Illustrator Nina Cosford works for a range of clients, from publishers and media providers to bookshops and magazines; plus she makes movies, graphic novels and children’s books. But she has a special passion for museums, kick-started by her “Museum for Kids” projects.
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Monthly Archives: July 2013
From the Archive; Collecting Digital Art and Design
I’m reposting these talk-and-conference reviews from 2010, as the issues covered are now to topical. With Louise Shannon recently made Curator of Digital Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, debate continues around what museums might collect from the field of digital art and design, and how it should be conserved (MoMA’s Architecture and Design Department set the pace with its Video Games acquisitions, which I spent a fun afternoon playing on my last visit). Louise co-curated the seminal show, Decode: Digital Design Sensations, staged in the Porter Gallery, and hearing one of the co-curators of the latest show to open there, “Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace”, on BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week” (17/6/13), made me think about how we might be “reneging on remembering” by relying on digital storage to save our real-life memories. But what happens when digital formats deteriorate and/or become obsolete, and those files are on longer accessible? Check back for my review of Memory Palace, coming soon…
John Maeda in conversation with Alice Rawsthorn
Attended 2 February 2010
Decoding the Digital Conference
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Attended 4-5 February 2010
Monday 7:01pm, 22 February 2010
“Discussing the digital”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally published on Eye Blog
John Maeda on dirt, de-cluttering and the power of art
Even though John Maeda wasn’t speaking at the conference, “Decoding the Digital”, staged alongside the exhibition Decode: Digital Design Sensations, his work and words (from this lecture earlier in the week) were referenced during the proceedings.
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Irish Gold
National Museum of Ireland
Archeology
Kildare Street, Dublin
Permanent Collections
Visited 25 May 2013
Even though I’ve been to Dublin many times, this was my first visit to one of the city’s three sites that house the National Museum of Ireland. Having read about the museum’s development in Anthony Burton’s Vision & Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A Publications, 1999), I was interested to see if its 19th-century roots, administered by the Department of Science and Art, as part of its “South Kensington system”, might still be evident.
Today the museum combines a distinctive building and interior, a world-class collection, and a friendly, inclusive “interface”. Founded in 1877 as the Museum of Science and Art, it brought together a number of collections and institutions (not unlike the Victoria and Albert Museum’s origins). The museum building in Kildare Street (and its opposite twin, the National Library of Ireland), resulted from an architectural competition won by Thomas Newenham Deane, with the purpose-built museum opening in the 1880s. The two institutions flank the 18th-century Leinster House, originally home to the Royal Dublin Society, it became the new nation’s parliament building on independence from Britain in 1921. The proximity of museum to government points to the importance the Nationalists afforded to the exploration and preservation of Ireland’s cultural heritage.
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From the Archive; Raymond Pettibon in London
Having just discovered Raymond Pettibon on Twitter (am marvelling at his word games, but can’t decipher them), I thought I’d repost this exhibition review, written for Eye Blog.
Sadie Coles HQ
69 South Audley Street, London W1
3 October to 17 November 2012
Visited 5 October 2012
Thursday 5:00am, 11 October 2012
“Don’t explain”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally posted on Eye Blog
Raymond Pettibon straddles the high / low culture divide, adding his seductive scrawl to the white cube of a London gallery
Raymond Pettibon’s latest series of drawings investigates recurrent themes around American pop culture, film noir and baseball, and are currently on show at Sadie Coles HQ. This mid-sized, commercial gallery, a two-floor white cube, was well populated for a rainy Friday afternoon – it is a treat to see these drawings (loosely termed) in the flesh.
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