Bev's News

Located in the mountains of Vorarlberg, Austria, Horizon Field consists of 100 life-size, solid cast iron figures of the human body spread over an area of 150 square km in the communities of Mellau, Schoppernau, Schrocken, Warth, Mittelberg, Lech, Klosterie and Dalaas. The work forms a horizontal line at 2039m above sea level

Artur Zmijewski, Sunderland

Four distinctive groups of people are invited to a Warsaw workshop to create a banner to reflect their conflicting views of Polish national identity. As Artur Zmijewski's video builds towards a super-stressed finale, the groups provocatively amend each other's representations. In its careful staging of conflict, the piece is typical Artur Mijewski. Elsewhere, there's a collage of film fragments of mass political protest from across Europe and the Middle East and a video re-enactment of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers playing prison guards went along with the humiliation of their pretend prisoners. This is art as psychological provocation, casting doubts on moral convictions formed from social conventions.

Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, to 9 Oct

Robert Clark

Dali's Elephant, London

You don't need to know that Salvador Dalí designed an ashtray for Air India, or that he was given an elephant by way of thanks, to see the link this show proposes between surrealism and Indian art. The collage of man and beast, and emphasis on sex and the subconscious in works here might describe European surrealism or Indian mysticism. Sakti Burman mines childhood memory and medieval romance for dreamy paintings of flying elephants and Dalí, while Jogen Chowdhury conjures a disorienting nightmare in his drawing of a man and his monstrous "other". It may not be a direct cultural exchange, but the show's intriguing premise gives art history a playful shake.

Aicon Gallery, W1, to 4 Sep

Skye Sherwin

Iran Do Espírito Santo, Edinburgh

The internationally-renowned São Paulo artist presents his first UK exhibition of drawings and sculptures that are as irresistibly captivating as they are enigmatic. This is magic minimalism as Santo transforms the most banal of utilitarian objects – an oil drum, a shirt box, a lightbulb – into miniature sculptures made of silver, granite and copper. The images are exquisitely simplified, drained of all consumer detail, condensed down to their formal essence. The mundane is mystified and afforded an almost numinous aura. In contrast to Warhol's pop art, Santo's cans are almost archetypal in their purity. Likewise, his wall drawing turns the gallery into a hypnotic abstraction. Altogether, a series of exquisite artistic hauntings.

Ingleby Gallery, to 25 Sep

Robert Clark

Jess Flood-Paddock, London

Young artist Jess Flood-Paddock's work is an impish delight. Gangsta's Paradise builds an Eden of towering oddities. On the walls, a backdrop depicts the edge of the world from the film The Truman Show, the sham border around a prison-like reality TV universe. Within the artist's shaky utopia there's a vast lobster sculpture, a replica of athlete Michael Johnson's book, Slaying The Dragon, and photos of giant rabbits. It seems witty and weird but, beyond that, we're left with a maze of moral uncertainty and wrong-headed aims. Those comical bunnies were once imported to feed starving North Koreans, while the lobster is now a symbol of civilised cruelty.

Hayward Gallery Project Space, SE1, Wed to 19 Sep

Skye Sherwin

Martin Creed, Edinburgh

A series of office chairs are stacked, or rather precariously balanced, one atop another, in order of their diminishing size. This is Martin Creed's Work No 997. Work No 396 is a series of run-of-the-mill DIY planks stacked, guess what, in order of their diminishing size. Creed is, of course, the artist who infamously staged The Light Going On And Off (Work No 227) for his 2001 Turner Prize-winning exhibition. Audiences tend either to love or hate Creed's work according to whether they get his singular sense of mischief or not, and that itself depends in fact on whether they believe that art can properly contain humour or not. Indeed, Creed is probably best viewed as the joker in the contemporary artworld pack. Then one might begin to appreciate the deadpan delight in his conversion of the Fruitmarket staircase into a synthesizer to be played on by visitors' feet.

Fruitmarket Gallery, to 31 Oct

Robert Clark

Heather & Ivan Morison, Portsmouth

You get a good story from Heather and Ivan Morison. In the past decade their varied projects have included mail art missives about the progress of the couple's allotment and a pairing of desert UFO sitings with accounts of early western pioneers in photographic slides for instance. Their latest creation, towering over Southsea common, is Luna Park, a giant, industrially-produced dinosaur sculpture. Created by laid-off Serbian factory workers, it fuses the story of the world's largest dino skeleton, which turned out to be a ruse, with that of a now defunct Yugo car factory. An accompanying film exploring its construction in Serbia thickens the plot.

