Beautiful TED talk by Amit Sood, director of Google's Cultural Institute and Art Project. This talk brings together a rich and diverse history curated art and makes it accessible to a broader audience. 

The art spans a variety of mediums (paintings, pottery, jewelry, etc), historical time and cultures. Captured in this highly collaborative project are several features:

• A high level of detail captured in the art itself.
• Diversity in the collection of art (medium, geography, culture and time).
• Accessibility to prestigious art and information.

These features allow for exploration and experimentation examples.

1. Visual art clusters - Using these features in the art in combination with machine learning approaches allows Amit to explore the concept of  “visualizing an art cultural big bang” visually and chronologically.
2. Descriptive art clusters - Viewing the art collection descriptive features provided an interesting perspective of how art could be curated, explored and described. 
3. Portrait Matcher is an experiment in interactive art, whereby a change in a person’s head position is instantly matched with similar portraits within the art collection. 

I was able to stop by the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) this weekend to explore the current art on display, including Chris Jordan's exhibit "Running the numbers." I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and my company as we wandered around the museum. Of all the exhibits, I enjoyed Chris Jordan's most. His art is backed by research that puts numbers into a powerful visual context.

Chris was featured on TED a few years ago on his motivation for his series and bringing meaning to the "data." As he describes in the video he is just illustrating who we are at this moment in time.

_ ABOUT THIS PIECE

I started working on this close to a year ago when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t go back to sleep. As I began watching Across the Universe, I grabbed my art pad and began sketching out this girl. After finishing the shading of her face, I put the picture into my portfolio where it sat for several months. Occassionally, I would would drag it out and wonder what I wanted to do with it.

I decided to stick to a simple palette of red and black and cast this beautiful girl as a black widow. I didn't think it would be enough to leave the piece at that, so I added to black widow spider to make it a bit more obvious. A year later the picture finally came together.


TECHNIQUE

This was done in pencil, Indian Ink, and acrylic paint.

_ABOUT THIS PIECE

Some pictures capture facets the human element that I would love to try to recreate in my own work. This beautiful model, her glance, her hair, and her confidence caught my attention long before I was ready to use the reference in my work. While I was working on this piece and listening to Pandora, Damien Rice's song "Cannonball" came on.

TECHNIQUE

I used India ink, pencil, red acrylic, color pencil, and pen.