The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision (in English)

English version of the book on the Sistin Chapel, announced in the previous post:
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The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision (Hardcover)
by Heinrich W. Pfeiffer (Author), Steven Lindberg (Translator)

Details on Amazon.com.

La Sistina svelata - Iconografia di un capolavoro

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The new book of comprehensive amazing close-up photographs about one of the most important masterpieces of western art, the Cappella Sistina by Michelangelo.
Book profile (in italian): >>>>

Sino ad oggi la Cappella Sistina è stata soprattutto studiata sotto il profilo stilistico e, sulla scorta dei lavori di restauro, sotto quello eminentemente tecnico.
Questo volume mostra una nuova Sistina attraverso uno sguardo del tutto innovativo all’iconografia delle pareti laterali dipinte fra gli altri da Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli e del lavoro michelangiolesco nella volta, nelle lunette e nella parete del Giudizio Universale.
L’aspetto rivoluzionario del lavoro non consiste nel sovvertire giudizi storico artistici o attribuzioni oramai del tutto assodati dalla critica, ma nel mostrare immagine per immagine, colore per colore la soggiacente struttura simbolica che ordina coerentemente l’intera opera. Questa struttura simbolica, un vero e proprio programma filosofico-teologico, anticipa e determina l’intera storia degli affreschi della Sistina, dagli artisti quattrocenteschi sino al lavoro di Michelangelo. Si tratta di un programma iconografico unitario formulato dai teologi di Sisto IV, in pieno Quattrocento, e poi seguito dallo stesso Michelangelo molti anni dopo.
La pubblicazione è anche l’occasione per mostrare la Sistina con un’eccezionale abbondanza di particolari in modo che questo scrigno d’arte risulti ‘squadernato’ di fronte agli occhi del lettore ma anche ‘decodificato’ nei significati e persino nell’uso dei colori di ciascuna scena.

steve.museum announces new functionality and a Facebook application

Hi everyone,

I wanted to alert you to some new functionality offered by the steve social tagging project, and to ask for your help in recruiting your friends and classmates to tag art using the new steve Facebook application. You are now able to email invitations to tag art to friends, share your favorite images or tags, and display works from the steve tagger on your Facebook profiles. We also encourage you to join the steve Facebook group--it's a handy way to hear about new developments on the project. The formal announcement of our new tools, and an invitation to participate, follows.

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Steve.museum is a collaboration of art museums that is studying the potential of social tagging (user-contributed descriptions) to improve access to online art collections. Our research is conducted online, where visitors are invited to look at and tag works of art from the collections of U.S. and U.K. museums. The project has recently added some new functionality to its tagging tools, allowing users to share their favorite images and tags with others, invite friends to participate, and—for those with Facebook accounts—to display their tagged works on their Facebook profile pages and to see the most popular tagged artworks.

We invite you to check out our new features by visiting the steve website or by trying out the Facebook application. Our research depends on you to tag artworks, and to invite your friends and contacts to participate as well.

You’ll find the steve tagger online at http://tagger.steve.museum. If you have not tagged previously, you’ll have the option to create an account. Doing so is not mandatory, but registering does help us to collect more useful information for our research.

The steve Facebook application (steve Art Tagger) can be accessed at http://apps.facebook.com/steve-museum/. When you install the application, you’ll have the opportunity to link your Facebook account to a previously-created steve account.

Please note that if you would like to explore both the steve tagger at tagger.steve.museum and the Facebook application, you’ll need to close your browser between sessions to avoid conflicts that may cause errors. Also, the choice to link your steve account with Facebook is persistent: steve will remember you as a Facebook user in the future.

More about the project: You can learn more about the steve project by visiting our project website at www.steve.museum. Museums contributing images to the current research project include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.

Live from Möbius Lugano Multimedia Award

Right now, at the Möbius Lugano Multimedia Award 2008, held today in Lugano, I am attending the second part of the event, a symposium with the theme “Web Media Collision. The media war and the web”. Roberto Carraro, whose speech has just been completed by a huge round of applauses, has replaced the traditional powerpoint presentation with a Second Life session. Roberto has built in Second Life the visual support for his argumentation around the media war and the competition between different media tools. From television to interactive television, the web and to web 2.0, from video-games to video-games built by the users. Roberto has used a symbolic graphical representation of the tension and evolution of these tools and navigated between them arriving at the web 2.0 panel where the heads and the bodies of the long Giacometti-like shaped black and red human shadows co penetrated each others in a spherical representation where concepts such as blogosphere, wiki, RSS were floating. Andrea Basso, research director AT&T Labs in New Jersey has concentrated on data mining and information retrieval on the internet; Andrea has made a demonstration for Miracle: multimedia information retrieval by content – a search engine which allows searching audio and video contents using speech recognition and segmentation of contents. Prof. Paolo Paolini, from USI Lugano, is now speaking about career possibilities in the new media field. Tangentially, Paolo brings about a discourse that has been set aside in the other speeches: while new media is setting forth towards broad promising horizons, and web 2.0 towards web 3.0, there are numerous cultural institutions and museums in the world that do not have yet a website or if they have one it gives little graphical and contents appeal for users. Paolo is re-directing the attention towards opening possibilities for multimedia production in contexts where human and financial resources are scarce, through open-source easy to use authoring tools. Think small be fast act effectively..