Since I’m a history, fine art, poetry and sports enthusiast, I was excited to locate a group of blogs that I thought were pretty rich with novel content and user friendly commentary. Heaventree was among these finds along with Vulnex, which is defunct but is still able to be accessed for its commentaries on the raison d’etre of “Why Blog?”. In a pod of blogs mentioned on Mountshang, I also discovered the excellently designed Giornale Nuovo.
Even though the Giornale has become defunct as a blog site, it is no doubt maintained on the web for its images and the sheer accessibility of the voice of its author who writes primarily about fine art intermingled with literature. It would be a crime to delete this blog from the web, since it is equivalent to a finely bound leather volume. In fact, posted comments can still be found on Giornale that applaud the site as one of “the most favorite blogs on the web.” Since the site is defunct, I have been unable to assess the site’s ultimate ranking in popularity; the site http://technorati.com/ makes no mention of it as far as I can tell. That said, the creative melding of modern and antique curiosities on Giornale is breathtaking. Looking at its creative menu with all entries, the site is more like a collection of admirable novelties rather than a forum for intense “town hall” debate. Giornale is clearly not Deborah Lipstadt’s blog where controversy over a hot topic like “Holocaust Denial” is the engine for blogging input. Clearly, the appeal of the Giornale is its introduction of rarely considered material culture. Accessing the blog, one gets the sense it was built to be a little “Ashmolean” of the web, with its audience loving its author’s hunt into little known dusty areas of artistry and history. In a word, the site has style.
Indeed, the Giornale in the author’s words, is “a public weblog, journal and scrapbook,” which was “composed in a hotel room in a town on the Baltic coast of Southern Sweden.” The author, not a historian, worked as an IT consultant for a telecom company in the town, having been born in Wales with some years spent in Italy. From this cultural vantage point, the author’s postings to on-line diaries at memepool weblog, led the author to continue posting at the OpenDiary, that in time became less a day-by-day diary, morphing into intermittent “notices in the shape of a web-log” to which people responded. The archives of the weblog are kept online as monthly archives and individual entries. Since the author became disinterested to continue his postings, the site was last updated on the 9th of May, 2008. My guess is that the site required a tremendous commitment of resources and time to generate. Nevertheless, the author maintains an open email for contacts. As noted before, Giornale can be accessed along with other links on Mountshang.
My interest in Giornale as well as Heaventree no doubt stems from the idea that original source artifacts can spur discussion. Material culture is a basic leverage point of historic enquiry and these sites exploit the arcane and little known, engendering a special kind of fascination. Chinese art and artifacts, 19th to 21st century European and American sculpture and painting, offer portals through which bloggers can engage in creatively accessing histories of China, Europe and the Americas. Getting hold of an interesting smorgasbord of cross-cultural content shapes a platform for creative streaming. Speaking about content in relationship to the work of Didier Massard, the Giornale is pretty straightforward in this post, letting us know the photographer builds miniature models and then takes pictures of them which can be seen at the Klein Gallery. Actually, it isn’t so much what this defunct blog says in its posts about art and history, but that it does so in a way that inspires people to dig down and mine their own artifacts, recollections and insights, posting their responses. We can see this at work in a post by Michelangelo on October 1,2007 08:02 PM, that responds to Gironale’s review of Didier Massard’s Klein Gallery show, lending insight into other kinds of rare architectural Models.
Cutting away from the Giornale, in my own blog, I’ll want to project a more colorful lead blogger with a voice that warms up when dusting off photographs, in-situ art, constructs, paintings, sculpture and creative writing while also appreciating the history that spins off visuals and literature. Where Giornale and Heaventree borrow their art and literature, I own the rights to much of what I plan to photograph and write about as well as some large scale murals I’ve painted and some literature I’ve written. While pursuing coursework at Yale, I did some on-ground research into the history of a relative of mine in New Haven in anticipation of writing a screenplay which I’d also like to blog about. Posts on Gironale, much like what I plan to do, are not particularly in-depth or exhaustively scholarly by any means, but serve rather to whet the appetite for discovery that would otherwise remain lost. Underscoring this focus, is the post on the Swedish museum show of artist Eva Bonnier, which led a blogger by the name of Monica Perna, to post a commentary that helped flesh out a sense of relationship to this obscure artist. Visiting the Giornale site, blogging threads are from doctors, scholars, as well as intellectual vacationers.
While no doubt interesting to fine art connoissuers and antiquarian specialists, the Giornale blog is really a wide ranging random mix of curiosities that are difficult to categorize but gain a sense of order and relevance on the author’s blogging collection. While appearing rather as a mixed bag, this blog’s real force is in the pleasure of things discovered and the inspiration that each blogger is contributing not just to the extension of the web through usage (What is web 2.0 / “The Machine is Us/ing Us”) but joining in the extension and witness of history. In these blogs, what appears as disjointed trivia in a site like Giornale is actually the spin of the first threads of written historic documentation and remembrance. The challenge of the blogsphere is to cull significant content and to save it as a repeatable path to access. Keeping the Giornale in place on the web even though the blog is closed, keeps alive one of the essential mechanisms of history through creating a portal of access and contemplation through preservation.
