Visit the Museum of Online Museums where you will find links from their archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector. The MoOM is organized into three sections.

The Museum Campus contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence. Most of these sites will have multiple exhibits from their collections (or, in the case of the Smithsonian, displays of items not on display in the Washington museum itself).

The Permanent Collection displays links to exhibits of particular interest to design and advertising.

Galleries, Exhibition, and Shows is an eclectic and ever-changing list of interesting links to collections and galleries, most of them hosted on personal web pages. In other words, it's where all the good stuff is.

As if getting jostled awake by the screeches, alarms and hollering of a city that never sleeps isn't bad enough, a web-based art project wants you to make Lower East Side noises into audible art.

But the noises are much less annoying when you can control them. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum has commissioned an online exhibit called Folk Songs for the Five Points. It starts with an interactive map of Manhattan's downtown neighborhood.

Colored circles dot the grid of streets, marking spots where the museum's artist-in-residence David Gunn recorded an assortment of audio clips. Each hue represents a different genre of sound, ranging from spoken to musical to ambient. Up to five clips can play at once, each with its own playback controls at the bottom of the page. Vectors on the map can be shifted with the click of a mouse, layering various sounds.

"When I moved to New York, the Lower East Side really intrigued me," said Gunn, who is a recent British import. "There are all these different cultural contexts that have collided over time, and I wanted to create a reflection of that diversity by using music as the main focus."

A musician himself, Gunn recorded the majority of the 38 clips using a DAT recorder. "When you walk around Manhattan, there are an awful lot of ambient sounds," he said. "It's one of the noisiest cities I've ever been to." Some audio was planned, such as the 9/11 commemorative service at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, while other sounds, like the leaking hydrant or the East River's lapping waves, were accidental finds.

Gunn encourages folks who hear a different version of the 'hood to e-mail their own sounds or send suggestions. He originally conceived an open-source project in which anyone could add sounds, but copyright concerns squashed that idea. "We were worried someone would submit Kylie Minogue or something similar, which could get us in a very difficult situation," Gunn explains.

In its first week, the site received over 20,000 hits, growing to 70,000 by mid-January. Joe Marianek, a 25-year-old Ohio native who now lives in Brooklyn, stumbled upon the project on Gothamist and was instantly captivated. "You get to play and literally assemble your ideal soundscape of the urban environment," he says. His mix includes the spooky winds from under the Williamsburg Bridge coupled with the Puerto Rican poets at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Gunn sees Folk Songs for the Five Points as an ongoing documentation of the neighborhood and hopes to further promote the idea by setting locals loose with their own DAT recorders. He's also considering similar projects in other cities including Shanghai and Bejing.

"You could do this almost anywhere and it would be interesting," he said, "because every city has its own fluxes and changes."
By Sonia Zjawinski
http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,70029-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

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Poetic Dialogues is an ongoing poetry-generating project that features short flash movies of people reciting verses of Merhi's poetry. Shot with a wristwatch camera, these short movies featuring invited friends and strangers have a spontaneous and intimate feel to them. Each time the project is engaged, three movies are randomly selected to appear on the screen. As each sequence is played, a new poem is created, and a dialogue is established among the three subjects. Pressing "play" again resets the project and delivers a new combination of three movies and a new composite poem. Hundred of poems are possible with Poetic Dialogues. With new movies added to the site over time, Poetic Dialogues is a work of increasingly varied meanings and linguistic possibilities.

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