digital art – ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews

We’re excited to announce the September 2024 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links from each title below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find the full backlist of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Home page of the library guide — **All Aspects of Color Resources**

Home page of Bloomsbury Fashion Central with an About description — **All Aspects of Color Resources**

All Aspects of Color Resources, a Research Guide

Reviewed by: Michele Jennings

New York Public Library’s All Aspects of Color Resources research guide–attributed to Arezoo Moseni at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library–provides an excellent starting point for researchers of historical, theoretical, psychological, and technical aspects of color. It mostly features print books from NYPL’s circulating collections, with a page dedicated to online resources ranging from ebooks to museums and foundations dedicated to artists and designers known for exploration of color. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/w6k6-cs52

Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library

Reviewed by: Hailey Joannah Byrd

Launched in June of 2023, Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library is the newest addition to Bloomsbury’s Fashion Central collection that features resources across the fields of costume history, making, and design. The library is focused on an interdisciplinary and object-based approach to historical fashion research, a practice that has been rising in popularity. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/5qkw-7c55

Fashion Calendar Research Database

Reviewed by: Erin Carney

The Fashion Calendar Research Database (FCRD) is a digitized archive showcasing the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Ruth Finley Collection, an extensive archive which includes her publications Fashion Calendar, Home Furnishings Calendar, and Fashion International. Published between 1941 and 2014, these periodicals document decades of fashion and design history. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7dtd-rc65

Glossary of Early Modern Popular Print Genres

Reviewed by: Bridget O’Keefe

The Glossary of Early Modern Popular Print Genres identifies and describes terms related to European print culture between 1500-1900. The digital glossary encompasses terms in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This state-of-the-art database foregrounds both the materiality and the intellectual content of Early Modern Print culture, illuminating historical knowledge dissemination and cultural exchange. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/texp-n256

International Dunhuang Programme

Reviewed by: Ann Bell

The revamped International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) website unifies digital resources from 35 partner institutions worldwide to enhance appreciation of the history and culture of the Eastern Silk Roads. In the early 1900s Mogao Cave 17, sealed for nearly 1000 years, was discovered near Dunhuang, an oasis town serving as a major nucleus of trade and religion along China’s Silk Road. In addition to textiles, paintings, and small wooden statues, thousands of manuscripts quickly earned the grotto the informal title of “Library Cave.” In 1994, the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) formed, collaborating to catalog, conserve, and promote scholarly research of the Silk Road. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/b8d9-md21

MoCDA Museum of Contemporary Digital Art

Reviewed by: Maria Ketcham

Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA), established in 2019, is an online museum of digital works that serves to promote the understanding, enjoyment, preservation and protection of digital art. Their website showcases digital art selected “from a representative and diverse group of digital artists that are deemed the best of historical and contemporary art,” and offers a wealth of information on a variety of artists working in digital formats. Most of the work featured is NFT art. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/cwxp-rc81

Reviewed by:
Tonya D. Lee, Instructional Technology & Online Learning Coordinator
Moore College of Art & Design
tlee@moore.edu
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/f0ve-sz86

A screenshot of the homepage of Google Arts & Culture’s, Play a Kandinsky, including an image of Wassily Kandinsky’s 1925 painting Yellow-Red-Blue with seven interactive hotspots. The image includes a blue “Launch Experiment” button. — Homepage of Google Arts & Culture’s, Play a Kandinsky, including an image of Wassily Kandinsky’s 1925 painting Yellow-Red-Blue with seven interactive hotspots. To begin the four-step resource, participants choose to “Launch Experiment.”

The Google Arts & Culture Experiment Play a Kandinsky is an interactive digital resource that provides participants a unique opportunity to delve into the question “What if you could hear color?” Using the writings of abstract painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky, Play a Kandinsky demonstrates the complex neurological condition of synesthesia using simulation technology. A collaboration between Google Arts & Culture and the Center Pompidou, this free resource combines interactive visual elements with musical interpretations by sound artists Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, who created audio samples from music in Kandinsky’s library.