Aspex Gallery/Southsea Common, Sat to 10 Oct

Skye Sherwin

Paul Nash & Fay Godwin, Sheffield

An apt pairing of two sets of photographs of distinctly moody and unashamedly romantic landscapes. Paul Nash is best-known for his paintings of the desolate landscape of first world war no man's land. His Private World photographs here, taken during the 15 years before his death in 1946, sometimes achieve a similar quality in which features of atmospheric landscapes seem to embody aspects of human mood. Fay Godwin's Remains Of Elmet, commissioned to accompany Ted Hughes's poems of the same name, view the brooding moorlands of the Calder Valley into stark monochrome tragedies. The real subjects of both series appear to be protagonists who are nowhere pictured.

Graves Gallery, to 14 Nov

Robert Clark

Big Chill Arts Trail, Ledbury

Nudity, laughter and jelly are the main ingredients of this year's Big Chill Arts Trail, the offshoot cultural program of the Malvern Hills music festival. The headline act is artist Spencer Tunick, famed for "naked installations" where thousands of volunteers strip for the camera everywhere from a Bruges theatre to a Gateshead quayside. But, with its laidback vibe, the festival seems like the right home for such a gathering. For the first time Tunick will be daubing participants' bodies in paint as a critique of the oil spill. For those less inclined to get their kit off, there's a taster of Tate's Rude Britannia show, with comic art by the likes of Bob and Roberta Smith and Quentin Blake. Most deliciously surreal is Bompass & Parr's plan for a towering jelly fruit pyramid that you can taste as you explore.

Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Thu to 8 Aug

Skye Sherwin

Titian's art drinks in the air and light of his native city and breathes it out across the world

Titian is an artist who travels well. The very name we know him by in the English-speaking world, derived from Tiziano, is testament to his capacity to take root in cultures remote from his own. In his later life, he painted for export, sending paintings by ship from his native Venice to his employer, the Spanish king. Amazingly, he was on salary as a Habsburg court artist, paid lavishly first by Charles V and then Philip II, while being allowed to live in his own city.

That was an astute as well as magnificent decision by Charles V, for Titian's art breathes in the air and light of Venice and softly breathes it out again, as gold, as fire, as flesh. That's right – I've just come back from a holiday in La Serenissima. Man, those Titians.

In fact, because Titian travels so well, because he was so sought after by princes in his lifetime and has been so keenly collected by connoisseurs and museums ever since, there are not that many canvases by him in Venice itself. You can see his works all over Europe and America, from Edinburgh to Boston. What you can see in Venice, however, are paintings intimately connected with the city and his life there.

Titian's Assumption in the church of the Frari is a strong candidate for the title of the world's greatest painting. It is his answer to Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Leonardo's Last Supper. But in Venice a fresco would have faded – the moist air eats works on plaster. So the Assumption is an oil painting placed by the artist against the glorious natural light of a Gothic window. Titian competes with the sun; he challenges God. His light equals and enriches that of nature itself.

In the Accademia gallery you can see his Pieta, the crushing last work in which he prays for the light to last, for its dying embers to linger on. Titian, in extreme old age and with his city ravaged by plague, painted a work of such force it is like a building, a cathedral, made of paint – his answer to Michelangelo's terrifying Vestibule of the Laurentian Library.

Titian showed what oil paints can do, how they can even create an architecture. He is sensual, profound and audacious. In Venice, his art mirrors the light-filled waters, the blazing sunsets, the dawn copper that filters in through medieval windows. His canvases have drunk in enough of that light to fill the whole world.

From Jessica Flood-Paddock in London to Artur Zmijewski in Sunderland, find out what's happening in art around the country

The Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to see the Loneliness of Lowry

This summer, the Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is curating the first major exhibition of work by L.S Lowry be shown outside The Lowry Gallery in Salford in five years.

Featuring some of Lowry's most powerful pictures, the show illustrates a lesser known side of one of the UK's most popular artists.

Better known for his northern industrial landscapes, the exhibition examines a different side of Lowry, looking beneath these scenes at an artist who cites his inherent loneliness as one of the main influences on his work. He said: "Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened."

The exhibition will show approximately forty works, including oils and works on paper from both private and public collections throughout the country. It features some of Lowry's most powerful pictures focusing on portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes and seascapes.

