Tags: exhibition

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition:

I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of tune collections. Are you happy for me to do so?

I replied that I’d be honoured!

The exhibition opened on May 19th. I just happened to be in London a few days after that for the Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. So I arranged to have a little tour of the exhibition from its curator, Jennifer Brian.

It’s a really nice collection, and it was kind of surreal to see my website in amongst esteemed artifacts of folk music history.

I’m not used to The Session getting recognition from a museum, but I am used to getting kudos when I tell fellow trad musicians that I made the website. I joke that it’s my passport to free pints anywhere there’s a session happening, but it’s true.

The next night when I was playing in the session in the pub, Brendan The Navigator, I outed myself about halfway through the evening when I handed out some stickers for the website. Sure enough, someone immediately asked if they could buy me a pint.

I must admit it’s very gratifying when people appreciate the work that’s gone into building and maintaining The Session.

The exhibition at The Royal College of Music Museum is free and runs until October. If you’re in the neighbourhood, you should drop in and check it out.

An Archeology for the Future in Space

I really enjoyed this deep dive into some design fiction work done by Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo, and Fred Scharmen.

(Remember when Simone spoke at dConstruct about toasters? That was great!)

Back in December 1997, when Jessica and I were living in Freiburg, Dan came to visit. Together, we boarded a train east to Vienna. There we would ring in the new year to the sounds of the Salonorchester Alhambra, the band that Dan’s brother Andrew was playing in (and the band that would later be my first paying client when I made their website—I’ve still got the files lying around somewhere).

That was a fun New Year’s ball …although I remember my mortification when we went for gulash beforehand and I got a drop on the pristine tux that I had borrowed from Andrew.

My other memory of that trip was going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see the amazing Bruegel collection. It’s hard to imagine that ever being topped, but then this year, they put together a “once in a lifetime” collection, gathering even more Bruegel masterpieces together in Vienna.

Jessica got the crazy idea in her head that we could go there. In a day.

Looking at the flights, it turned out to be not such a crazy idea after all. Sure, it meant an early start, but it was doable. We booked our museum tickets, and then we booked plane tickets.

That’s how we ended up going to Vienna for the day this past Monday. It was maybe more time than I’d normally like to spend in airports in a 24 hour period, but it was fun. We landed, went into town for a wiener schnitzel, and then it was off to the museum for an afternoon of medieval masterpieces. Hunters in the Snow, the Tower of Babel, and a newly restored Triumph of Death sent from the Prado were just some of the highlights.

There’s a website to accompany the exhibition called Inside Bruegel. You can zoom on each painting to see the incredible detail. You can even compare the infrared and x-ray views. Dive in and explore the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

All You Need is Link | Rhizome

A lovely piece of early web history—Olia Lialina describes the early Net Art scene in 2000.

The address bar is the author’s signature. It’s where action takes place, and it’s the action itself. The real action on the web doesn’t happen on the page with its animated GIFs or funny scripts, it’s concentrated in the address bar.

And how wonderful that this piece is now published on Rhizome, an online institution so committed to its mission that it’s mentioned in this seventeen year old article.

SPEED SHOW

I like this ad-hoc approach to staging one-night-only internet art shows:

Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night.

Magnum Photos: The Places We Live

A photography exhibition and book by Jonas Bendiksen of densely populated urban areas around the world.