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Where Technology Meets the ArtsSM
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Catalogues, Archives, Cultural Institutions
Education and Distance Learning
Internet Policy, Digital Property
The Arts, the Internet, Society
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| Catalogues, Archives, Cultural Institutions |
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Curator for a Day
Maria Doiranlis, 2002
For those of you interested in amassing exquisite works of art for your
own private collection, a number of museum websites allow visitors the
pleasure of creating and maintaining virtual art collections.
Leitmotif
AM Carley, 2002
This spring, after twenty years, I decided it was time to go back for a
visit to Marfa, Texas. The Chinati Foundation - Donald Judd's nonprofit
- was organizing its annual symposium there, in early May. The
symposium, Light in Architecture and Art: The Work of Dan Flavin,
took place at the Marfa AmVets hall. The gathering combined an
attentive audience with inspired speakers. They spoke of light, all but
one of them while in a darkened room.
Back to the Archives: The Ghost of Parchment Future
AM Carley, 1999
One begins to appreciate physical archives - with their look, feel,
smell, relationships, life-sized objects and textures - grouped
intelligently in a more material reality. Nothing in such an archive
has been flattened into the uniformity of pixel patterns on a screen;
the handwriting on the document is not a mere likeness - it was made by
another human, working with this same document, at another time... |
Collectors and Collections
AM Carley, 1999
For
some, it's the aesthetic pleasure: waking up in the morning and
enjoying, again, the way the sunlight touches on that ancient Chinese
vase. For some, it's the thrill of the hunt: tracking down the last
element of that matched set that was broken up centuries ago;
discovering a wonderful Robert Ryman painting at a flea market in
Chelsea.
The Inadvertent Collector
AM Carley, 2001
In other words,
our tax structure does not encourage artists to make gifts of their
work to museums and libraries during their lifetimes. So, a lot of the
time, they don't. Instead, the works accumulate and accumulate and artist
and loved ones together try to ignore the inevitable reckoning that
looms in the nine months following the artist's death...
Picture This
AM Carley, 2000
My
midcentury upbringing in Middle America's heartland may have been
odd in some ways - no Barbie dolls, no soft white bread, rationed
television - and those ways sure were noticeable at the time. But
I think I knew, even then, I had a treasure not everyone shared -
wonderful books that could take me anywhere.
In return, I took them all in - and they sponged their way into the
deepest reaches of my brain where they remain to this day. It's that
Proust-and-the-madeleines phenomenon: I look at an illustration from Now We Are Six, and the room changes, the smells change, my height changes -- I'm swept back to childhood...
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| Education and Distance Learning |
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September Song
AM Carley, 1999
There's an inertia about learning; once started, it just doesn't want
to stop. An infant exploring the joys and surprises of her first
springtime can't help but learn; at that stage in life we are
hard-wired. We must learn. For adults, it may be less imperative, but
it's a definite option. Simply watching a child puzzling over a
caterpillar, an adult can discover a new aspect, just imagining how
life looks through the eyes of another...
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Innovation Internalized: Making it up as you go
AM Carley, 1999
How do we respond to the digital revolution? (Undeniably it is
underway.) If, as predicted, we begin to look to new products and
services for emotional stimuli, first, and practical aids to living,
secondarily, what does this do to innovation? Who will be the new
innovators? How does one make a leap from the familiar to the
fantastic, from tools to theory, from comfort to challenge?
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| Internet Policy, Digital Property |
Cowboys' Lament: Kelly v Arriba Soft
AM Carley, 2002
Lace curtains are going up, horses are stabled and the frontier that
once was the Internet has been tamed. The cowboys of those
rough-and-ready days of the last century had better learn their manners
if they want to stay off the one-way road marked "Sunset."
On 6 February 2002 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals released its
decision in the case, Kelly v Arriba Soft Corp., overturning a Federal
District Court decision from 1999. Why should we care? Here's some
background to the story.
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Trailblazing the Internet
AM Carley, 1998
One indication of our collective confusion is the fact that we still
don't have consensus on the metaphor for the Internet. A flammable
community, or maybe a park, or perhaps a telephone, or a doorknob that
rewards its user with unbounded knowledge. What's even more important
is the weight being given to the transformational potential of the
Internet...
