Mashing-up Hiroshige to block ads and Add-Art!

What in the world am I talking about?? Brooklyn-based artist Steve Lambert has developed a plug-in for the Firefox browser that block ads and replaces them with art. There’s a lot more about Add-Art (and how great it is) over at C-Monster’s blog, so I won’t recap here.

We caught up with Steve about a year ago in the comments on the Walker’s post about the application and mentioned the Museum would be interested in contributing images to the project. Steve has been updating us with progress reports and then, a month ago, suggested we curate a show for the launch.

Add-Art shows are made up of 8 individual works at 15 different sizes. We needed to present a selection of collection works that would look good in all these different sizes knowing the plugin would randomly present the images depending on what ad space it was attempting to block. Hiroshige’s prints are detailed enough to create interesting crops and are already online, so they seemed a natural choice for this project. Joan Cummins, our Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art selected the 8 prints…

…and here’s what the Hiroshige mash-up looks like for the Add-Art application.

Add-Art publicly releases today (May 22) and there is a panel discussion at the New Museum this evening. Congrats to Steve and the team and thanks for letting us take part in this great app! Instructions for installing are on the Add-Art site.