iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 25/03/2026

In other news regarding art world residences, the former director of the Louvre has exactly the kind of home you’d imagine

A photo of the former director of the Louvre at home, with a gallery wall of gilt-framed paintings behind him

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 15/07/2025

why is google search so good but google books search so bad?

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 02/04/2025

Today I'm looking at: Remedios Varo's "Simpatía (La rabia del gato)" aka Sympathy (the cat's rage).

A painting: Remedios Varo's "Simpatía (La rabia del gato)". A surrealist scene. A woman sits at a table, looking down at an orange cat with its hind legs held aloft in the air. A glass of water has spilled on the table; the water runs off, creating a river on the floor.

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 26/03/2025

Today I learned that @theguardian.com is running a contest for “Invertebrate of the Year”. At a time of increasing climate crisis, of course the tardigrade—which has survived all 5 great extinction events—should win www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Lego and tardigrades’: when humans finally destroy the world, what will remain?

Milnesium tardigradum is only 0.5mm long and has survived all five great extinction events – plus it’s cute

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 19/03/2025

In Waterstones. What’s the story here then

A pair of black shoes on the floor of a Waterstones. The shoes’ owner is nowhere to be found.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 10/03/2025

Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? ... But what if you didn’t? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art? www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

The big idea: should we abolish art?

Down with expensive trophies at art fairs: it’s time to reclaim a more radical vision of creativity

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/03/2025

Today I'm thinking about Ceal Floyer's Working Title (Digging), a stereo sound installation that aurally represents the act of shovelling dirt. freunde-der-nationalgalerie.de/en/blog/acqu...

Ceal Floyer's Working Title (Digging), a stereo sound installation that aurally represents the act of shovelling dirt. Two speakers lying face up on the floor, in opposite corners of an otherwise blank room in a gallery. A CD play, connected to both speakers by wires, sits in another corner.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/03/2025

A sad day: RIP to the @britishlibrary.bsky.social's vaguely Italian-sounding, impressively laconic sign which greets visitors on the entrance piazza. Replaced with this much more conventionally grammared yellow sign. Interesting to note the continuing commitment to capitalising "piazza".

A (now outdated) sign outside the British Library in London which reads: Please take care, Piazza slippery. Please take care. Piazza can be slippery in wet/icy conditions. British Library Estates."

The new sign outside the British Library, which reads: "Please take care, the Piazza can be slippery in wet or icy conditions."

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 04/03/2025

"The painting had been hanging in the National Museum in Gdańsk, when on 24 April 1974, a cleaner knocked it from the wall, the frame broke, and she discovered the painting had been replaced with a photograph." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Brueghel painting stolen from Poland in 1974 found in local Dutch museum

Art detective and magazine help crack case of Flemish masterpiece thought to have been stolen by Polish agents

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/02/2025

Will be in New York next week for the College Art Association annual conference #CAA2025 — so looking for NYC recommendations

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 28/01/2025

To the tune of “we found love in a hopeless place”

A label from the British Museum exhibition “Silk Roads”. It reads: Byzantine connections in a desert palace -
Also from Jordan, this section of a vibrant mosaic once decorated the floor of Qusayr Amra, an Umayyad 'desert palace' built for royal entertainment. Mosaics in early Islamic architecture drew from Byzantine traditions, sometimes reusing tesserae (small blocks) taken from churches. Wall paintings at this site also reference Byzantine art in their figurative imagery. Qusayr Ama was one of the desert complexes that the Umayyad caliphs constructed. Many were built along major routes connecting the Silk Roads, and may have provided respite for travellers.

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 21/01/2025

If you told me this, an image of the Horsehead Nebula captured by telescopes, was a promo image for the film Wicked, I would believe you www.eso.org/public/image...

eso.org

The Horsehead Nebula*

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

'The feeling of the show, then, is of provisionality, of history in the process of being digested and rewritten.' Wonderful encapsulation of what History is and how it 'works'. (And NB the exhibition itself is also a real treat).

