Fall classes are about to start up. Seems we much continually find ways to bring creativity into the classroom.

Ping: Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands:

“A little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering has designers learning to innovate with the aid of their hands.”

GEVER TULLEY has only one qualification for training software designers how to become more creative. He teaches children how to build objects like gravity-powered wooden roller coasters with their hands, at his Tinkering School in Montara, Calif., south of San Francisco.

Now Mr. Tulley does the same thing for dozens of adults who are in the front ranks of software design at Adobe, the big software supplier based in San Jose, Calif. In daylong workshops, about 100 Adobe designers wrestle with plastic beads, small electronic displays, Ikea water glasses and tiny sensors to create wacky motion games. Usually, about the only thing these folks touch on the job is a computer mouse.

Bob Murata/Adobe

A hands-on experience: Adobe designers use the art of soldering in a competition to build creative devices. The exercise was part of a workshop at the company’s headquarters.

(Via NYT > Business.)

Helen Kohen, one of Miami’s premier art historians, journalists, cultural supporters and, archivists.

Filling in the picture of Miami’s early arts scene:

CARL JUSTE / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

Art historian Helen Kohen digs through archives at the Miami-Dade Public Library to prepare for a presentation on the Miami art scene before the arrival of Art Basel.

“Its a freak show, an absolute freak show! Helen Kohen chuckles. Thats the false portrait of the Miami art scene found in the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, where Kohen has been sifting through almost six decades of locally produced television shows. Miamis TV stations “werent interested in the visual arts unless it had an absurd hook. For three Halloweens in a row, [then-CBS affiliate] WTVJ visited the home of a man who placed huge, grotesque sculptures on his front…”

(Via MiamiHerald.com: Visual Arts.)

cameleon
Artist: Noa, age 8. Posted by: Mirke…:

cameleon

Artist: Noa, age 8. Posted by: Mirke (unregistered).

created after visiting a zoo

(Via THEBLOG WEEMADE.)

Major art criminals were recently caught in Cooper City, did you know that? Because the art market is less influenced by other money markets criminals will look there for ways to get rich.
Four major art crimes and how they affect the market

For centuries, art crime was relatively harmless, at least from the perspective of the global economy and international crime. Forgers fooled the occasional buyer, tomb raiders dug up what archaeologists didn’t have time to reach, and the occasional nonviolent thief would steal for reasons more often ideological than fiscal. Even vandalism was dismissed as part and parcel of the ravages of war.

But since the Second World War, art crime has evolved into the third-highest–grossing annual criminal trade worldwide, behind only the drug and arms trades. Most art crime is now perpetrated either by or on behalf of organized crime syndicates, who have brought violence into art theft and turned what was once a crime of passion (think of Vincenzo Peruggia’s stealing the Mona Lisa in order to repatriate it to Italy, or Kempton Bunton’s stealing Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington as a protest against taxes on television sets) into a cold business. Art crime now funds, and is funded by, organized crime’s other enterprises, from the drug and arms trades to terrorism. It is no longer merely the art that is at stake, and it is no longer a crime to be admired for its elegance.

Today, the largest victim of art crime is the art trade. This multi-billion-dollar legitimate industry is victimized to the tune of a conservatively estimated $6 billion per year…

Read Full Article - ArtInfo.com

In December, 2008, Art Basel Miami Beach, I interviewed artist T.J. Norris of Portland, OR. Here’s a recent video work he shared with me.

2-channel video installation. Originally shown at New American Art Union (May/June 2008). Soundtrack by C. Renou. The original soundtrack is available as ‘Tribryd Installation Soundtracks’ on Beta-lactam Ring Records. The deconstructed remixes are available as ‘Trimix’, a CD/DVD set on Innova Recordings/American Composers Forum.

Infinitus [excerpt] from TJ Norris on Vimeo.