The Abbot Hall in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to the exhibition, saving you £5.75. You can Gift Aid it for £6.75.

Read The Guardian's Review here

Offer valid until 31 August 2010

Take up this offer

Click here to take up this offer

Help with Offers and Events

- You need to have joined Extra in order to see the redemption pages. You can sign up here
- You will need to be signed in at the top of the screen to be able to take up any offer or book tickets

Born in Transylvania, twins Gert and Uwe Tobias paint, sculpt and draw with a typewriter. It's bold stuff, says Adrian Searle, and the product of a lifetime of shared obsessions

There have been several pairs of twins who make art collaboratively. In the 1980s, the American Starn twins began working together on sophisticated photographic projects. The British artists Jane and Louise Wilson, who dislike being referred to as twins, continue to work in film and photography, although like the Chapman brothers (not twins) they have sometimes played up their sibling rivalries in their art. Gert and Uwe Tobias make art that looks as if it has evolved from the kind of private language twins occasionally develop, from mutual shared obsessions, with its repetitive motifs. The work of these Romanian-born identical twins is full of funny heads and scary faces, weird beings with pendulous noses, creepy expressions and peculiar extruded bodies.

But there is more to them than funny faces. Theirs is a hybrid art that mixes the old but complex technology of woodcut printing with painting, typography, and the creation of image-poems; they use a typewriter to tap out, rather than draw, hollow-eyed, drooling and grinning satanic faces. Occasional words and exclamations erupt among the red and black "x"s and "o"s, the dashes and dots, like a kind of magic, automatic writing. In fact it is a laborious technique, much used by concrete poets, and by writers and artists as diverse as Carl Andre, the late BS Johnson and by Lawrence Sterne, in his 1759 novel Tristram Shandy.

Like Sterne, the Tobias twins parody and recycle all sorts of styles and quotations in their work. Their sometimes mural-scaled woodcuts are on occasion entirely abstract, using repeated forms and shapes taken from Romanian folk-art decoration and 1920s Russian suprematism, to create a sort of complicated geometric abstraction that looks like painting, or poster art, but is neither. Other woodcuts appear both folkloric – shapes that look cut out with pinking shears – and peculiarly modern, playing on the carnivalesque and the biomorphs of Joan Miro. But the Tobiases are good at covering their tracks; it's hard to know exactly where their influences lie. Their art is a sort of grand fabrication.

In this show, the presentation of their work (which includes prints, paintings, collages, ceramic sculptures) is further complicated by painting directly on the walls behind and in between. The twins are playing games with us. In one corner, a group of ceramics crowds a shelf. A misshapen, lumpy head emerges from a commercial jug. A turd-like thing stands on a bird's-foot-cum-tree-root in a little bowl. There are dirty, slip-glazed, excremental figures, horrible shiny white creatures with brown stains running down them that you wouldn't want to touch. All this is very deliberate and scatological.

Among the woodcuts, there is a figure (pictured, top left) whose ear is a lamb chop or a map of South America; an eye like a fish set in a doily; a red tit with a white nipple grows inexplicably out of his forehead. Oh, deary me, I feel for this figure. I also feel my credulity is being stretched. Some of the Tobiases' small, delicately painted, translucent heads are more like photographic negatives of ghosts, or scraperboard illustrations of long-dead relatives.

Their work has always intrigued me, not least because of its collision between outmoded skills and a knowing postmodernity. Their art is unmistakable, but unplaceable. Sometimes they are like faux-naive outsider artists playing at being insiders, or, conversely, art world operators playing at being visionaries. Much is often made – not least by the artists themselves – of their Transylvanian childhood, and of the Dracula legend they were entirely unaware of until they moved to Germany when they were 12. All this, too, has been morphed into their art.

At Nottingham Contemporary, the Tobiases share the gallery with a large selection of photographs by Diane Arbus, one of the best of the travelling Artist Rooms devised by collector-turned-donor Anthony D'Offay. Arbus's photographs of mental patients dressed up for Halloween, proud transvestites and a catalogue of bizarre and alarming eccentrics, are far stranger, as well as more sophisticated and direct, than anything the Tobias twins have yet cooked up.

caricature

Inspired by 'outlaw architecture' this Seattle native channels the extreme DIY and freethinking of hippy survivalists going off-grid

Oscar Tuazon's art may be vulnerable, but you'd never guess. His sculpture-cum-architecture has used raw slabs of concrete, steel and untreated wooden beams, bark-encrusted tree trunks and weighty metal chains. For his current installation, My Mistake, at London's ICA, the artist has assembled what looks like a massive climbing frame from tree-size pine beams. Almost too big for the gallery, one girder even bursts through a wall.

