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Creative Arts

Tessa Verrecchia's fused glass
HelsBels - Ceramics and The Art Of Permaculture
Sarah Lamb Jewellery - handmade in silver with turquoise and lapis lazuli
Slashdot on Richard Box's very cool Electromagnetic Emissions Art

In August 2003 I went to London's Whitechapel Gallery to see an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller which featured a piece called "Forty Part Motet" (2001). This was their version of Thomas Tallis' wonderful choral masterpiece Spem In Alium for forty voices, which was specially composed for the octagonal banqueting hall at Nonsuch Palace (sadly now demolished) with the forty choristers standing around the edge in eight groups of five while the patron sat in the centre; true Surround Sound in the 1570s! Cardiff and Miller's take on this was to have forty loudspeakers (one for each singer) arranged in a circle around the space, so the audience could walk around and experience any number of sonic perspectives. It was fascinating to hear the different voices, and of course one could get much closer than would be practical or polite with real singers. The strangest part came at the end of the piece, when the gallery would return to silence, the audience suddenly alone again after feeling surrounded by people. A wonderful touch came in the way of coughing and whispering as the ghost choir prepared to sing again their piece; it was very eerie being physically alone in this room to suddenly hear people's voices all around you.

Surrealist Painting

Dadaism and Dada
First Surrealist Manifesto, 1924 and Surrealist Declaration of 1925
Review of David Gascoyne's work including his book "A Short Survey of Surrealism" [City Lights Books]
Mati Klarwein painted some cool album covers by Miles Davis, Jon Hassell, Santana, etc. Just check out the Surrealist and especially Landscape galleries, e.g.: Soundscape, You're Next, Headquarters, Power Spot, Indian Summer, Private Property.
Kuro5hin.org on Magritte's "L'Empire des lumieres" and Cycladic Lyre Player figurine
The extraordinary images of Alfred Kubin (also a writer)
Clucking Azure by Rowan ManningRowan Manning
Bob Drake's fantastic Art Tutorial
Stafford Beer's artwork [site not responding 2008-02-23]
Tomas C. Gilsanz
Picture galleries of Nadezhda Markalova and Nadezhda Karavaeva
Online collection of surrealist paintings includes:

Photography

Surreal Photography
Architecture photos of Abandoned Places and Dark Passages
Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey have developed a fascinating technique of Photographic Photosynthesis; their "Afterlife" installation at London's Beaconsfield Gallery in 2001 featured 5m-high photos developed onto grass using photosynthesis (yes, that's grass, not glass). I wish I'd seen it. More recently, they've been on an Arctic expedition, burning ice using "a lens carved from glacial ice as a magnifying glass for a neat refraction on global warming." Cool!

Photographic techniques

I (still!) use a Canon EOS600 analogue SLR camera to take portraits of people I know and places I've visited. When I can afford to switch to digital, I will, but until then, here's some useful tips:

Canon EOS Forum discuss Infra red film in EOS bodies and Canon EOS Lenses
Auto Depth of Field with Canon SLR
Photographing sky as part of a picture
Flower and Close-Up Photography at Photography Class
photo.net Learn Photography beginners' articles
Cokin Filter System

Computer Graphics

Algorithmic Animation and Mathematical Art
Fractals and other cool mathematical images
DigitalBlasphemy.com
Ken Musgrave's fantastic fractal planetary landscapes
Linux graphics software
net art

ASCII-art

Veronica's ASCII-art has some amazing images including Escher's Waterfall and Computer Trouble; she inspired my own humble Homage to Bridget Riley.


© copyright Malcolm Smith 2002-02-05 - last updated 2008-02-23 - links verified 2008-02-23