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Ones and Zeroes
AM Carley, 1999
We live in interesting times. Not so long ago, a dollar was a dollar.
Then came digital information. Then came the Internet. We are witnesses
to an important transformation. Money, after a long process of growing
abstraction, from precious metals to paper money, through credit cards
to the ones and zeroes of binary cash, has become information. At the
same time, information is becoming...
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Who's Afraid of the Internet?
AM Carley, 1997
Is
the Internet a fearsome force, to be tamed by the United States' best
and bravest, under an updated variety of the Manifest Destiny that
"tamed" the "wilderness" and took possession of this continent, with
all its riches, from sea to shining sea? Left untamed, would the
Internet pervert our national beliefs, overtake our national soul,
corrupt and defile our national rules and laws about property and
propriety?
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Starting Over, Going Up and Coming Down
AM Carley, 2000
So let's say you are a painter. You make paintings and show some of
them through art galleries, sell some of them out of your studio, and
have too many of them piled up to your kitchen table. Looking for new
ways to bring your work in front of more people, you consider the
Internet. It may seem impersonal, tech-y, and frightening, since it
seems anything at all could happen to anything you put up. Or you're a
composer of songs, or you're a poet, or choreographer, or photographer.
This Internet that seems to be everywhere these days is just not
looking very attractive to you...
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| The Arts, the Internet, Society |
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Musings
AM Carley, 2000
Maybe
your new composition is based less in melody and more in the chord
progressions. In jazz circles, reworkings by Charlie Parker and others
of I've Got Rhythm, some as separate, copyrighted songs, are
well known. Parker added so many linear and harmonic complexities -
which originated in his live improvisations, not in music manuscript -
that he departed the realm of the Gershwins' show-tune, entitling
Parker to consider his work a new composition. A particular
improvisatory flight was codified, named, and copyrighted, no longer
tethered to its past, thereby providing one more standard for everyone
else to riff on.
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A Day at the Beach
AM Carley, 1999
What
once were sales of hard goods - music CD's, for example - can now be
sales of data streams, services, in the form of downloaded music files.
If I bought a music recording in the form of a data stream, I could
delay materialization past the time of purchase, with not even a piece
of paper to represent the binary data - the thing sold...
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All The Time in the World
AM Carley, 2000
Many
hundreds of years later, we're hearing the term "Renaissance" again, in
flurries of self-definition. Maybe we're just flattering ourselves, or
maybe there is something to the comparison to Europe of the 1500's. Now
we buzz with a self-conscious sense of excitement - a kind of keyed-up,
hopeful, uncertainty. Maybe we are becoming aware, as they may have
done then, of potential: long-stored possibility, containable no
longer. Now, as then, knowledge itself, now known as information, can
translate to wealth and power. What we know, however, is framed in a
haze - we see and experience only enough to realize we know very
little, and are using clumsy tools.
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I Know It When I See It
AM Carley, 1999
Years
ago, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court was said to have
explained, "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see
it." he was talking about obscenity. He might as well have been talking
about art...
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Don't Fence Me In
AM Carley, 1999
So
there I sat in the subway car, minding my own business, when the ad
across from me seemed to shout: "Take back the living and working space
you've lost!" Involuntarily there tumbled into my head phrases like
"elbow room," "Lebensraum," and that recent bitter soundbite, "ethnic
cleansing." In the background, I imagined a hearty male voice
rabble-rousing to Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me In. What was being
advertised in my subway car? Self-service ministorage compartments for
crowed city-dwellers. It struck me as a little overstated...
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Who Owns the Mona Lisa?
Museums and Digital Information Online
AM Carley, 1996
Who
Owns the Mona Lisa? Well, there was always a sense in which the answer
was "we all do" since the work resounds loudly around the world.
Nowadays, there is another sense in which we can say we all own the
Mona Lisa, since the work is available for viewing on line. I say "the
work" is available, but of course what we see on the Internet is not
the work. And therein lies a world of trouble...
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