The Museum of Jurassic Technology on wmmna

wmmna (we make money not art) has a detailed post on The Museum of Jurassic Technology today. the Museum is a project that is part art, part fictional/fantastical archive and all meta-museum... after the jump are photos from the exhibitions inside the Museum and after the wmmna post's jump are more photos and an interview with founder David Wilson:

The Museum of Jurassic Technology - sascha pohflepp (2008.08.16 12:46 AM)
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/08/the-museum-of-jurassic-technol.php

an io9 post on John Whitney + Douglas Trumbull filed under Retro Futurism

IBM System/360 Mainframe (1968) VS Monolith (1968)

"Star Gate" sequence by Douglas Trumbull
from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968)

from i09 in their wonderful Retro Futurism category comes a reblogged Media Art Histories connection. this connection traces a few points of contact between John Whitney's DIY cam machine, his experimental film Catalog, Douglas Trumbull's Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Monoliths (as alien/alien technology) and the mainframes of IBM (as similarly monolithic tools in an artists' residency program at IBM)...

"In the late 1950s, animator John Whitney (perhaps most famous for assisting Saul Bass to create the opening title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) built a mechanical analog computer using the mechanisms from several WW II anti-aircraft guns. He used the resulting “cam machine” to produce short experimental animated films, releasing a demo reel in 1961 under the title Catalog. 2001 special effects artist Douglas Trumbull saw Whitney’s Catalog and was inspired by the artist's slit-scan technique, using it for the animated sequences in 2001. According to writer William Moritz, Whitney submitted “a proposal for a monolith as a computer-generated effect that would have looked different from anything else in the film. He was turned down.” Nevertheless, Whitney became IBM’s first artist-in-residence in 1966, and is considered one of the forefathers of computer animation."

"How a War Surplus Anti-Aircraft Gun Helped Inspire 2001: A Space Odyssey" - Lynn Peril (1:00 PM on Thu Aug 14 2008)
http://io9.com/5037142/how-a-war-surplus-anti+aircraft-gun-helped-inspire-2001-a-space-odyssey

the collection and preservation of MMOs @ The University of Texas at Austin

Megan Winget (in World of Warcraft)

a recent post on kotaku reports that The School of Information and project partner The Videogame Archive @ The Center for American History (both @ The University of Texas at Austin) have received funding for and are beginning to study the collection and preservation of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games including World of Warcraft (WoW), EverQuest (EQ) and Ultima Online (UO)

the methods discussed include interviews w/the developers, documenting oral histories from the players and in game documentation (i.e. screen recordings) of 'epochal moments'

Library Journal has an interview w/the the project head Assistant Professor Megan Winget. Winget says that this study is in the context of her primary research interest, which is in "the preservation of new media artifacts, specifically new media art, of which videogames are a major exemplar."

Jane Veeder interviewed by criticalartware (2003)

"Multiple histories are great; the problem you have is when there's no history. The discourse on, what do you want to call it, electronic art, digital art, didn't really start until 1990. Before that it was Art History majors who had done their thesis on an Abstract Expressionist painter, deciding that their niche was going to be writing about Video Art. And then they thought they had a handle on video and then it started going digital. So that got really confusing. You would get these articles that were reportage, they weren't any kind of real analysis or critical insight because they just weren't makers themselves. Dan Sandin said, 'Computer Art is unusual because you can't understand it just by looking at it.'" - Jane Veeder.

Jane Veeder interviewed by criticalartware (2003.09.29)
http://criticalartware.net