Ebay Art

A new exhibition opened yesterday at the Hayward:

Art Bought Online

A range of images and objects have been selected by Hayward Curatorial Associate Tom Morton and purchased from the auction site eBay.co.uk over a two-week period in August 2008. The chosen pieces reflect Britain's 'hidden' art - works that have occupied people's homes rather than the public space of a gallery, offered for sale through the democratic marketplace of the internet. View Basket comprises everything from Victorian paintings to original comic art, from customised action figures to ephemera by leading art world figures. An ever-expanding selection of works fill the gallery as new items arrive during the run of the exhibition, reflecting the project's open-ended nature. It also includes a display of the improvised and sometimes highly idiosyncratic packaging in which these items have been sent to The Hayward. When the exhibition ends the works will become part of The Hayward's archive.

Genius. Hope to get to go and see it. We have quite a collection of artworks adorning our walls from ebay - its a great place to get unusual prints for cheap. (I'd tell you the name of my favourite dealer, but you may bid the prices up....)

book corrections mark ii

... as per below, mistakes in copyediting.

Every single use of the word "pixelated" has been changed to "pixel".

cos that makes sense..... sigh....

Busy Busy Bee

... I'm dealing with my book proofs at the moment. I have a couple of weeks to turn them around.

Which would be entirely not-a-stress, if some helpful copy-editor hadnt gone through and changed the grammar at least once on every page, to "fix" sentences until they dont make sense. And I'm having to keep an eye out for those, as well as my own typos.

They've put "the" in front of everything, for some the wierd the reason.

For example:

Original text: 40,000 books from Harvard will be digitized.

"Corrected" version: The 40,000 books from the Harvard will be digitized.

Eh?

Photosynth redux

... is now available to try out online, and you can upload and create your own multi-photo walk-through panoramas (providing you are signed up to Windows Live). See http://photosynth.net/ . It really is the future of pulling together tagged-image content into a usable whole...

A Rubbish Poem for Scrabulous

Farewell Scrabulous
you were much used
and taught me words like Xu and Ai
and how to use double word scores effectively.
You will be missed
but maybe
now I will get more work done.

The end.

Photosynth

A great presentation from TED about Photosynth, a new system to look at digital images, which merges photos and builds VR models on the fly from underlying image data - such as all the pics on Flickr labelled with one tag. Really worth scrolling through to about 4mins in, seeing the demo with Notre Dam.

The best of times, the worst of times

The Urban Dictionary is a fascinating example of the whole web 2.0 caboodle - a dictionary of american slang written by "you". Its handy when decoding some comments left on blogs (such as gr7, rotflmao, lulz) or figuring out what the titles of British romcoms are actually referring to (I wont link to examples here, as they are invariably dubious activities of a sexual nature).

But then you see the definition of real words, like, I dunno, "feminism". And we see the trolls emerge. Are all commonly used web 2.0 sites so sexist? Misogynistic? Abusive? In this brave new t'interweb world, my heart sinks (and blood boils) that the mirror is held up to society, and the same old same old often emerges.

Olympiad

I've really been enjoying the Olympics, especially the cycling (go team GB. I'm not remotely patriotic in any other sporting event, apart from the Olympics. The real McHoy, indeed). And the gymnastics (I always wonder why you would bother spending the time to make a clip to put up on youtube, and not bothering to spell check?)

But surely, montages like this are what youtube was created for.

Sinister Corporation, World Domination, etc etc etc

Good article about Google in today's Observer.

ladybird ladybird

Ladybird books have just digitised lots of their children's books and put the illustrations online (following renewed interest in the illustrations over the last few years - they've become collectors items.) Naturally, you can buy prints, etc - but a fascinating collection of digitised material. Check out how the computer works...