The Google Art Project: Explore to Your Art’s Delight
The Google Art Project is a unique collaberation between Google and some of the world’s leading art museums, which enables people to discover some of the best works of art from around the world and examine them in high resolution detail.
Using the Street View technology of Google Earth one is able to move around the museums using interactive floor plans.
Where in the World is This?
It is an exciting way to learn more about the museums, galleries and art treasures of the world that interest you the most, and then go on to explore further afield and make new discoveries for yourself.
This is also an excellent way to plan in advance for your visit in real-life to one of these museums, as you can do all the “groundwork of research” in from the web – perhaps this could be called “cloudwork” or “cloudplanning”, or maybe designing a “cloudjourney”?
You can experience incredible close-up views of the artwork which you can zoom into – look at the brush-strokes an artist uses, in microscopic detail – a wonderful way to get the feeling of the personality and creative style of the artist. It is easy to move around paintings.
You can find more work by the same artist or learn more about the work by reading the detailed descriptions or listening to an audio tour. You can watch YouTube videos created by the museum or gallery themselves, while you are exploring the paintings.
Use the drop-down menus to choose a museum and to find artworks from that museum or find a specific work you are looking for. A way to discover hidden secrets, and work you would never otherwise have found.
Of course, cloud travel gives you the ability to walk through walls, fly along corridors, hop from one room to another or float up through the ceiling to explore another level, so it does mean you can cover a lot of ground a lot easier. And you won’t wear out the soles of your shoes as quickly either.
You can also create your own collection of favourite work, and then share it with friends, or perhaps use it while teaching your art class. Your very own collection of the best in the world, available at your fingertips… why not become an art collector?
http://youtu.be/GThNZH5Q1yY
Things you can do with the Google Art Project:
•Explore museums with Street View technology: virtually move around the museum’s galleries, selecting works of art that interest you, navigate though interactive floor plans and learn more about the museum and you explore.
•Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.
•Create your own collection: the ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family.
It has never been more fun or stimulating to prepare yourself to get the most out of your real-life visit.
Read MoreAelita Andre: the World’s Youngest Professional Painter
They say you’re never too young to make a start, and one Australian artist has certainly proved the point with the opening of her latest exhibition, this time in New York…
At four years old, Australian abstract artist Aelita Andre is the youngest professional painter in the world. She has been compared to Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky and Salvador Dali among others.
Aelita Andre – the pure pleasure of creation
Aelita had just turned two when her first solo show opened in 2009, featuring all the works she had painted as a one-year old. The show at the prestigious BSG gallery in Melbourne, Australia attracted
worldwide attention. The BBC London rang to congratulate her on her second birthday for her immense achievement, the Chinese press called her paintings “the work of a master”, 60 Minutes called her “the next big thing” and the Australian media dubbed her “Pee Wee Picasso”.
While still only two years old she was invited to Hong Kong where she staged a solo exhibition and painted live for over an hour in front of more than 60 Chinese and international media crews, after having been scheduled only to paint for five minutes.
Aelita is currently living in Melbourne, Australia with her parents Michael Andre and Nikka Kalashnikova who are of Russian origin and are both artists.
On one occasion when her father put one or his canvases on the floor to paint, Aelita crawled onto it and began dabbing and smearing paint across it with such conviction that her father just left her to continue, and placed a second canvas next to it for his own work.
Her works are vivid, expressive and full of energy and she is obsessed with painting. She runs around demanding “painting! painting!” and “kist! kist!” which is the Russian word for paintbrush. Her work has been featured by every major TV network and her paintings which are so admired by viewers continue to ignite heated debates around the world, about art.
Aelita has painted over 200 paintings, many of them large canvases. She paints with dedicated single-mindedness, but also with obvious joy and pleasure. Her world is explored through an “innocent eye” that opens a bright sunlit window into the primal and subconscious creative process.
She has a Solo Exhibition on currently in New York that opened on June 4th and runs to June 25th 2011, at the Agora Gallery, Chelsea, New York.
Aelita Andre – website:
http://www.aelitaandreart.com/aelitaandre/Home.html
Her works are available to buy at: http://www.art-mine.com/artistpage/aelita_andre.aspx
 003003:Best Friends Dolls – Pillow/Cushion by RainbowZebra Created by RainbowZebra Artist Elena McMillan — Part of a project by RainbowZebra Artists to raise money for charity. |
Do You Know What They’re Doing?
Today’s society tends to forget that we live in a fragile environment. By messing with the marine life we are messing with our oceans’ ecosystems. This is throwing off the balance, creating more problems for future generations.
For those who do have an awareness, we need to all work together to create change, and for anyone who does not think there are any problems out there, perhaps it is time to consider yourself part of a greater society, and re-examine your conscience – you may be the very one who comes up with the best ideas and solutions.
The AMCS is the voice for Australia’s ocean wildlife and the only national charity dedicated solely to protecting our oceans. We work on the big issues concerning the sea and its threatened wildlife.
