Blog/News
8th december 2008
Doing a search on Google, I discovered today the website Pop Art Pet. The Pop Art Style Portraits created will make every pet famous for more than just fifteen minutes! These War"howl"esque creations are bold yet minimalist, and totally customizable.
15th march 2008
Today I installed the free program Blurb BookSmart 1.9.2. on my computer to create and edit my own book about the ArtPet's. The price of a single book in bookstore quality starts at just 12.95 US$. You can even share, promote and sell your own books in Blurb's private or public online bookstore. Below are a few screenshots of the BookSmart software.
17th february 2008
Now as the cultural year 2007 is over, the website of Luxembourg and Great Region, european capital of culture 2007, offers you the possibility to create your own art logo for 2008. Try it yourself ! Some logos created for the ArtPets in Leslie's Artgallery are shown below. What logo do you prefer ? The cyan ostriche, the pink dromedary, the black giraffe or the orange elephant ?
25th january 2008
The EyeBone crew Ilona Szalontai and Tibor Simon from Hungary started in 2006 with the creation of handmade plushies and design toys which have been featured recently in different online art magazines. Some of their artworks are shown below.
8th january 2008
A dodecahedron is a polyhedron with twelfe faces. To the ancient greeks the dodecahedron was a symbol of the universe. Postscript and pdf templates and generators to create regular dodecahedral calendars have been known for many years. The earliest known relevant patent to use folding hedrons as an advertising medium was issued in 1933 (No 1997022). Artabus gives you now the possibility to build yourself a dodecahedral calendar with illustrations from hosted artists or with your own pictures. This calendar will astonish your friends.
6th november 2007
Today I installed and customized the Symbaloo Desktop on my PC, a nicely ajaxified, iPhone lookalike Web 2.0 startpage. Symbaloo is the idea of Tim Has from the Netherlands and has the mission to make the web more accessible. This personal online desktop with integrated newsreader is available since june 2007 in different languages. It's worth a try.
25th august 2007
Today I created my first VOKI, an animated customized talking character to express myself. VOKI's can go everywhere for personal, non-commercial use : on websites, blogs, social network profiles, emails and mobile phones. They can say anything, in your own voice or with text to speech (TTS) synthesis, in different languages. Have a look at the VOKI site, it's great fun.
16th august 2007
The snap preview technology which opens a little popup window with a thumbnail image of a web page allows visitors to visualize the content of the site without clicking on the link. There are a lot of discussions in forums on the web whether this Web 2.0 service is useful or obstrusive. I installed it on a few links on this blog to get some experience and feedback from users. The enabled links are activated by a small icon as shown on the following www.snap.com link. Give it a try. If you dislike it, you can disable the function by clicking on the option field in the upper right corner of the popup window.
7th august 2007
I found in my archives stickers from the "Stuppis", little digital virtual pets like Tamagotchis living in mobile phones. They were launched in 2002 by P&T Luxembourg for the club LUXGSM. You have to take good care of your Stuppi by sending regularly an SMS to give him food, attention, education and love. Virtual pets called Tamagotchis were first released in Japan in 1996 by Bandai.
30th july 2007
Today I became the proud owner of six giant microbes, plush dolls that look like common microbes. The "GIANT microbes" product line was introduced in july 2002 and consists of more than 50 different pets. The Common Cold, Stomach Ache, Red Tide, E.coli, White Blood Cell, Mange (Krätze) and Polio will join my ArtPet's in Leslie's Artgallery.
20th july 2007
Today I received my c.M.O.N.S. White, Cherri and Moo ordered at amazon.de. Red arrived already a few days ago and Blue is still blocked due to licence restrictions for export to Luxembourg. The c.M.O.N.S. are an alternative rock formation out of Barcelona, Spain.
19th july 2007
Lovebytes are a population of 20.000 unique friendly furry faces created for the International Festival of Digital Art "Lovebytes 2007" which took place in Sheffield UK from 13 - 20 may 2007. Based on a concept of Matt Pyke from Universal Everything, the lovebytes have been programmed by Karsten Schmid (toxi.co.uk) with the processing software.
18th july 2007
Nathalie sent me a photo of ArtPet No 0013 who was welcomed with great pleasure at home by the whole family.
10th july 2007
Today I visited the fictional planet of Neopia where the Neopets are living. It's an online site where users can create and take care of virtual pets. To buy them food, toys and other accessories, you need a virtual currency called Neopoints. Neopoints can be earned through playing games or winning contests. The Neopets site was launched in 1999 by Adam Powell and Donna Williams and bought in 2005 by Viacom. Mid 2007, Neopets reports 142 million accounts and 210 million pets. Petpets are Neopets' pets, both are also available as plushies or stuffed toys in different shops. The following pictures show some Neopets and some Petpets.
6th july 2007
The french artist Plastikpeople is the creator of the nice textile puppets shown on the photos below. You can buy these design puppets in his online plastikshop. The real name of Plastikpeople is Samuel Martin and he is featured as one of the young emerging artists during july 2007 in an collective exhibition in Leslie's Artgallery in Luxembourg, Bridel.
23th june 2007
I have created some ArtPet mosaics with the online Image Mosaic Generator (v2.0). You can upload your own picture and generate a mosaic composed of hundreds of smaller images hosted on Flickr. Click on the pictures to see a larger view.
6th june 2007
Mike sent me a few days ago a photo of Djeeny, a Wire Fox Terrier, posing with his favourite toy, the ArtPet with code 0010.
