25/02/02

Extensis Ships Portfolio 6 For Creative Professionals

Extensis today announced the immediate availability of Portfolio 6 - its award-winning Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Portfolio 6 includes a suite of completely new features that make it the easiest and most effective way for professionals to share, organize, retrieve and distribute the digital files they create and use on a regular basis. "Portfolio 6 flies in the face of traditional asset management," said Joseph Schorr, senior product manager for Extensis. "While most DAM solutions are rigidly-structured and have a steep learning curve, Portfolio 6 was rebuilt from top to bottom to make sense in a creative environment. Never before has a full-featured asset management program been so easy to learn and to integrate seamlessly into an existing workflow. The free Mac OS X upgrade will make it easy for our customers to adopt Portfolio today, and continue using it without interruption as they move all their major software tools to Mac OS X later this year."
Coming soon: Apple? Macintosh? OS X Version - Registered owners of Portfolio 6 will be eligible to receive a free upgrade to the Mac OS X version of Portfolio, which will ship later this year. Portfolio 6 currently operates in the Mac OS X Classic environment, allowing Mac OS X users to take advantage of the program's powerful cataloging and file management features. The free upgrade this summer will bring the full Portfolio 6 feature set to Mac OS X.
"Most of our customers are professionals whose primary platform is still Mac OS 9," said Schorr. "But as more and more key applications become available in Mac OS X, we know there's going to be strong interest in a full migration to Mac OS X. We plan to have Portfolio for Mac OS X ready when creative professionals are really going to need it." "FolderSync and the new Portfolio Express palette alone make Portfolio 6 a must-have upgrade," said Avery Raskin of The Write Words, a beta-tester for Portfolio 6. "Portfolio is the must-have asset manager for every professional and I couldn't imagine working without it."
Related post : Extensis Portfolio 6 Announcement with new features
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Thaw Conservation Center Morgan Library NY opens

The Morgan Library, New York
THE THAW CONSERVATION CENTER OPENS

The Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan Library, a world-class laboratory for the conservation of works on paper—drawings and literary, historical, and music manuscripts—as well as a place for conservation studies, opened in February 2002. Occupying the entire 5,600-square-foot fourth floor of the historic Morgan House, the Thaw Center more than doubles the size of the previous conservation facilities and includes designated areas for wet and dry conservation work, matting and framing, advanced seminars, graduate internships, and postgraduate fellowships. It provides the safest environment for the care of objects as well as for the conservators who handle them. The advanced lighting, ventilation, communications, climate control, and other technical equipment will afford broader investigation, treatment, and training opportunities.

In July 1999 the Morgan Library announced a $10-million gift from the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust to support conservation activities at the institution, including the new facility, expanded staff, and an educational program. According to Charles E. Pierce, Jr., Director of the Morgan Library, "This munificent support of Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw enabled us to create this new conservation center, which is at the very heart of the Morgan's mission and activities as a major research library and museum. The Thaw Center will greatly enhance our ability to preserve, interpret, and present the collections that are held in the Morgan's trust. The facility carries the name of Mr. and Mrs. Thaw in recognition of their extraordinary and wide-ranging contributions to the Library."

"My wife and I felt that the Morgan with its great collections should have an equally great department for the preservation and restoration of such collections," Mr. Thaw stated, "and we are happy to move the process along."

"The support of the Thaw Center and related activities, so magnanimous itself, follows Mr. and Mrs. Thaw's many other acts of generosity to the Library, including the promised gift of his entire collection of drawings and his important role as a Trustee." Dr. Pierce continued, "They have assembled over forty years a collection of drawings that is the best in private hands. Gifts and promised gifts from these holdings greatly enrich the Library's collections of drawings and watercolors. We will be better able to care for these works, as well as our other holdings, because of these same great benefactors. Soon, we can more systematically undertake conservation of the approximately 350,000 objects in the Library's collection."

The New York–based firm Samuel Anderson Architect designed the Thaw Center. "The Thaw Center's program," noted Mr. Anderson, "includes requirements for generous natural northern light, specific yet flexible treatment and teaching areas, precise climate control, and an open collegial character. Our design, developed in close collaboration with the Library's administrators and conservators, ensures not only that it carefully fulfills all requirements but also physically reflects the Center's fundamental goals."

Samuel Anderson Architect recently completed the award-winning Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies and the Agnes Mongan Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Harvard University Art Museums. Mr. Anderson, who earned a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union, New York, as well as an A.B. degree with honors from Harvard College, served as project architect on the Busch-Reisinger Museum/Werner Otto Hall, Harvard University Art Museums, while with Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects. His firm, begun in 1991, has completed numerous residential, commercial, and institutional projects.

Margaret Holben Ellis, Professor of Conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she served as Director of Conservation Planning, has been appointed Director of The Thaw Conservation Center. "I envision the Thaw Center as a place of dynamic interchange among conservation and curatorial professionals, supported by a state-of-the-art facility and encouraged by a variety of academic opportunities," commented Professor Ellis. "The invitation to plan all aspects of the Center with the Morgan's knowledgeable conservators was an overwhelming honor and an irresistible challenge." 

