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History

Dig into an Incredible Compendium of Objects Excavated from the Bottom of Amsterdam’s Amstel River

During a nine year period in the early 2000’s a new metro line was excavated along the banks of Amsterdam’s Amstel river. The urban waterway had to be completely pumped, which gave archeologists a rare opportunity to examine the full spectrum of everyday and extraordinary objects which had fallen to the bottom of the prominent river. Below the Surface, a website created by the Department of Archaeology; Monuments and Archaeology (MenA), the City of Amsterdam; and their Chief Technology Officer, serves as an interactive compendium with access to images and information of 19,000 of the nearly 700,000 findings from the excavation site.

On the website you can explore the findings by date or dig into Below the Surface’s selection of object stories which provide context to specific pieces pulled from the river. An historical background is provided for select buttons, tokens, pottery segments, stamps, books, and other findings such as a 19th-century pipe cover decorated by a portrait of the Dutch navel lieutenant Jan Carel Josephus van Speijk or a 16th-century belt which bears the inscription: “Ik bin en ieger nu ik hebbe dat mi behaget” (or “I am a hunter and I now have what delights me”).

Meticulously divided display cases of the found objects are installed in the new metro line’s Rokin Station and can be visited by the public. A short documentary of the project can be found on Below the Surface’s website, with English subtitles coming soon. (via Kottke)

Art Photography

Things Organized Neatly: A New Book of Compulsively Organized Things by Austin Radcliffe

One of my oldest sources of visual inspiration on the internet (and one of a handful of early art/design blogs that inspired me to start Colossal in 2010) was Things Organized Neatly, an exhaustive catalogue of objects compulsively organized just so. From toy collections, to artworks and editorial photography, the site collects thousands of images of neatly arranged things that have a near Zen-like impact on your brain as you scroll through the site.

Run by blogger and curator Austin Radcliffe, Things Organized Neatly has picked up more press and awards over the years than almost any other tumblelog. Now, after six years of publishing, the very best of Things Organized Neatly has made its way to print in a new book published by Universe, with a foreward by artist Tom Sachs. Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Art History

Extraordinary Interactive Hi-Res Exhibit of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’

Teaching art history online can be tough, despite a wealth of tools and technologies it’s difficult to create an environment that compares to a great teacher who can make artworks engaging to a live audience. However, this new interactive exhibit of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights completely nails it. This is the internet we were promised.

The site was created by filmmakers, photographers and art historians as part of an upcoming documentary by Pieter van Huijstee titled Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil. The ‘interactive documentary’ not only lets you explore the painting in incredible detail down to the most minute brush strokes, it also includes sound design as you move through various sections of the painting and a series of audio essays describing over 40 areas of the painting! This might be the crowning example of how to educate the public about a masterwork painting online, I wish there was something like this for more artworks.

The documentary and interactive exhibit coincide with the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, which is also being celebrated by the Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands that is currently exhibiting 20 paintings and 19 drawings by the “Devil’s Painter”—the vast majority of his surviving works.

To see more paintings in vivid detail you can also explore the Google Art Project (they beat us for a Webby a few years ago, but we’re not bitter). Also related: A new Bosch painting was identified in Kansas City last week. (via Metafilter)

Design History

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People cleverly organizes the daily schedules of famous artists, philosophers, writers, and composers as recorded in their own diaries and letters. Not only does it show how they switched gears between creating, sleeping, and leisure time, but the chart is fully interactive including quotes from each individual. I would love to see a version of this with modern creatives (and more women) as well. (via Coudal)

Update: The information used to create the infographic comes from the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey.

Design

What Color Is It? A Website that Translates the Current Time into Color

Created by Berlin-based artist and designer James E. Murphy, What Color Is It is a website that translates the current time (based on a 24-hour clock) into a corresponding hex color value. The color of the page changes gradually as each second ticks by. This could be a great start to a watch face for the Apple Watch. (via Swissmiss)

Art Photography

‘I’m Google’ by Dina Kelberman: A Visual Exploration of Google Image Search

I’m Google (direct link) is an ongoing digital art project by Baltimore artist Dina Kelberman that documents digital patterns through non-artistic photography found on Google Image Search. When I first started scrolling through her Tumblr I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at: frame after frame of airplanes pouring orange fire retardant on fires which slowly morphed into an orange kayak and then an orange bridge and on and on until I realized every single image shared a slight visual characteristic with the image before it. Via her artist statement:

I’m Google is an ongoing tumblr blog in which batches of images and videos that I cull from the internet are compiled into a long stream-of-consciousness. The batches move seamlessly from one subject to the next based on similarities in form, composition, color, and theme. [… ] I feel that my experience wandering through Google Image Search and YouTube hunting for obscure information and encountering unexpected results is a very common one. My blog serves as a visual representation of this phenomenon. This ability to endlessly drift from one topic to the next is the inherently fascinating quality that makes the internet so amazing.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a few minutes scrolling through this impeccably curated collection of seemingly mundane photography that collectively creates something visually transcendent. (thnx, sara k!)