Born in 1975, Tuazon grew up outside Seattle, coming of age watching bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana (one spell in the mosh pit was so frenzied he once broke his leg). Having graduated from the elite Independent Study Program at New York's Whitney Museum in 2003, he cut his teeth working for renowned extremist Vito Acconci, a performance artist and poet-turned-architect. After moving to Paris in 2007, Tuazon set up the gallery castillo/corrales with a group of artist and curator friends, and the past three years have seen his constructions of wood and concrete take over exhibition spaces across Europe.

Inspired by what he calls "outlaw architecture", Tuazon channels the extreme DIY and freethinking of hippy survivalists who decide to go off-grid. If his industrial materials suggest a minimalistic stress on concept over making, he's just as interested in the physical side of sculpture. He is not afraid to get his hands dirty: working with riggers and technicians, he starts off with a sketch, chain-sawing wood, developing ideas and patching up problems on the hoof. From the impromptu-looking concrete slab that intersects the two-storey wooden frame of his 2009 work, Bend It Till It Breaks, to the neon strip light glowing two and a half metres up an untreated tree-trunk buttressed by planks in I Wanna Live, his structures have a rough-shod, improvised feel.

As muscular and uncompromising as it can first appear, Tuazon's work is ephemeral. Like the hippy idealists defining their environment on their own terms, the artist will always have to pack up and move on. Yet while they stand, pushing at walls and ceilings and taking over space, these makeshift constructions remind us of the imaginative struggle to make what we want of the world, no matter what rules and boundaries seem to press down on us.

Why We Like Him: For Kodiak, a 2008 installation including a water tank, window, wood beam and lantern, created with his brother Eli Hansen and based on the 10 days they spent living rough on a wintry Alaskan island. We also love his 2007 book, Un-house – The Architecture of Dwelling Portably, which chronicles his experiences on the road while tracking down nomads in the forests of Oregon.

Freestyle: Since they were teenagers, Tuazon and his bro have covered themselves in homemade tattoos, making up the designs as they go along.

Where Can I See Him? My Mistake is at London's ICA until 15 August.

Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new life

Carola Hicks, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art. She created something new in the world of contemporary biography, writing the life stories and afterlives of iconic works of art such as the Bayeux tapestry and the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public.

Her first book to reach a wide general audience was the acclaimed Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (2001), a gripping account of an 18th-century aristocrat, an earlier Lady Diana Spencer. This Lady Di defied convention: she abandoned her husband, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, for a secret liaison with Topham Beauclerk, concealed her illegitimate child, divorced, remarried and earned her living by becoming an accomplished painter. Carola's biography illuminated 18th-century artistic life and exposed the consequences of transgressive behaviour by women.

Her next book, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), was the first of her innovative biographies of works of art. Carola brought fresh insights to this medieval strip cartoon and instrument of political propaganda. Most groundbreaking was her investigation of the afterlife of the Bayeux tapestry: its rediscovery by 18th-century antiquarians, its survival though the French revolution, its reinvention by the pre-Raphaelites, its skewed interpretation by over-reachers from Napoleon to Heinrich Himmler.

She followed this success with The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), which Radio 4 serialised as its Christmas book of the week. As Henry VIII's queens disappeared, they were erased from the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel. When he replaced orthodox Catholicism with his own Supremacy and Reformation, the glass was adapted to reflect this, too. The magisterial images were made by immigrant craftsmen handling tiny pieces of luminous glass. "This book is in part a hymn to their light, with glass of beryl and amethyst, sapphire and emerald … in miniature the story of the nation," Peter Ackroyd wrote of it.

Born in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, Carola was the daughter of actors, David Brown and Margaret Gibson. After her father died on active service in North Africa in 1943, Carola was brought up by her mother, who continued her stage career. Carola was educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles school at Hampton, Middlesex, and then at Edinburgh University, where in 1964 she took a first in archaeology, and was one of the stars of the department.

