Exploring the ways in which artists, artisans and technicians are intelligently expressing their creativity with a passion for culture, technology, marketing and advertising.
The Museum of London has launched an iPhone app that enables users to access its extensive art and photographic images of the streets of London
Developed in conjunction with Brothers and Sisters, the free StreetMuseum app utilises the iPhone’s geolocation technology to allow users to hold up their phones to London landmarks and overlay a historic image of it on the real-time image.
This is a great new use of Augmented Reality.
To get a free sneak peek at the story, fans can eyeball an eight-page digital preview on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. The Dust to Dust app, devised by comiXology and Boom Studios, includes a retail locator bundled with a preorder feature for those who want to purchase physical copies. Learn more about Dust to Dust, and see more cover variants, by clicking the link above.
Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.
A beautifully designed website full of comprehensive information on art and art history. A must resource.
Last year Edinburgh residents tackled Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure The Lost World, last month Dubliners were taking a collective look at The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Brighton’s readers are currently engrossed in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel From Russia with Love. Now a new project is hoping to take the “one book, one city” initiative a step further, and get the whole world reading the same novel.
The brainchild of Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and a contributing editor at Wired magazine, the One Book, One Twitter scheme launches tomorrow. Readers have been voting for the book which they’ll be tackling for the past month, with Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods eventually triumphing over titles including Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
“The aim with One Book, One Twitter is – like the one city, one book programme which inspired it – to get a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book. It is not, for instance, an attempt to gather a more selective crew of book lovers to read a series of books and meet at established times to discuss,” explained Howe at Wired.com. “Usually such ‘Big Read’ programs are organised around geography. Seattle started the trend for collective reading in 1998 when zillions of Seattlites all read Russell Banks’s book, Sweet Hereafter. Chicago followed suit with To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later. This Big Read is organised around Twitter, and says to hell with physical limitations.”
Gaiman, whose novel follows the story of ex-convict Shadow, released from prison and embarking on a bizarre journey across America with the mysterious Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a former god, said he thought One Book, One Twitter was “a great idea – a sort of worldwide book club”.
He was, however, slightly concerned about the choice of American Gods, describing himself as “half-pleased and half-not”, because it’s “such a divisive book”. “Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it … It’s not a book I’d hand out to everyone, because the people who don’t know anything about what I’ve written and who hate it – who might have loved Stardust, or Neverwhere, or The Graveyard Book or Sandman – probably won’t go and look any further,” the author explained on his blog.
“But it’s happened, I’m kind of thrilled that I get to help kick off something this new, and I’m going to do all I can to help. Which, today, will consist of making sure I let all the publishers around the world who have American Gods in print know about this, and, over the next few months, sending helpful or apologetic tweets to people who are stuck, offended, or very, very confused.”
On Twitter at @1B1T2010 – with more than 1,500 followers days after launching – and hashtag #1b1t, the One Book, One Twitter project begins officially tomorrow.
Curious to see how many people follow this. I loved the book. http://amzn.to/chfk08
A collection of links, ideas and posts by Antonio Ortiz.
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