#multimedia-history

#multimedia-history

Upload any picture or video, and Musubi uses artificial intelligence to extract the most important part and hover it in space as a 3D image within the frame. That could be a video of a child's first steps or a snapshot of a birthday party. The image will be displayed in 3D form, viewable in all its holographic glory across nearly 170 degrees.

The contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines.

The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth... In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.

Bregman claims, 'Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the centre of the world.' This statement encapsulates the concern that Europe is losing its cultural significance.

I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world, but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.

CultureClic is one of the most comprehensive French art apps available. Designed as a mobile-first discovery tool, it maps out more than 1,350 museums across France and highlights hundreds of geolocated artworks, photographs, and historical engravings. The app is particularly strong in Paris but also features content in cities like Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Avignon. What sets CultureClic apart is its use of augmented reality, allowing users to visualize artworks and historical documents in context.

The robot repeatedly inscribes text and images onto the glass surface using a marker, then removes them with a sponge. This cyclical action renders visible the process through which present events transition into recorded history, emphasizing the instability and revisability of historical narratives.

I recently gained a new obsession, and I'm ready to share it with the world: finding and analyzing rare vintage images. A picture speaks a thousand words, and these photographs tell us more about history than a textbook chapter ever could. So even if you think history is boring, I'm well-equipped to change your mind, and give you some delicious food for your brain to chew on today.

Some of the 3D scans were done in collaboration with Japan's national broadcaster NHK. A voluptuous Neolithic marble, a model Nayarit home from ancient Mesoamerica, Claude Monet's 1891 painting "Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun)" - these are among the items in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection that are now available to the public as high-quality 3D scans.

When unmarked, masked federal agents grabbed an international student and forced her into an SUV on a public street in the spring of 2025, the United States entered into a new era of federal policing. At first, it was alarming - a move more commonly associated with authoritarian dictatorships than a democratically elected government with checks and balances. Now that this tactic, and others like it, have become routine, it is no longer enough to react in alarm.

Radioposter has built what it calls Paper-fi: physical books with synchronized audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. No chips embedded in the paper, no QR codes to scan. The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio.

Publishers' adoption of generative AI is reducing the friction between content and format, making it easier for the same story to appear as shorter summaries, audio, or video, often in real time. To some publishers, a text article may soon be more of a vehicle for original reporting, not a final product. That information could become no longer available strictly in a static piece of content, but transformed into different shapes and formats, based on a reader's signals and preferences.

Recently, AI decided that a painting long thought to be a copy of Caravaggio's The Lute Player is actually by the master, while another version of the same subject, previously thought to be authentic, is not. Both conclusions were disputed by the former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. A similar debate erupted in March 2025 when AI declared that portions of The Bath of Diana, also long believed to be a copy, could have been painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

Taking time to take a closer look is always worthwhile,

In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)

When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen ( The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.

Digital by Nature: The Art of Miguel Chevalier at Kunsthalle München presents the artist's largest solo exhibition in Europe to date, curated by Franziska Stöhr. The exhibition surveys Miguel Chevalier's practice from the early 1980s to the present, tracing his sustained engagement with digital technologies as both tools and subjects of artistic inquiry. Born in 1959 in Mexico City and based in Paris, Chevalier has worked with computers as a creative medium for more than four decades.