True to her thespian inheritance, she played Olivia in Twelfth Night on a student tour of the Highlands and Islands. During one exploit, she and fellow actors constructed a Loch Ness monster out of hessian, wire and newspaper and faked a sighting, reported in the national press. After acting in repertory and television, Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on "the animal style in English Romanesque art".

She worked on Reader's Digest and Woman's Own and for the Council for British Archaeology before becoming a researcher in the House of Commons library. Carola said you could always tell what MPs were really like by the way they treated their staff. She met her future husband, the lobby journalist and now fellow author, Gary Hicks, in the Strangers' Bar. They married in 1969.

She worked at the British Museum on the account of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, whose three volumes were published in 1975, 1978 and 1983, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1978 and writing her first book, Animals in Early Medieval Art (1993). For several years from 1984 she was curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. She became a fellow and director of studies in art history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where for more than 20 years she taught as she wrote, in a lively, accessible style that combined erudition with enthusiasm.

A keen gardener, amateur photographer, ice-skater and botanic drawing student, with a lifelong love of theatre, Carola was witty and irreverent, wrote wickedly funny articles for the Literary Review, and especially enjoyed Biographers' Club events. Days before her death she had almost completed Girl in a Green Gown, a "biography" of Jan van Eyck's enigmatic portrait The Arnolfini Marriage.

Six months ago, Carola was diagnosed with cancer, which she faced with clear-eyed dispassion. She died at home, stylish to the last, with a red rose from the garden on her pillow. She is survived by Gary and their children, Colette and Toby.

• Carola Margaret Hicks, art historian and author, born 7 November 1941; died 23 June 2010

London museum unveils gravestone of Robert Seymour, the artist who killed himself after 'being dropped' by Charles Dickens

The scene on 20 April 1836 was horrific: the artist lay in a welter of gore on the floor of the summerhouse at his London home, his coat and waistcoat burning from the ferocity of the shotgun blast which had killed him.

Now, a century after Robert Seymour's memorial disappeared, the stone commemorating him is to be unveiled at a ceremony in the back garden of 48 Doughty Street, the museum in Charles Dickens' only surviving London home.

Seymour had taken his own life within 24 hours of a last meeting with the author Dickens, after completing the final illustration – named Death of a Clown – for the writer's first novel, the Pickwick Papers. Almost certainly Dickens had told Seymour he was being dropped as the artist for the serial, which when bound together would become his first runaway best seller and launch his career.

The gravestone, which had been missing for more than a century, was tracked down by Stephen Jarvis, a scholar, and rescued from the damp crypt of a London church. Its re-dedication will be some reparation for a grave injustice which some blame on Dickens.

A number of admirers of Seymour certainly believe that morally Dickens was responsible for his death. The wretched artist is thought to have believed his genius had been stolen and that the book would make another man rich and famous.

Seymour died literally heartbroken: the inquest found that the blast from the fowling weapon, an early type of sporting gun, which he turned on himself, disintegrated his heart.

David Parker, a former curator of the Dickens House Museum, in north London, and an expert on the Pickwick Papers, said: "I don't think Dickens can be blamed for Seymour's suicide. That's not to say that he handled his transactions with Seymour perfectly, but blame is another thing … If there is any truth in the hypothesis that the distinguished illustrator couldn't bear to be bossed around by the scribbling whippersnapper, then it has to be said that Seymour had failed to grow up and come to terms with realities."

Seymour took his own life within 24 hours of that last meeting with Dickens. Before he killed himself he destroyed his private papers, just as Dickens would 34 years later.

Seymour was replaced as Dickens' artist by Robert W Buss, but he too was quickly replaced by the illustrator most famously associated with the author, one who would work with him for decades – Hablot Knight Browne, nicknamed Phiz.

When the publishers Chapman and Hall brought Dickens and Seymour together in 1836, the latter, whose work had been compared to that of Hogarth and who had been dubbed "the Shakespeare of caricature", was certainly better known than the young journalist and author.

Within the year that changed forever: Dickens and Pickwick, when the serial was bound together into his first novel, became a sensation.

But the idea for the book was Seymour's. The illustrator was known for comic sporting prints, and he dreamed up the idea of The Nimrod Club, the adventures of sporting friends, which would have his pictures linked by texts supplied by a hack writer. Dickens protested he knew little of sports – and took control of the whole project. Seymour's title was dropped in favour of the Pickwick Papers, and though in two of the best-loved passages Mr Pickwick and his friends go ice skating and play cricket, most of their adventures occur in coffee houses and inns.