In a site like Giornale, bloggers walk down the most basic trail of history in observing or recollecting their world and recording their impressions in format. Historiography is the lens which colors a scholarly historian’s viewpoint onto documentation and blogging seems to naturally celebrate this bias that permeates all of historic documentation in presenting personal taste and viewpoints on all sides of postings. That said, the blogsphere is a great way to introduce, acknowledge and help preserve what is in our cultural attics, through our experience of the past and particuarly in our present lives. ♦
Even though the Giornale has become defunct as a blog site, it is no doubt maintained on the web for its images and the sheer accessibility of the voice of its author who writes primarily about fine art intermingled with literature. It would be a crime to delete this blog from the web, since it is equivalent to a finely bound leather volume. In fact, posted comments can still be found on Giornale that applaud the site as one of “the most favorite blogs on the web.” Since the site is defunct, I have been unable to assess the site’s ultimate ranking in popularity; the site http://technorati.com/ makes no mention of it as far as I can tell. That said, the creative melding of modern and antique curiosities on Giornale is breathtaking. Looking at its creative menu with all entries, the site is more like a collection of admirable novelties rather than a forum for intense “town hall” debate. Giornale is clearly not Deborah Lipstadt’s blog where controversy over a hot topic like “Holocaust Denial” is the engine for blogging input. Clearly, the appeal of the Giornale is its introduction of rarely considered material culture. Accessing the blog, one gets the sense it was built to be a little “Ashmolean” of the web, with its audience loving its author’s hunt into little known dusty areas of artistry and history. In a word, the site has style.
Indeed, the Giornale in the author’s words, is “a public weblog, journal and scrapbook,” which was “composed in a hotel room in a town on the Baltic coast of Southern Sweden.” The author, not a historian, worked as an IT consultant for a telecom company in the town, having been born in Wales with some years spent in Italy. From this cultural vantage point, the author’s postings to on-line diaries at memepool weblog, led the author to continue posting at the OpenDiary, that in time became less a day-by-day diary, morphing into intermittent “notices in the shape of a web-log” to which people responded. The archives of the weblog are kept online as monthly archives and individual entries. Since the author became disinterested to continue his postings, the site was last updated on the 9th of May, 2008. My guess is that the site required a tremendous commitment of resources and time to generate. Nevertheless, the author maintains an open email for contacts. As noted before, Giornale can be accessed along with other links on Mountshang.
My interest in Giornale as well as Heaventree no doubt stems from the idea that original source artifacts can spur discussion. Material culture is a basic leverage point of historic enquiry and these sites exploit the arcane and little known, engendering a special kind of fascination. Chinese art and artifacts, 19th to 21st century European and American sculpture and painting, offer portals through which bloggers can engage in creatively accessing histories of China, Europe and the Americas. Getting hold of an interesting smorgasbord of cross-cultural content shapes a platform for creative streaming. Speaking about content in relationship to the work of Didier Massard, the Giornale is pretty straightforward in this post, letting us know the photographer builds miniature models and then takes pictures of them which can be seen at the Klein Gallery. Actually, it isn’t so much what this defunct blog says in its posts about art and history, but that it does so in a way that inspires people to dig down and mine their own artifacts, recollections and insights, posting their responses. We can see this at work in a post by Michelangelo on October 1,2007 08:02 PM, that responds to Gironale’s review of Didier Massard’s Klein Gallery show, lending insight into other kinds of rare architectural Models.
Cutting away from the Giornale, in my own blog, I’ll want to project a more colorful lead blogger with a voice that warms up when dusting off photographs, in-situ art, constructs, paintings, sculpture and creative writing while also appreciating the history that spins off visuals and literature. Where Giornale and Heaventree borrow their art and literature, I own the rights to much of what I plan to photograph and write about as well as some large scale murals I’ve painted and some literature I’ve written. While pursuing coursework at Yale, I did some on-ground research into the history of a relative of mine in New Haven in anticipation of writing a screenplay which I’d also like to blog about. Posts on Gironale, much like what I plan to do, are not particularly in-depth or exhaustively scholarly by any means, but serve rather to whet the appetite for discovery that would otherwise remain lost. Underscoring this focus, is the post on the Swedish museum show of artist Eva Bonnier, which led a blogger by the name of Monica Perna, to post a commentary that helped flesh out a sense of relationship to this obscure artist. Visiting the Giornale site, blogging threads are from doctors, scholars, as well as intellectual vacationers.
While no doubt interesting to fine art connoissuers and antiquarian specialists, the Giornale blog is really a wide ranging random mix of curiosities that are difficult to categorize but gain a sense of order and relevance on the author’s blogging collection. While appearing rather as a mixed bag, this blog’s real force is in the pleasure of things discovered and the inspiration that each blogger is contributing not just to the extension of the web through usage (What is web 2.0 / “The Machine is Us/ing Us”) but joining in the extension and witness of history. In these blogs, what appears as disjointed trivia in a site like Giornale is actually the spin of the first threads of written historic documentation and remembrance. The challenge of the blogsphere is to cull significant content and to save it as a repeatable path to access. Keeping the Giornale in place on the web even though the blog is closed, keeps alive one of the essential mechanisms of history through creating a portal of access and contemplation through preservation.
In a site like Giornale, bloggers walk down the most basic trail of history in observing or recollecting their world and recording their impressions in format. Historiography is the lens which colors a scholarly historian’s viewpoint onto documentation and blogging seems to naturally celebrate this bias that permeates all of historic documentation in presenting personal taste and viewpoints on all sides of postings. That said, the blogsphere is a great way to introduce, acknowledge and help preserve what is in our cultural attics, through our experience of the past and particuarly in our present lives. ♦
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