5th april 2007
Dream your ArtPet ! Argentinian generative artist Leonardo Solaas created "Dreamlines", a Java application developed with the "processing" language, where the user inputs one or more keywords to paint his dream. The system looks in the web for images related to these words and takes them as an input to generate continous paintings drawn by a swarm of particles. Try it yourself !
Leonardo Solaas lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and works as a programmer, designer and website developer. He studied philosophy and is self-taught in everything related to programming, design, visual arts and technology. As a software artist, his work, especially his project "Dreamlines", has been featured in many local and international exhibitions. He has been awarded the most significant prize in new media arts in his country, the Premio Museo de Arte Moderno. In 2006, he received the IBM Media Award at the 19th Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Germany, for this net-artwork. The following images are some results if you enter the keyword "ArtPet" to paint your dream.
25th february 2007
The ArtPet's are now part of the collaborative work "One Million Points of Light" launched by the british artist Andrew Pepper working with installations, holography and light. The coordinates of the ArtPet's uplighted blocks are 11,4. Once all the blocks of light are illuminated, a three-dimensional holography image will be made of the "One Million Points of Light" project, resulting in a sculptural installation made entirely of light.
17th february 2007
Many thanks to lodi51 for her kind compliments on her Skyblog about my ArtPet's Mobile installed at the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art". Visit her blog to meet some of her friends interested in contemporary art !
4th february 2007
What is inside my Black Cube (No 13) which I received a few weeks ago ? I don't think it is an ArtPet ! Otherwise the meaning of the enclosed thing would not be irreparably lost if you open the wooden cube. "TheBlackCubes" is an interesting contemporary art project, playing with human curiousity, realized by the italian artist Michelangelo Roberti (Miki). Miki graduated in philosophy and he is a sound technician planning to create his own music studio.
26th january 2007
I found another tool to visualize the structure of my artpet website : WEB2ADN. The developer of this project, Thomas Baekdal, a danish internet coordinator, is the creator of the conceptual artwork Intelliau (july 2003), the worlds first robotic cat. I looks like a cat, acts like a cat and feels like a cat. By the way, the WEB2ADN project reminds me my own artwork ADN & Eve exhibited in 2003.
22th january 2007
Yesterday was the last day of the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art" where the ArtPet's have ben installed. This morning they were transferred to their new home in Leslie's Artgallery, 66-68 rue de Luxembourg, L-8140 Bridel, Luxembourg.
20th january 2007
This evening I drawed an ArtPet on the typedrawing board created by storyboard.net. Have a look at it or draw your own artwork.
18th january 2007
Today I entered a wish on the folly's f-wish tree. This outstanding web project developed by boredomresearch was inspired by the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees in Hong Kong where visitors make a wish by writing it on joss paper and tying it to an orange. The oranges are then threwed into the tree and if the paper succesfully hung onto one of the tree branches their wishes come true. Explore the f-wish tree to find my wish or to submit your own wish.
14th january 2007
Artpet's are the subject of my latest paintings from the serie "2 oeufs sur le plat".
13th january 2007
The weekly TV guide Télécran (No 3/2007, p.140+141) published a report "Erfrischend anders" about the collective exhibition "Roundabout" with a photo of the ArtPet's. A featured report about this exhibition with interviews of the participating artists Stina Fisch, Christian Frantzen, Marco Godinho, Roland Quetsch and the curator Christian Mosar has been presented today in the culture magazine of RTL TV.
11th january 2007
Today I checked my website with the W3C markup validation and the CSS validation services to be sure that the site is fully interoperable. After fixing some bugs all the webpages have been found to be XHTML 1.1 and CSS compliant. If you have an own website, click on the links to check your own webpages.
10th january 2007
The following graphs visualize the structure of the main webpages of my website www.artpet.lu. The html-graph tool developed by the swiss artist Marcel Salathé alias Sala color-codes the different html-elements.
Try it yourself. Enter your website or blog url in Salas html-graph applet and see your tags popping up like confetti. Sala is not only a talented programmer, but also a biologist, a writer, a musician and the person behind the famous conceptual art project onethousandpaintings.
8th january 2007
Today I tried to translate the homepage of my website in different languages with the automatic translation tool offered by Google. It's funny. Try it yourself : www.google.com/language_tools.
7th january 2007
The collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art" has been presented at T.TV by art7, luxembourg art scene and subculture. The report includes an interview with the luxembourg artist Anne Michaux who explains her photographic illustrations shown at the exhibition.
6th january 2007
Press feedback about the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art".
4th january 2007
Vernissage day of the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art" in the Rotonde 2 in Luxembourg - Bonnevoie. Young people present a range of representative works in the plastics art today. My contribution are the ArtPet's.
3th january 2007
Presentation of the publication supplemented to the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art".
1st january 2007
The ArtPet's have been presented on Radio ARA in the culture forum "Bloë Baaschtert" by the artists network LX5.
9th december 2006
Opening party "Luxembourg and Great Region : European Capital of Culture 2007".
November 2006
Invitations to the collective exhibition "Roundabout - Refreshing Art" where the ArtPet's will be installed are distributed as chewing gum's.
August 2006
I have been asked by the Organisation Team of "Luxembourg and Great Region : European Capital of Culture 2007" to show my ArtPet's at a collective exhibition. I accepted this invitation with great pleasure.