post-Internet age. Miri’s hyperactive textures are rooted in original engineering, live-coded from found sounds with open source tools, derived from open ecosystems in both sounds and software. For Establishment, she is producing an original audiovisual edition, pairing her live visual talents with the compositional ones.

The London-based artist self-described as “oriental” in origin has fast become a mainstay of the underground livecoding scene. Her day job is as an engineer of electronic musical instruments, with expertise in music tech, web technologies, hacking, creative coding, algorithmic music, immersive multimedia, and generative visuals.

Show more

Show more

Cloud Sequencer

A new work by Ronald van der Meijs.

Notes from the author:

This project is a first start for a new sound research project into the diversity of clouds, sun and wind in order to create a sort of ‘natural sequencer’ for an outside sound installation. This site specific instrument consists out of seven solar powered bass organ pipe units interacting on the brightness of the sun to control the loudness of the sound. In this way passing clouds form a natural sequencer for this installation. Each organ pipe unit is catching the wind with one of the 5 smal sails, controlled by a system of pulley wheels and counter weights for pitching the sound of each organ pipe by a moving valve.

The weather conditions of the island determine how the sounds and its composition evolves as a constant changing requiem for the West Vlieland village which disappeared into the North Sea in 1736. As for this village the installation is completely handed over to the unpredictability of the weather. This plays a major part in the concept of this sound installation; one has to accept the weather conditions in al its appearances. This means that it needs sun, clouds and wind to produce a variety of sounds. So if there is no sun at all there is no sound to produce. What is left in this situation is the sound of nature itself.

The work has been installed on the Dutch island of Vlieland (53°18’02.3″N – 5°05’12.0”E) from July 22th to aug 30th 2017

Author’s blog

Avatar

Avatar is video for a dance performance that conveys the formation of the human body into the avatar on the computer screen while it is inprocess of questionning it . Avatar exposes some occasions such as “loading” and “Disconnected” through its own way, while using the internet .

10 min.
2009

Visuals: Candas Sisman – csismn.com
Sound design: Mert Kizilay – myspace.com/mertkizilay
Choreography: Yigit Daldikler
Concept: Neylan Ogutveren
Performance: Yigit Daldikler

Tarots Upgrade

Italian artist Jacopo Rosati created a series of tarots images inspired by the social networks experience. So you can get the Fake News card, the Conspiracy (It’s all connected), the Russian Hacker (ransomware infection) or Chinese (your password got stolen).

tarots upgraded

Bbeeetthhooovveeenn

In 2002, the Scandinavian composer Leif Inge took Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and stretched it out to 24 hours without distortion or pitch variations. The 9th Symphony’s standard duration is around 67 minutes (but it depends on the director: it can also exceed 70′ and reach up to 77’16 “in the Kubelik version of ’74), it is an expansion of about 21.5 times.

The title of this expanded version is 9 Beet Stretch. It sounds like a slow-moving sound continuum, but not so slow that it does not allow you to perceive changes in a reasonable time (a few minutes, but generally shorter). Obviously, with these times, the melody is completely lost and everything turns into a sequence of chords, but the dramatic sense of harmony remains.

All note’s entries are very gradual because it is not  a simple metro slow-down but an audio signal stretched, so any attack that in the original file lasts 1/10 second, becomes 2.15 seconds in the expanded version. The audio file is a Naxos recording directed by Béla Drahos with Nicolaus Esterházy Symphony and Choir (Naxos 8.553478).

The stream can be listened on the internet from the 9 Beet Stretch site (click the player at the top right of the page). It’s an ongoing 24/7 stream of 9 Beet Stretch, starting at the time of sunset, Wien, march 26th, the date Ludwig van Beethoven died, so the four movements start at:

  • CET 18:16 movement 1 – duration 5½ hours
  • CET 23:43 movement 2 – duration 5 hours
  • CET 04:48 movement 3 – duration 5 hours
  • CET 09:24 movement 4 – duration 8½ hours

Note: CET = central Europe time.

In daylight saving time add one hour.

Link: the 9 Beet Stretch site

Reverberation as music

A singer within the St. John’s Baptistery, in Piazza dei Miracoli (Pisa, Italy), uses the acoustic qualities of the architecture to turn a mono-melody into harmony.

The reverberation time of the Baptistery can reach up to 15 seconds, offering a vast space of time to handle sustained notes, so a single singer can create harmony superimposing new notes on the reverberation of the previous ones.

A composition written for the Baptistery in Pisa is Ian Costabile’s Earth and Sky Voices (here on You Tube). There is also an electroacoustic composition: SiderisVox by Leonardo Tarabella performend here on 2006. You can find some notes here. Unfortunately I could not find an audio extract.

Some details about the video: the tourist speaking thinks that singer has come by chance, but he does not know that acoustics demonstrations are very frequent. He also speak about “echo”, but of course the correct name of the sound effect is reverberation.

Links to other post about this topic are below the video.

14&15 Mobile Photographers

Unfortunately this site no longer exists

14&15 Mobile Photographers is the first international showcase dedicated exclusively to mobile photographers and to their work. We are driven by a great curiosity to explore the new frontiers of digital photography, the mobile photography. For this reason, in 2015 we launched this platform, with the aim of promoting this sector of photography which is growing fast worldwide. We believe that the smartphone is only a tool to take pictures and does not represent anything more than an easy and fast camera. But this smart tool is always with us, ready to record our life in every moment.

1415_1 iPhone with Hipstamatic appPhoto by Scott Strazzante
1415_3 1415_4

Site link

Removed

They are not playing cards. Removed is a project by American photographer Eric Pickersgill where the pervasiveness of the cellphone is highlighted through its absence. Ordinary images in which the central object is removed and in this way the scene appears in all its absurdity.

Pickersgill comments:

Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is so disconnected from one another. Not much talking. Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn’t have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family. Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online. Twice he goes on about a large fish that was caught. No one replies. I am saddened by the use of technology for interaction in exchange for not interacting. This has never happened before and I doubt we have scratched the surface of the social impact of this new experience. Mom has her phone out now.

The Removed site is here, with many images.

Atomic Ruin

Watch on vimeo

Note from Andrew Walker (the author):

This was a very unique location to shoot and something most people don’t get to experience. The location is a incomplete nuclear power station in Western Washington…Satsop. The power plant is also second largest municipal bond default in U.S. history. Walking around in the cooling towers was like being inside of an alien structure. Also the acoustics in the cooling towers was also very unique. The equipment I used was a Kessler Second Shooter along with a new slider system I was testing out in the location. The rig was prefect for getting in and out of some of these locations. I used 2 Nikon D810 DSLRs to capture this.

Music: “Time”
Artist: Hans Zimmer
Album: “Inception” soundtrack
Special Thanks to Kessler for providing the Second Shooter and the 8020 Kessler Cart.