Tag Archives: gallery

Google Art Project brings galleries from around the world to your computer screen

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Today Google dipped its paws into the art industry.  Art Project is “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.”  In short, over the past 18 months Google’s traveled to 17 art museums around the world and captured super high resolution images of famous artworks.  Now online users can take 360 degree tours of individual galleries using the same Street View click, zoom, and pan techniques most are used to using when navigating Google Maps.  Google hit up many world renowned museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, State Tretyakov Gallery, and Van Gogh Museum.  And check this: each of the 17 museums hand-picked one piece of artwork to be photographed using gigapixel technology; these super super high definition selections contain around 7 billion pixels allowing users to explore them in extreme detail.  For example, the people hidden behind the tree in Ivanov’s ‘The Apparition of Christ to the People’ suddenly become visible thanks to the gigapixel capture.  In addition to browsing the beautiful works of art, Google is enabling users to create their own collections, share them with others, and make them sociable with commenting support.

Head over to http://www.googleartproject.com/ to check it out!  Look after the break for official PR and some videos detailing the project.

Food for thought: Libraries are dead because of the digitization of books; with instant access to high definition galleries are museums on their way out now as well?

[Via GoogleBlog] Continue reading Google Art Project brings galleries from around the world to your computer screen →

Apple products destroyed in the name of art

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Digital-imaging and CGI artist Michael Tompert is fascinated by the destruction of Apple products.  Ever wonder what an iPad would like after a sledgehammer beating and torch treatment?  Your inquisitiveness get resolved in the image above titled “Book Burning.”  Sick and tired of antenna issues and feel like pounding your iPhone 4 with an eight pound sledgehammer?  Don’t do that–just flip through the gallery below and visualize it.  There you’ll also find “Breathe”, a MacBook Air with 12 rounds in it (damaged by a Heckler & Koch handgun); “Liquid Crystals”, a sledgehammered and torched MacBook; “You’re So 2000&L8”, a disfigured iPhone 3G; and “Caltrain Fatalities: Left Track/Right Track”, a rainbow of iPod nanos ran over by a train.

All of these disturbing images are part of Tompert’s 12LVE photography exhibit located at the WhiteSpace Gallery in Palo Alto, California.  “The images are large-scale yet microscopic, providing a canvas for contemplating our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage,” says Tompert.  The inspiration behind the gallery is rather simplistic; when Tompert got tired of his two sons fighting over an iPod touch, he took it from them and smash it on the floor.  “They were kind of stunned — the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,” he told the LA Times.  “My wife told me that I should do something with it.”  And the rest, as they say, was history.

It’s important to note that Tompert is not anti-Apple; in fact he calls himself “an Apple fan from Day 1”.  If that doesn’t do it for you, he’s a former Apple graphics designer.

Again, take a look in the gallery below to gaze at the beautiful destruction and head over to Cult of Mac to gain insight into the making of the gallery.

[Via CNET]