Video created for AMCS: Australian Marine Conservation Society
Read MoreShirin Neshat: Art in exile
Shirin Neshat is perhaps the most famous contemporary visual artist to emerge from Iran.
Born in Qavin, one of the most religiouc cities in Iran, her work, predominantly in film and photography draws on her own experiences as an exile from Iran, to explore with great sensitivity Islam and gender relationships and the widening political rift between the West and the Middle East.
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Journalist Peter Bradshaw wrote of Neshat’s debut feature film “Women Without Men” in his 2010 film review in the Guardian:
“The Anglo-Iranian comic Shappi Khorsandi recently revealed that Jon Snow had told her about a conversation he had once had some years ago with the then prime minister, Tony Blair.
The premier had asked Snow, plaintively, why Iran hated the British so much. Snow replied hesitantly: “Well, you know, because of Mossadeq …” – that is, the left-leaning Iranian leader, toppled in 1953 by a coup instigated by the British and American governments because of his determination to nationalise oil.
Blair replied blankly: “Who?”
Perhaps watching this excellent movie would be a way for Blair, and the rest of us, to brush up on British and Iranian history.”
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Iranian Artist Shirin Neshat's debut feature film: "Women Without Men"
In this presentation on TED Talks, Shirin Neshat talks about her journey as an artist in exile, with particular reference to her feature film “Women Without Men”.
More information about this on the film’s website
“The story I’d like to share with you today its my challenge as an Iranian artist. as an Iranian woman artist. As an Iranian woman artist living in exile.
Politics Has Defined Our Lives
Well it has its pluses and minuses and the dark side, politics doesn’t seem to escape people like me. Every Iranian artist in one form or another is political. Politics has defined our lives.
If you’re living in Iran you’re facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture, at times execution. If you’re living outside like me, you’re faced with a life in exile. the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family.
Therefore we don’t find the moral and emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.
Artists as the Voice
Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds themselves also in the position of being the voice. The speaker of my people, even if I have indeed no access to my own country. Also, people like myself, we’re fighting two battles in different grounds.
We’re being critical of the west, perception of the west about our identity, about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. We are there to take pride and insist on respect. At the same time we’re fighting another battle that is our regime, our government, our atrocious government who has done every crime in order to stay in power.
Our artists are at risk. We are in a position of danger. We pose a threat to the order of the government, but ironically this situation has empowered all of us because we are considered as artists central to the cultural political social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope for our people.
Culture is a Form of Resistance
We are the reporters of our people and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance.
I envy sometimes the artists of the West, for their freedom of expression. For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. For the fact that they are only serving one audience, namely the Western culture
But also I worry about the West because often in this country, in this western world that we have, culture risks to be a form of entertainment.
Our people depend on our artists and culture is beyond communication.
My journey as an artist started from a very personal place.
I did not start to make social commentaries about my country. The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. It was after the Islamic revolution of 1979. While I was in absence from Iran, Islamic revolution had descended on Iran and entirely transformed the culture from Persian to Islamic culture.
Women as a Mirror
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in society, but instead I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn’t recognize anymore. More so I became very interested as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions I became immersed in the study of the Islamic revolution, how indeed it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting in the way that the women of Iran historically seemed to embody the political transformation. So in a way, by studying a women, you can read the structure and ideology of the country.
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse, the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of god, faith but violence and crime and cruelty. For me this became incredibly important and yet I had a neutral position towards this.
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic revolution. This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn’t know I would discover, so my art became slightly more critical, my knife became a little sharper, and I fell into a life in exile.
I am a nomadic artist. I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. I go everywhere to make believe it’S Iran. Now I’m making films.
Women Without Men
Last year I finished a film called “Women Without Men”. Women without Men returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercise a coup and removed democratically elected Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh. The book is written by Iranian woman Shahrnush Parsipur’s , a magic realist novel. This book is banned and she spent 5 years in prison. my Obsession with this book and the reason I made this into a film is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female, traditionally, historically in Iran and the question of four women who are all looking for an ideal, a change, freedom and democracy.
While the country of Iran equally as another character also struggles for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign intervention. I made this film because I felt it was important for it to speak to the westerner about our history as a country. All of you seem to remember Iran after the cultural revolution. Iran was once a secular society and we had democracy and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government.
The film also talks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamified. In the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way had intellectual lives, and most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. These are some of the shots I create for my film. This is some of the images of the coup and we made the film in Cassablanca, recreating all the shots.
This film tries to find a balance between telling a political story but also a feminine story. Being a visual artist indeed I am foremost interested to make art. To make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism and become an important universal work of art.
The challenge I had was how to do that. How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. How to move you with your emotions but also to make your mind work. This is some of the images and the characters of the film.