THE MORGAN LIBRARY
225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.themorgan.org

20/02/02

Another City de David Hoffos à Montréal

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal ANOTHER CITY (Une autre ville), de DAVID HOFFOS, a été montée pour la première fois à la Southern Alberta Art Gallery en 1999, puis à Calagary, à la Trépanier Art Gallery. Another City n'a jamais encore été présentée ailleurs au Canada. Avec sa scène de baiser sur fond de grande ville futuriste, l'œuvre pourrait se décrire comme un croisement entre le récit romantique et la science fiction, entre Notorious de Hitchcock et Blade Runner de Ridley Scott. Nouveau montage, et en projection 3-D. Comme l'explique David Hoffos, « J'aime montrer comment se fait le trucage. Comprendre le trucage ne gâche en rien la magie de l'illusion. »

Né à Montréal, installé à Lethbridge en Alberta depuis 1990, David Hoffos combine avec brio différentes techniques - maquettes artisanales, film, vidéo, projections de toutes sortes - afin de produire ce qu'on pourra désigner du terme d'installations, mais qu'il préfère nommer des « illusions ». En fait, ces œuvres complexes renvoient du coup à différentes pratiques artistiques et cinématographiques. Au nombre de celles-ci, il faut citer les théâtres d'illusion optique, le cirque et la magie foraine, le cinéma fantastique depuis Le Voyage dans la lune de Méliès jusqu'à Star Wars, l'une de ses références cruciales. Mais on y voit aussi la pratique plus récente de l'installation vidéo illusionniste, celle d'un Murray Favro ou d'un Tony Oursler, dont il prolonge les recherches brillamment.

 

Cette exposition à lieu dans le cadre de la série Zone libre dont Another city de David Hoffos est le second projet. Zone libre est un nouveau volet de la programmation en art contemporain du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, mis en place à l'automne 2001. Il consiste en “une série de manifestations ponctuelles, visant à redonner à l'art actuel sa force d'action et sa mobilité au sein de la programmation”.

 

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal

20 février - 28 avril 2002

 

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19/02/02

SVG Essentials - Producing Vector Graphics with XML

Tap the Power and Flexibility of Scalable Vector Graphics with O'Reilly's SVG Essentials
How can you create a high-res image that scales perfectly on any monitor, PDA, or cell phone? Or build a web page with graphics that update automatically if the content is changed? With Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), the new XML-based graphics standard from the World Wide Web Consortium, all manner of such "intelligent" graphics are possible.
According to J. David Eisenberg, author of the new O'Reilly book SVG Essentials, "SVG is becoming the format of choice for exchanging vector data because it's open, transportable, and cross-platform. With SVG, web and XML developers can create Web documents that are small, quick-loading, and interactive. Plus, because it's an XML application, you can use all the XML tools on your files."
"It's easy to create XSLT stylesheets that take source XML data and create SVG," notes Eisenberg. "For example, you can take an XML data source that lists weather data, run it through an XSLT stylesheet and produce a series of USA Today-like weather diagrams. You can take the same data, run it through a different stylesheet, and create a bar graph of daily temperatures. These easily built tools add a lot of power above and beyond the normal 'drawing program' features."
SVG Essentials takes you through the ins and outs of SVG, beginning with basics needed to create simple line drawings and then moving through more complicated features like filters, transformations, and integration with Java, Perl, and XSLT. The book goes beyond "how to" and explains the concepts underlying SVG. SVG Essentials covers the gamut of things you can do with SVG, including:
  • Creating web graphics that automatically update
  • Generating graphs and charts from information stored in a wide variety of sources
  • Creating diagrams that users can explore by zooming in and panning around
  • Exchanging detailed drawings, from architectural plans to CAD layouts to project management diagrams
  • Managing graphics that support multiple languages or translations
  • Creating complex animation

The book even delves into the markup at the foundation of SVG, providing a solid base for creating your own custom tools. It includes appendices that explain key technical tools like XML, matrix math, and scripting, along with a reference to the SVG vocabulary. Whether you're a designer searching for an easier way to handle web graphics or a programmer building and managing complex data visualizations, you can get the job done with SVG Essentials.

SVG Essentials
By J. David Eisenberg
February 2002, 364 pages, $34.95 (US) $52.95 (CA)

09/02/02

Chiho Aoshima at Blum & Poe, Santa Monica

Chiho Aoshima
Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
February 8 - March 9, 2002

In her solo debut, Chiho Aoshima exhibits five medium to large-scale digital prints. Most recently seen in the traveling exhibition Superflat, her work is identified with the visual and conceptual precedents of Takashi Murakami's work. Chiho Aoshima's style demonstrates the striking trend of anime- and manga-influenced work that has garnered so much attention in recent Japanese art. This work derives many of its stylistic cues from 18th- and 19th-century traditions of formal and spatial reduction. In Chiho Aoshima's work, space and scale are obfuscated by the all-over compositional methods she creates digitally. Though they have the appearance of paintings, she composes her brightly-hued work entirely on the computer, which allows for every inch of the work to be painstakingly rendered.

Chiho Aoshima's works often depict adolescent girls in humorous or bizarre situations. These range from magical and dream-like to dark and horrific. The visual vocabulary she uses exemplifies kawaii, or cute, imagery, but Chiho Aoshima twists this distinctly Japanese device into her own. Frogs, girls, cherry blossoms, fish, snakes, and noodles all occupy the same world, a world with indecipherable terrain, where there is no demarcation between air, water, or land. Still-life and portraiture mix easily in Chiho Aoshima's variously scaled works, as do fashion, design, and traditional art practices.

Chiho Aoshima lives and works in Tokyo and is the head of Digital Drawing for Takashi Murakami's Hiropon Factory.

The pieces were created with the support of Canon, who generously assisted Chiho Aoshima with the printing.

BULM & POE
2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.blumandpoe.com