What in the world am I talking about?? Brooklyn-based artist Steve Lambert has developed a plug-in for the Firefox browser that block ads and replaces them with art. There’s a lot more about Add-Art (and how great it is) over at C-Monster’s blog, so I won’t recap here.
We caught up with Steve about a year ago in the comments on the Walker’s post about the application and mentioned the Museum would be interested in contributing images to the project. Steve has been updating us with progress reports and then, a month ago, suggested we curate a show for the launch.
Add-Art shows are made up of 8 individual works at 15 different sizes. We needed to present a selection of collection works that would look good in all these different sizes knowing the plugin would randomly present the images depending on what ad space it was attempting to block. Hiroshige’s prints are detailed enough to create interesting crops and are already online, so they seemed a natural choice for this project. Joan Cummins, our Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art selected the 8 prints…
…and here’s what the Hiroshige mash-up looks like for the Add-Art application.
Add-Art publicly releases today (May 22) and there is a panel discussion at the New Museum this evening. Congrats to Steve and the team and thanks for letting us take part in this great app! Instructions for installing are on the Add-Art site.
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
That’s quite a cool geeky project, and as a Japanese art lover, I completely agree with your choice of artworks
But some of the bigger versions are stretched. Is it something done on purpose because the bigger images are going to be resized? It they are not, it’s a shame to have to deform the artworks for the sake of technology…
I think you’d have to ask the artist about this. He should be able to answer questions via his website.
Florence, you have a keen eye! One of the 300×600 images is stretched, but it’s sort of a cheat on our end right now while we’re doing some research. It’d be boring to explain in detail, but I’m fairly certain it only shows up like that on our site. (If you see embedded it in a page, please let me know.) So in short, we know about it, we’re working on it, and it should be minor.
This is our first public show so we’re still working out some kinks. If you spot anything, and you don’t mind, we have a bug tracking system here: dev.eyebeam.org/projects/add-art/tickets Don’t be intimidated by the official looking interface. These reports help us a lot.
Thanks!
Steve Lambert
No worries. I wish it could work on myspace ad, so I guess that makes one to report :p