After a couple of the stories were published, disagreements between the artist and author became insoluble, and it was clear which rising star the publishers would back.

The clash and then the death of Seymour is still a sensitive subject for Dickens scholars.

Dickens and his publishers had been at pains to play down Seymour. In a later edition Dickens wrote: "Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book."

Jarvis, who hunted down the gravestone, is a member of the Dickens Fellowship, and is working on a biography of Seymour. He traced an 1889 magazine report noting "the painfully neglected condition" of the grave at St Mary Magdalene in Islington, London. Gravestones were later removed to the church crypt, where Jarvis found Seymour's by torchlight.

The stone's three-line inscription just records Seymour's name, age and date of death. Jarvis believes Seymour's family fell into poverty, and could not afford to add later deaths to the stone. The suicide blighted their lives, he says, leading indirectly to the suicide by drowning of his son, whose landlady recorded the piteous remark that he was so lonely he thought he would go insane.

Jarvis felt he owed it to Seymour not to abandon this single memorial to another century in darkness. It took him five years to get permission to move the stone to Doughty Street, a move which he sees as both honouring Seymour and righting a historic wrong.

At the museum, which is planning celebrations for the bicentenary of Dickens' birth in 1812, the director, Florian Schweizer, said: "We welcome the monument as an important addition to our collections – but I don't think one can blame Dickens for his death at all."

Julienne Audrey, CC Attribution License

One of the items on my summer “to do” list was to update the appearance of my blog here and add some additional security features. Well, I can check that item off the list thanks to Wesley Wilson who did all the grunt work on installing a new WordPress theme, commenting . . . → Read More: Time for a change . . .

What online tool do you use most often?… at AnswerGarden.ch.

In a few weeks I’m doing an inservice workshop for a group of Florida art teachers titled “What’s in your digital toolbox?” My goal is to introduce them to 10 online tools (or websites) “that every art teacher should know.” So, I’m curious “What online . . . → Read More: What online tool do you use most often?

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Famed wall artist BLU has a new animation out titled BIG BANG BIG BOOM, which he describes as an “unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life, and how it could probably . . . → Read More: Blu is Back with BIG BANG BIG BOOM!

I See What You Mean by Lawrence Argent

I returned home from ISTE 2010 this past Wednesday and spent most of Thursday and Friday catching up on things that needed my attention (like putting in some extra time at the dog park to make up for the days I missed). A box of conference stuff that I . . . → Read More: My Takeaways from ISTE 2010: Creativity, Remixing, Crap Detection, and Global Connections

While sitting in sessions and skimming the Twitter stream during ISTE 2010, the following ten tools and resources caught my attention:

1. Google + Bing = Bingle search

2. Sweet Search 4 Me, a new search tool for K-8.

3. Mashpedia, a real-time multimedia/social encyclopedia/search tool.

4. TeachArtWiki is intended to promote collaborative teaching and learning . . . → Read More: Ten Tools and Resources from ISTE 2010 and beyond

Economist Jean-François Rischard provided the opening keynote at this year’s ISTE conference Sunday night telling the audience of mostly ed tech people that the world is facing a multitude of global problems (20 to be exact) that need our immediate attention. These are global problems in the sense that they can’t be solved by any . . . → Read More: Reflections from ISTE 2010: Tackling Global Problems

I’m giving Tweetboard a go today as a way of doing some real-time reporting from the ISTE 2010 conference via Twitter. It shows up as a little pop-out tab on the left side of the screen and reports any new tweets on my Twitter page. Let’s see how (and if) this works.

Tweetboard . . . → Read More: Testing Tweetboard at ISTE 2010

While taking a breather between trips this week, I thought I’d share a few items:

First up, I got a chance to peruse my copy of the Paint the World With Light book this weekend and enjoyed every page of it. You may recall, I mentioned the Paint The World With Light project in my list . . . → Read More: Good Things Come in 3?s

This past week, I was able to get away to New York City for an art-viewing adventure. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing Doug and Mike Starn‘s Big Bambú installation on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The massive site-specific bamboo structure opened to the public back in . . . → Read More: Up On The Roof

June is going to be a busy month for me so I decided to post my monthly Web sightings a day early.

Let’s start with this 10-minute video featuring Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA that illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. This isn’t the first time I . . . → Read More: Web Sightings for June 2010