Archives for posts with tag: guggenheim

User-generated content goes stellar, with Google’s YouTube collaborating with the Guggenheim on YouTube Play – the first biennial of creative video.

YouTube and Google – two of the world’s top 10 ‘Cool Brands’ – and Guggenheim are sector heavyweights, and YouTube Play represents collaboration at its very finest.  Creators from any location, with any level of expertise, equipment and budget are invited to ‘play’ and submit a video to the site.  The submissions are reviewed by an expert jury – which includes Takashi Murakami and Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector – and the final 20 videos will be displayed at all four of the foundation’s museums in October: the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York.  The website itself is borne from further collaboration – this time between Hewlett-Packard and Intel – and HP is also providing ‘video stations’ in all four Guggenheim museums to promote the project and the partnership.

Google is no stranger to working with the arts, and the relationship with Guggenheim is well established – last year the pairing announced an international design competition to celebrate the ideas & teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright (we wrote about it at the time here).  In the same year, Google famously showcased its Google Earth software through collaborating with the Museo Nacional del Prado, producing a virtual Prado gallery experience.  Google’s cultural collaborations always hit just the right mark between investing in the world’s rich cultural landscape, while still providing scope to rightly position themselves as world leaders in new technology and platforms.

Submissions for YouTube Play close on July 31st.

Rose Enright

c. Guggenheim

During a night at the opera you would expect your sense of smell to be near, if not at, the bottom of the list for sensory stimulation.  Unless of course you are unfortunate enough to be sat next to the last man in the world who swears by bathing in ‘Brut’ before a night on the town.  Smell can be quite a distraction at times, often a negative one, especially in the murky world of personal hygiene…

I digress.  Earlier this month, the Guggenheim premiered ‘Green Aria: A ScentOpera’ in their Peter B. Lewis Theatre.  1970’s cologne this was not.  In fact, this 30 minute olfactory spectacle was two years in the making, the result of the collaboration between writer and director Stewart Matthew, composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson and the French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel.  Laudamiel, who has created perfumes for Clinique, Estée Lauder, Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors, produced more than 30 original scents to act as the characters in Green Aria.  These scents and their accompanying music were performed to an audience sat in near darkness, each seat complete with its own ‘scent microphone’, which released meticulously coordinated ‘wafts’, and could be held close to the nose throughout the performance.

Part of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process season, Green Aria was sponsored by fashion, fragrance and design house Thierry Mugler; a bold step for the brand, considering the concept was at first met with a certain degree of cynicism from the press.  Nonetheless, the ScentOpera proved a resounding success; Matthew and Laudamiel are now marketing their scent technology to hotels, movie theatres and videogame makers.  Who nose (sorry, sorry) what’s in store for the future?!

Rose Enright

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Not content with showcasing its technology with the Prado earlier this year, Google has now teamed up with the Guggenheim to launch a new international design competition to celebrate the ideas & teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Established to celebrate the golden anniversary of the institition, the competition showcases two of Google’s services:  Google Sketch Up and Google Earth, enabling entrants to design their building  in 3-d and locate it virtually anywhere in the world.  With the Tate using Google maps and Street view to create an online art map of the UK, is this the beginning of Google’s assertion for dominance in the digital cultural realm globally?

Laura Hollis-Ryan