Play a Kandinsky uses Kandinsky’s painting Yellow-Red-Blue (1925) to explore the interconnectedness of color, shape, and sound experienced by those with synesthesia. The resource uses experiential learning practices and includes four scaffolded interactive exercises that deliver content through visual, audible, and kinesthetic activities appropriate for various learning styles and audiences. Each exercise is tiered in complexity and engagement, resulting in a user-created unique and shareable musical score generated by Google’s machine learning neural network, Transformer.

The resource can be accessed through a web browser or Google Arts & Culture’s mobile app. Because this resource uses visual and audio elements to demonstrate synesthesia, one must have speakers to gain the whole experience. Once launched, audio narrates the transitioning text as pop-up boxes detail actions to take to interact with the content in the first step of the resource.

A screenshot of the first step in Play a Kandinsky, showing a dark red circle on a medium red background with the instructions “Keep clicking the circle. Each color represents a sound.” — The first step in Play a Kandinsky, participants are introduced to synesthesia by interacting with moving shapes to hear different sounds representing different colors.

In the first step, participants click on a moving circle to play samples of sounds the artist might have heard when seeing different colors. In addition to introducing the basic principles of synesthesia, this activity establishes the foundational knowledge and technical know-how needed to engage with the remaining steps. Navigating between steps is either automated or initiated using the navigation bar at the bottom of the page. In future iterations, creating greater consistency in the transitioning between steps would improve the predictability of the user experience.

A screenshot from the second step of Play a Kandinsky, showing a dark blue circle on a light blue background. Text on the image reads “BLUE” “which Kandinsky heard as an ORGAN” “and associated it with emotions like HEAVENLINESS.” — The second step in Play a Kandinsky highlights three shapes from Kandinsky’s painting Yellow-Red-Blue and asks participants to interact with each to hear color and sound associations described in Wassily Kandinsky’s writings. The sounds are artistic interpretations by sound artists Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, who used Kandinsky’s music library to create music samples.

Navigating to the second step, participants interact with three shape elements from Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue to read and hear about the relationship between color, shape, sound, and emotion. By clicking on the blue circle, one hears organ music that represents the artist’s belief that round forms best represent “soft, deep colours” like blue, and the darkest blues generate the sounds of an organ (Kandinsky 1977, 39). In this step, the developers missed an opportunity to connect the content directly with Kandinsky’s writings. Adding citations that substantiate the content would provide participants with avenues for continued learning and firmly root the lessons in texts of historical significance and relevance.

A screenshot from the third step of Play a Kandinsky, showing seven play buttons on top of Kandinsky’s “Yellow-Red-Blue.” — In the third step, Yellow-Red-Blue is presented with seven interactive hotspots that play music samples that allow participants to “hear” the painting.

In the third step, Yellow-Red-Blue is presented with seven interactive “movements” that, when clicked, play Antoine Bertin and NSDOS’s music samples to allow participants to hear the painting. In this third step, the interface provides a set of variables that yield unique and differentiated outcomes based on the individual’s interactions.

A screenshot from the fourth step of Play a Kandinsky, showing a pop-up box outlining the instructions on how to create a user-generated musical composition and share the results. — In the fourth step, participants use their emotions to create a unique rhythm that is the foundation for a user-generated musical composition. Upon completion, the composition can be shared using the share icon.

The intentional skill and knowledge scaffolding, combined with increasingly personalized interactions, results in a final step that embraces experimentation and creative freedom.

In the last step, participants select their current mood to play sounds that provide the rhythmic foundation for an original and shareable user-generated musical composition created by interacting with elements in Yellow-Red-Blue. Because the composition is based on the order and frequency that each hotspot is initiated, the combinations are seemingly limitless. It is essential to mention that the interactive “emotion” buttons in the web browser version Play a Kandinsky have contrast issues that would be an accessibility concern.

Using interaction design principles combined with experiential learning methods, Play a Kandinsky provides an engaging introduction to the complexities of synesthesia through a well-produced digital technology that engages participants of varying experiences and learning styles. Google Arts & Culture and the Center Pompidou have created a tool that engages participants in a unique sensory experience that would be further enhanced by considering the mentioned areas for refinement.

Listen to the author’s unique musical composition created by Play a Kandinsky here: https://g.co/arts/fZrbhXuC1UU2zZb38