Cathy's Art Diary

Innovative online lecture from the National Gallery on how technology might influence art in the next decade. Jacky Klein from the Courtauld took us through various new technologies and how they had been used by artists. It should have coincided with the Durer exhibition which is now later in the year as a comparison to how he responded to the new technology of his time, printing. I would say most of the work she discussed was conceptual art so were more about analysing idea rather than producing fine art works however there were some fascinating projects. I must admit I don’t like virtual reality so I won’t rushing to see Jon Rafman’s “Sculpture Garden” which combines a VR maze with a real sculpture. However I did like Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Fireworks Over Beijing” which combined images of an alabaster model of the Forbidden City with film of fireworks over it to represent the fact they are now illegal in the city due to fire. I did like some of the AI works including the one shown h...

Thought provoking exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at 100 newly released products or ideas in development now which will shape the world of tomorrow.   This show was packed with ideas around the themes of self, public, planet and afterlife. It would be fun to rerun it in ten years to see what effect the products have had. I’ve been interested to see how many of the developments I have spotted in the real world since. However I also liked the warning it came with through a quote from Paul Virillio “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the ship wreck.”   I found some of the inventions horrific like the glove to be worn by warehouse staff on which they can read the orders but it also measures how long it takes them to fulfil an order and counts any mistakes they make. This seems to be eroding their personal value as an employee and turning people into robots.   I did feel at times we are inventing a fix to a problem rather...

Thought provoking small exhibition at Tate Britain for the winner of the IK Prize 2016, a prize for digital innovation. This project compares current photo journalism and British art from the Tate’s collection and trains an artificial intelligence tool to find similarities between them. It invites you to make these comparisons and uses those results to train the AI tool. The tool uses object recognition, facial recognition, composition analysis and context analysis. A display shows pictures that the tool has matched and rates them on this basis as a percentage score. I’m not sure what the use of this is but it was an interesting way of looking at a new technology in an understandable way. Closes on 27 November 2016  

Fun exhibition at the Jewish Museum looking at the role of Jewish immigrants in creating and developing the recording industry. The show began by looking at the development of records and record players from the Emil Berliner’s invention of the gramophone and the birth of His Master’s Voice label and then went through technological development from shellac through vinyl and into CDs and the web. The main room was a wonderful display of record covers from various Jewish artists arranged by chronological themes. There was a great section on comedy records. There were av displays but quite a few of them didn’t work. The real shame was the exhibition was almost silent, just the occasional quiet records on a jukebox. I know I usually moan about noise in galleries but this one needed it. Closes on 16 October 2016  

Seminar on new technologies to enhance the experience of musuems and how they deliver information organised by the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK) and held at the Christopher Ingold Chemistry Lecture Theatre, University College London. I am cheating a bit here as this was an event I attended for work but as it was about museums etc I thought I'd count it for the blog! I found it fascinating and although some bits made me ask why, Anthony Hudson-Smith's web project to tag objects and record memories associated with them, Tales of Things , others made me want to sign up to help such as the Transcribe Bentham porject at UCL which is asking the publci to help them transcribe the papers of Jeremy Bentham. Anyway here is a list of all the talks : Shaping Up : 3D documentation and knowledge in cultural heritage by David Arnold – Department of Computer Science, University of Brighton Tales of things : archiving and viewing the cultural heritage of everythi...