Hasta La Ideas

Katsushika Hokusai, Thunder god, 1847 (Courtesy Freer Gallery of Art)

The museum collection digitization boom continues! Following the lead of institutions such as The Getty, the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery kicked off the new year by releasing their full collections online. Translation: more than 40,000 masterpieces of Asian and American art (the vast majority of which have never been on public display) are now available for free public use. Thumbnails these are not. More than 90 percent of the images will be available in high resolution and without copyright restrictions. In the initial release, each work is represented by one or more highly detailed images at the highest possible resolution, with some available for download as digital wallpaper. So stop what you’re doing and outfit your laptop, tablet, and smartphone with the frolicking—or possibly warring—gilded peacocks from James McNeill Whistler‘s famed Peacock Room.

Pictured at right, Neil Greentree working on collection digitization. (Photo: Hutomo Wicaksono for Freer and Sackler Galleries)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The glowing, blinking, buzzing, bustling crossroads that is New York’s Times Square doesn’t lack for much—except serenity. Artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz is looking to inject calm into the chaos this month with A Pause in the City That Never Sleeps. Created for the Midnight Moment initiative, which synchronizes electronic billboards and newspaper kiosks throughout Times Square to display creative content nightly from 11:57 to midnight, in partnership with Performance Space 122’s COIL 2015 Festival, the work is a black and white moving image of a bored-looking man who peers down at the passing crowds and yawns, repeatedly. Sound like a yawn? Not until you remember how contagious—and calming—a yawn can be.

“To be able to trigger in the audience a positive contagious physical reaction, an involuntary mass yawning performance, and to plant a brief sensation of much-needed rest in thousands of people is a fascinating possibility,” says Chilean-born Errazuriz, who lives and works in New York with parallel workshops in Santiago. “It is our intrinsic empathic quality that makes yawning contagious, and empathy is a scarce quality in New York City. I like the idea of imagining families of tourists fascinated by the flickering NYC lights suddenly finding themselves yawning and deciding its maybe time to go back to the hotel and spend some family time together.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Gather ’round, design lovers, and consider the possibilities for collective gathering in the streets of the future. That’s the brief of a new competition organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture in partnership with the New Museum and the New York City Department of Transportation in the run-up to IDEAS CITY 2015 (now in its third year, the biennial Festival created “to explore the future city and to effect change,” will take place in downtown New York from May 28 to 30). Your mission: design “a work of mobile architecture suited for hosting daring feats of oratory” and is in keeping with this year’s festival theme of “The Invisible City.” Discuss, debate, and dream on that, and then review the full contest details. The registration deadline is January 23 and entries must be submitted by February 23.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ever wondered what children imagine when they play? Enjoy :)..(Read…)

By AsapSCIENCE…(Read…)