Copy-right & Disney: A Fair(y) Use Tale

This little movie has already made a lot of fans. Bob Frost has shown it as part of his discussion on copyright & CH, during the TEC-CH seminar "Computer-enhanced communication for libraries, archives and museums". A Fair(y) Use Tale is a humurous review of the main principles of the copyright law. Not by chance, it has been done using cuts from Disney animation movies (company renowned for having a very strict copyright policy).

Visual search engine

Pagebull is a visual search engine, in practice, the search results are presented not as text, but as screenshots of the websites.

End Semester: seminar on digitizing printed books

The summer semester ended on Thursday, with a seminar held by J. C. Grycz, curator of books at The Internet Archive and founder of the non-profit organization Libraries without Walls (if you browse through the site, you may want to check the digital illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland). The seminar introduced issues related to the selection, digital capture, storage and online presentation of printed materials made available in digital form.

If you are interested in digitization, a book recommended by J. C. Grycz is Digital Heritage. Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, edited by Lindsay MacDonald.

Today YouTube in italian!

YouTube has been just launched in its ITALIAN version!
http://it.youtube.com/

Super-high resolution pictures: 9G pixel

The website Haltadefinizione displays experimental pictures (of paintings and cities) at an astonishing high quality resolution (9 GigaPixel)!
enjoy: http://haltadefinizione.deagostini.it/

Visit to Archaeological Museum in Como

In conclusion of the course "Communication and archaeology", we paid a visit to the Archeological Museum Paolo Giovio in Como. A very traditional museum, but with some remarkable pieces, among which some beautiful Roman architectonic elements with mythological scenes.

See Virtual tour (in Italian)

Our two archaeologists, Susanna and Thanasis (not by chance an Italian and a Greek), in a discussion with professor D'Andria, regarding a quote from Strabonius, in Ancient Greek

TEC-CH Seminar: Inhabiting the Cultural Imaginary

Sarah Kenderdine, Special Projects manager at The Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia, will start on Friday a seminar with the theme "Inhabiting the Cultural Imaginary". This is the second seminar held by Sarah for TEC-CH students, enriched this year with fresh new projects and resources. The book "Theorezing Digital Cultural Heritage", edited by Sarah Kenderdine and Fiona Cameron, still in the making last summer, has recently been published.

And one of the most interesting projects, PLACE-Hampi (Stage 1), has been concluded - last year Sarah had just come back from southern India, where she captured the data for the panoramas. PLACE-Hampi is a virtual heritage installation made of high-resolution panoramic images augmented with stereo animations of Hindu mythological scenes. To learn more..

Exhibition "Patong" at the Gottardo Gallery

From May 23rd to August 25th, The Gottardo Gallery in Lugano houses the exhibition "Patong". The patong are the big sculptures of the native people in the Borneo island (the dayak). Sculptures represent ancestors, priests, spirits, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motives. Some of them were created purposefully for housing the spirit of a deceased person. The dayak believe that each human being has two souls: one that dies with the body and one that remains for a while near the deceased before heading for the House of the Souls.
All the sculptures are part of the collection Serge Brignoni, at The Museum of Cultures in Lugano. This exhibition is part of a project of collaboration between the Museum and the Gallery, which has in plan the organisation of several other exhibitions in the following 3-4 years.

Exhibition "This landscape, so calm and so eternal" at the Hermann Hesse Museum in Montagnola

Giosanna Crivelli is an Italian-Swiss photographer. She has known Hesse as a child and later on rediscovered him with fascination. The exhibition opened at the Hermann Hesse Museum on April 4, 2007, "This landscape, so calm, so eternal", displays Giosanna's photos of landscapes "seen through Hesse's eyes". Regina Bucher, the curator of the Hesse Museum insisted that this exhibition is not merely an association of photos with Hesse's quotes, but a vision of nature built on Giosanna's understanding of Hermann Hesse's vision. "Giosanna would go on a mountain and wait for hours until she finds the right light for the photo she wants to take", explains Regina.

The photographs are objects of contemplation, each unique and each in surprising consanance with Hesse's words, displayed near it. What strikes, on entering the exhibition is the cumulated effect of colours, deep blue, violet, red, reddish orange, mineral yellow. As some colours seem un-naturally deep, Regina readily underlined that the photos are not worked with any image-editing program.

The challenge for the artist and for the curator has been to arrange the photos in the small room that the Museum uses for temporary exhibitions. This is the second temporary exhibition I see at the Hesse Museum (the first one was "Rifugio Monte Verità") and every time I am amazed about how simplicity and imagination can exploit a small space. The size of the photos ranges around A4-A3; two photos are enlarged to poster-size, hanged in the middle of the room. Information about the exhibition and the artist is displayed outside, in the hall, so that the room is entirely dedicated to images and Hesse's words.

Witty machines

Luigi's post from the Exploratorium Explainers reminded me of a funny one-hour conversation I had with a chatbot some four years ago. I was wondering why did its responses seem so meaningful at times and was certain that if I talked enough with it I would make sense of the algorhythm. Meanwhile, chatbots have certainly become wittier (that one was not bad also, he did keep me absorbed for one hour). One important thing they miss is memory: they reply to your last question and cannot integrate the input from the conversation into the following answers.

To see where the conversation between two machines can lead, take a look at this article, I chat, therefore I am. Don't miss the conversation extract

Or just talk to Alice

PS: Wouldn'it it be interesting to adapt a chatbot for a museum website? Imagine a chatbot backed by a database that stores information on subjects ranging from the Enlightenment to Indian arts (not necessarily all together) I would spend half an hour every once in a while talking to a machine that would answer all my questions. Funnier than reading a dozen of articles. Remember the witty know-it-all computer in "Artificial Intelligence"?