The Green Movement and Uprising
Now comes the green movement, summer of 2009 as my film is released, uprising begins in Iran. What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice repeats itself now, again in Teheran. The green movement significantly inspired the world. It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. What was most significant again for me was once again, the presence of the women. They are absolutely inspirational for me.
If in the Islamic Revolution the woman portrayed was submissive and didn’t have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Teheran. Women who were educated, forward thinking, non traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist.
These women, and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women: that under all circumstances they have pushed the boundaries, they confronted the authorities, they have broken every rule, in the smallest and the biggest way and once again they proved themselves.
I stand here today to say that Iranian women have found a new voice and their voice is giving me my voice and it is a great honour to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the west only, for now.”
Read MoreThe End of the Line
An Ocean Without Fish
Imagine an ocean without fish. Imagine your meals without seafood. Imagine the global consequences. This is the future if we do not stop, think and act.
“The End of the Line” was the first major documentary film to reveal the devastating effects of overfishing on our oceans and to show the direct effects of our global love affair with fish as food.
It examines the imminent extinction of bluefin tuna, brought on by the growing western demand for sushi, the impact this has on marine life, such as the huge overpopulation of jellyfish and the profound implications of a future with no fish which would result in mass starvation for many across the globe.
Filmed over a two year period it documented investigative reporter Charles Clover as he confronted politicians and celebrity restaurant owners who expressed little interest in the damage they are doing to the oceans.
One of his allies in his investigations is the whistle-blower Robert Mielgo, a former tuna farmer intent on exposing those involved in destroying the world’s magnificent bluefin tuna population.
The film travels right across the globe, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the coasts of Senegal and Alaska to the Tokyo fish market. It features top scientists, indigenous fishermen and fisheries enforcement officials. The End of the Line is a wake-up call to the world.
The End of Seafood by 2048
Scientists predict that if we continue fishing as we are now, we will see the end of most seafood by 2048
The End of the Line chronicles how high-tech fishing vessels leave no escape routes for fish populations, how farmed fish as a solution is a myth and how the demand for cod off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1990s led to the decimation of the most abundant cod population in the world.
The responsibility lies with consumers who innocently buy endangered fish, politicians who ignore the advice and pleas of scientists, fishermen who break quotas and fish illegally, and a global fishing industry that is slow to react to an impending disaster.
The End of the Line shows that there are solutions that are simple and doable, but political will and activism are crucial if this is to be solved.
We need to protect large areas of the ocean through a network of marine reserves which are off limits to fishing, to educate consumers that they have a choice by purchasing fish from independently certified sustainable fisheries and to control fishing by reducing the number of fishing boats across the world
Global Campaign
The End of the Line premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and was used to launch a global campaign for citizens to demand better marine policies.
Charles Clover, the book’s author said, “We must stop thinking of our oceans as a food factory and realize that they thrive as a huge and complex marine environment.
We must act now to protect the sea from rampant overfishing so that there will be fish in the sea for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
“Overfishing is the great environmental disaster that people haven’t heard about,” said producer George Duffield.
“A recent global conference about bluefin tuna stocks saw almost no media coverage in the U.S. We hope this film really sounds the alarm. We can fix this problem starting right now.”
“Reading the book The End of the Line changed my life and what I eat. I hope the film will do the same for others,” said producer Claire Lewis.
How the film was financed
The End of the Line is a leading example of the new wave of documentary. It is an independent film – made outside the established broadcasting structure.
It is a campaigning film which aims to change the world by engaging large public audiences in a political issue. And it is a project which is integrated with the work of NGOs and progressive companies to achieve this change.
The film’s financing is an example of the new model of funding: with cornerstone funding from the UK’s Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, the vast bulk of the finance came from not-for-profit foundations in the UK and the USA.
In the UK the cinema release of the film was supported financially by Waitrose – a major UK retailer.
The film has received financial support from: The Waitt Family Foundation, Marviva, The Oak Foundation, Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, WWF, The Weston Foundation, The Clore Foundation, The Marine Conservation Society, AD Charitable Trust, GD Charitable Trust, Waterloo Foundation and Oceana.
Read More(Sign Up and Claim ) Your Piece of the Ocean
Seven tenths of Earth is covered by water and the oceans belong to all of us.
Every individual on Earth has a right to assume that the oceans are managed for the benefit of all those alive, their children and grandchildren – not on behalf of vested interests. If the biological diversity of the oceans is to be maintained or restored, large areas must be protected altogether from the commercial fishing industry and responsible fishing must prevail outside those areas.
Every person on the planet can claim 2 hectares of ocean – that’s what you get if you divide the surface area of ocean by the number of people on Earth.
If the biological diversity of the oceans is to be maintained or restored, large areas must be protected altogether from the commercial fishing industry and responsible fishing must prevail outside those areas.
With some help from our friends at Google, we have created the map you can see here. Anyone willing to pledge their support to the campaign can lay claim to their 2 hectares.
Pledge your support and claim your piece of the ocean here…
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