UCSD Arts Libraries

Secret Museum On The Moon’s Surface

From a NYT article from November of 1969 about the tiny museum smuggled to the srface of the moon on the landing of Apollo 12 (!)…
“…according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA’s official channels were unsuccessful.

According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg’s wavy line; Novros’ black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd’s 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, “the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art” [a sculpture which is in MoMA’s permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, “similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer.” Warhol’s contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature.”

Via BoingBoing

RIP Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the innovative composer died this week at home in Germany.

Hugely influential to everyone from the Beatles to Frank Zappa, he was also considered very controversial–for instance when he said that the September 11th attacks were “the greatest work of art one can imagine”. Yipes.

“In one of his lager-scale operas, ”Licht,” Stockhausen tried to capture all of the facets of the world with sound and noises and set them in relation to the human spirit, speech, smells and colors.

The piece, which took 25 years to compose, is an enormous sonic representation of the seven days of the week. So large is the work’s scope that multiple scenes needed to depict Thursday alone last four hours.” From the AP piece at NYT.com

Complaint Choir!

Some crazy Finns got together and started thinking about how to harness all the energy people spend complaining into something else..thus was born the Complaint Choir! Many new Complaint Choirs have been started since then, some in the US too, so go here to read more, or here to start one of your own!

Worldscape Laptop Orchestra

The Musical Laptops of York

The concert hall is dark and hushed, as such venues tend to be. Then the orchestra begins to play. First there’s a whirring, then a beep, then a high-pitched squeak. The 50-piece Worldscape Laptop Orchestra has begun its performance at the University of York, in England.

By “piece” the orchestra means laptop computer. Fifty of them, made by Apple, have been gathered by the university’s music department to perform works composed by Ambrose Field, a senior lecturer in the department. They will be streamed live from the university’s Web site later this month, a local newspaper reports. Continue reading Worldscape Laptop Orchestra…

The day the music died

From the BBC, November 2nd, 2007

Internet law professor Michael Geist examines a legal row which could have grave implications for anyone and everyone serving an online audience.

In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores.

Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured more than 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.

Within two years - without any funding, sponsorship or promotion - the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

In mid-October this year the IMSLP disappeared from the internet. Continue reading The day the music died…

Smithsonian’s Research and Scholars Center newsletter

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center invites you to read the inaugural issue of its online newsletter.

Read about the Center’s resources and programs, including the Inventories of American Painting & Sculpture, the Photograph Archives, and the fellowship program. This issue features the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Centenary Symposium, which was hosted by the Research and Scholars Center in September.

For suggestions, comments, or questions about the Research and Scholars Center newsletter, contact Nicole Semenchuk.

Cabinet Magazine’s A Minor History of Giant Spheres

I love Cabinet Magazine, and this timeline of Giant Spheres through history is so excellent. The best one in my opinion is the entry from 1984 where an Austrian artist builds a giant spherical house, gets in trouble with the government for doing so and then declares himself and the house an independent nation named the Republic of Kugelmugel. Too good.

Studying global warming through old masters’ paintings

Thanks Boing Boing!
Researchers are studying the painted sunsets by artists like Turner, Rembrandt, and Rubens to get a sense of how volcanic eruptions may have impacted global warming. The National Observatory of Athens scientists look at the colors the old masters used in their depictions to suss out the amount of volcanic ash was in the atmosphere. The historical data will then help populate computer simulations of global warming. From The Guardian:

The results will feed into the scientific study of a phenomenon called global dimming, which is caused by air pollution blocking sunlight. Some experts believe this has acted as a brake on global warming, and that climate change could accelerate as air pollution from industry is reduced.

Professor (Christos) Zerefos and his team looked at natural global dimming caused by volcanoes, the results of which can be severe. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 threw out so much material that it triggered the notorious “year without a summer”, which caused widespread failure of harvests across Europe, resulting in famine and economic collapse.

The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. Continue reading Studying global warming through old masters’ paintings…

U.S. researchers turn words to music

Stragely enough, this is from the CBC and not a local paper..

U.S. electrical engineers and computer scientists have developed “Google for music,” a search engine that takes words and finds tunes to match. Users can search “high energy instrumental with piano,” “funky guitar solos” or “upbeat music with female vocals” and locate the songs they want, said the researchers, from the University of California in San Diego. They have built a system that allows a computer to annotate a song using algorithms they created. Once annotated, a user can retrieve it with a text-based search engine, they said in a statement Tuesday.

But it’s not quite that simple. Before the computer can categorize songs, it has to be trained. Gert Lanckriet, a UCSD electrical engineering professor, said that the scientists have developed what they call Listen Game, Continue reading U.S. researchers turn words to music…

Music Scholar Barred From U.S., but No One Will Tell Her Why

From NYT.com Sept. 17, 2007 by Nina Bernstein

Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States.

Her case has become a cause célèbre among musicologists and the subject of a protest campaign by the American Musicological Society and by academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where Ms. Ghuman was to have participated last month in the Bard Music Festival, showcasing Elgar’s music.

But the door has remained closed to Ms. Ghuman, an assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who is British and who had lived, studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt exclusion.

The mystery of her case shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to defend against such a decision once the secretive government process has been set in motion. Continue reading Music Scholar Barred From U.S., but No One Will Tell Her Why…