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

Like just LOOK at this panopticon... Wonder what Foucault would have thought

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

This is a great, Pynchon-esque story: Secretive underground exploration group assists with missing museum artefacts in Melbourne. Members of clandestine group retrieve objects from drains after burst pipe at Australian museum’s storage facility. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/01/06/s...

theartnewspaper.com

Secretive underground exploration group assists with missing museum artefacts in Melbourne

Members of clandestine group retrieve objects from drains after burst pipe at Australian museum’s storage facility

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

Escape from the terrordome: how Netherlands panopticon prisons are being reborn as stunning arts hubs. They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Escape from the terrordome: how Netherlands panopticon prisons are being reborn as stunning arts hubs

They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres – complete with cells for rent and escape rooms

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 06/01/2025

hi @willpooley.bsky.social just to say I really enjoyed "Sheet Happens" and have found it helpful in my own work. so thank you

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Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

El Greco’s portrait of the great renaissance miniaturist Giulio Clovio in 1570, holding one of his masterpieces. Today has been his day.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 03/01/2025

This handbag would EAT at Paris Fashion Week

The “VARSYREN” tea light lantern sold by IKEA, with me holding it

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badaude @badaude.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Lacan wishes you a happy new year, from the first seminar of Lacan.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 30/12/2024

"patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can't trust difficult to draw." An excellent, important piece by Sophie Smith in the @londonreview.bsky.social - www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Sophie Smith · Sleeping Women: On the Pelicot trial

Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations...

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 18/12/2024

I hate the term "museum professional". It's work. You are a museum worker.

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Nit Nurse With Wound @dannybirchall.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

It's my tenth anniversary of moving to Neasden today. To celebrate, here are ten Top Facts about the suburb everybody loves to deride ... #NWology

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Dr Bendor Grosvenor FRHistS @bendorgrosvenor.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

I don't see many long threads on here, but I'll try one - it's about Holbein's Ambassadors, his 1533 masterpiece in the National Gallery. It's often presented as a great mystery, but I think once we understand the circumstances in which it was made, its meaning becomes clearer. 1/

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 12/12/2024

Versailles: Science and Splendour is the Guardian's exhibition of the week (with a great photo of my colleague Hannah Cenusa cleaning Louis XV's rhino). Very proud to have worked on this exhibition! www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

A French revolution in science, Japanese art remixed and Everest re-ascended – the week in art

A blockbuster show of Versailles’ experiments, Takashi Murakami’s cheeky spin on classic paintings and Mallory and Irvine remembered – all in your weekly dispatch

surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 09/12/2024

"What good might be achieved if auction houses and academia were to work more closely together on provenance research?" A blog post on the recent "State of the Field" article by @shreyagupta.bsky.social, @libertypaterson.bsky.social, Niti Acharya, & me. www.history.org.uk/higher-ed/ca...

history.org.uk

State of the (Future) Field: The History of Collecting and Its Institutions

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anaïs walsdorf @global-subterra.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

My first publication! 🥳 Thank you so much to @camillemarys.bsky.social and @ellietheelement.bsky.social for all your work putting together this outstanding special issue! Can't wait to dive in!

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Christopher Smith @christophersmith.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

This excellent article by @suryabowyer.com, Shreya Gupta, @libertypaterson.bsky.social , and Niti Acharya includes a generous reflection on AHRC funded work in collections, and a challenge for the future @hisjournalha.bsky.social

As we have seen, the fields of the history of collecting and the history of institutions are diverse yet often entwined. By analysing the work of a new generation of scholars – under the auspices of the CDP scheme – this article has charted recent research trends and looked forward to future directions in these fields. That future is a thrilling one. Collecting institutions are increasingly motivated to examine their colonial histories and the provenance of their objects. This provides research opportunities across academia and the museum sector. Digital tools increasingly aid this work. Recent developments in network mapping have been particularly fruitful, and we are seeing an increasing use of quantitative methods when investigating collections and their histories. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already used by the commercial sector and by a handful of larger public institutions such as the Wellcome, though it is usually deployed in very limited contexts. As research continues and AI becomes integrated into more areas of everyday life, we shall see an increasing number of institutions deploying AI to help analyse and make sense of collections data at a scale that was not previously viable. The ‘raw materials’ of history – to return to Burgess's metaphor – are becoming better understood as well as more readily accessible. The future of looking back at the past is bright.

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Neil Postman’s Seven Question are useful here (Neil was on my dissertation committee):

1. What is the problem to which technology claims to be a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?

4. Which people and institutions will be most harmed?

5. What changes in language are being promoted?

6. What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?

7. What alternative media might be made from a technology?

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 06/12/2024

The arrangement of this board makes it look like Rudiger is some omnipotent god looking down upon his subjects from heaven, and the hippo at bottom right is screaming out at him for the unfairness of god’s judgement ⚽️

An image of the board that is beside the enclosure for Toni the Pygmy hippo at Berlin Zoo, who is sponsored by the German footballer Antonio Rudiger

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Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

All ills of the human race

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 06/12/2024

I would like a return to this style of phone number please. Simple. Chic. Mysterious. (No this was not the number for a museum.) 📜

A cropped image from an issue of the magazine Pictorial Education, bearing the text, "Telephone: Museum 8521".