10Oct
this is about me constructing mediainspiratorium while living in West Cowes
( In this photo-montage made in Photoshop, I wanted to celebrate some of the great icons of art-media history celebrated in my mediainspiratorium. Above, these include the actor José Ferrer playing Henri de Toulouse Lautrec in John Huston's Moulin Rouge, the actor Hedy Lamarr - who along with the composer George Antheil:
"Hedy Lamarr At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hoppingtechnology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers."
(wikipedia)
Hedy Lamarr was a great beauty, George Antheil composed Ballet Mecanique in the 1920s to accompany Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy's film of the same name. The cosmonaut is the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, the cartoon character is of course Bugs Bunny the anarchist Trickster hare - drawn and animated by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery in the early 1940s.
'I always wanted an art history that placed innovations in art in context with other cultural innovations - in media technology, in fashion and lifestyle, in graphics, theatre, dance (etc) in short I wanted a personal vade mecum - an Intermedia Arts History - and I couldn't find one, so I decided to invent one for myself: Initially this began as a web archive, then Dr Russell Richards coded it for an Apple app...
My Mediainspiratorium launch exhibition in Hackney
This was great - Dave Leigh- a friend and part-time lecturer at London College of Fashion had loaned me his spacious Hackney shop, and we’d turned it into a gallery for this short launch show: about my mediainspiratorium app and web-archive: Russell Richards and I had completed it as an Apple i-Phone/i-Pad app earlier in 2020, and we wanted to do an exhibition-launch in London and Dave's Hackney gallery was just the spot.
In its ideal form (as an app rather than just a web-archive as it exists now: see https://mediainspiratorium.com/) it was an interlinked repository of recent developments in culture - from 1800 - to the present (2010). As a web-archive it offers a menu so you can choose 1800-1900 and every period or decade up to 2010, covering innovations in culture, art and media - it is rather personal in that it is my choice of the innovations I've included.. but if you want me to add something important, please suggest it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWuZRLpJJA&t=3s
These were some of the e-fliers I did to promote the mediainspiratorium app online. I've used José Ferrer as Lautrec again, with the famous photo of Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen, part of a portrait of Charlie Chaplin without his Tramp make-up, and finally, Jean Marais, Cocteau's lover in his film Orphee (1949-50) in this film, through ingenious simple in-camera special-effects - like the mirror - Orpheus can pass into the Underworld...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWuZRLpJJA&t=3s
We put this up in a day or so, with the help of my mate, the artist Martin Richman, who lived relatively nearby. I’d done most of the mounting and framing on the island and Smartie helped hang them - meticulously I may add. We had several projectors and LCD screens there showing ZeitEYE and other showreels we had, as well as cool window dressing, glass-door transfers and postcards to give away. I do love sparse, Modernist, cool gallery spaces and Hackney was ideal. We had a long opening party guest-list and about 50 of them came, including the Mayor of Hackney Borough and several art/design mates (Andrew White included) - some from as far away as Bristol (Judith Aston from University of West England at Bristol…and Prof Mike Griffin (the first VR prof in the UK) who I’d been working with on several projects, including a digital-shadow tracer we called TAG-Scan - worked on any bar-code, QR code, product ID to trace the digital history of the product, the supplier, the maintenance engineers and so on…
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