Latest somethingdark news
Developing a website such as SDk and the magazine it hosts takes time. That's why we think contributors and others interested in what we are doing deserve to be kept informed on our progress. This page has been designed to do exactly that: to keep you up-to-date as to where we are. We're pleased to have you with us.
Keep up-to-date: to be notified when the next issue of SomethingDark is out or when there is a significant update to the website, click here to join our mailing list.
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London: Cork Street Open Exhibition 2010Latest News 
Thurs 05 Aug, 2010.
The Cork Street Open Exhibition has garnered a prestigious international reputation in its three years of existence, and after attending the 2010 private viewing on opening day, Wednesday 4 August, SDk can appreciate why this is the case. This year’s event attracted more than 1,200 entries, from which a panel of five judges drawn from the UK art world selected some 100 works of contemporary painting, photography, graphic art, sculpture, original prints and mixed media for exhibition.
SDk particularly appreciated the sociopolitical comment in Hey, Are You a Terrorist?, a drawing–collage by the young Finnish artist Toni Toivonen (judge’s choice, runner up), and the urban landscape paintings The Alley Way and Urban Scene, in oils by American artist Courtland Blade and in acrylic by English artist Keith Krzywicki, respectively.
Also catching our eye was the unmistakably Dali-esque Vertigo, in oils by Lindsay Pickett (UK), and Cows Crossing, a digital work by Irish artist Christine Simpson, as well as what might be termed the “Freudian surrealism” of A Place Beneath the Surface by London-based photographer Dominic Hawgood....Read more
We've done it againSDk Updates
Wed 28 July, 2010.
Google have just informed us of our latest website-speed stats, and a little experimentation has paid off, as we've managed to improve on what already was pretty amazing progress.
Google now reporting the following:
"On average, pages in your site take 0.4 seconds to load (updated on Jul 26, 2010). This is faster than 98% of sites." - Google Website Performance.
We couldn't be more happy, and can't wait to get our new server, which is pending, churning away at it too as that may even give us that extra percent (we can dream).
Major Mapplethorpe retrospective hosted by NRW-Forum, DüsseldorfLatest News
Sat 10 July, 2010.
Further evidence that SDk is not obsessed with Robert Mapplethorpe but that the point we are making – that his work was, and still is, enormously significant both artistically and sociopolitically – is valid and relevant today, is the fact that galleries and museums internationally are still featuring significant showings of his work. This was the case with the Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell exhibition hosted at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London late last year (see our Latest News entry dated 30 June), and it is currently the case with the major retrospective at the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf.
Entitled simply as Robert Mapplethorpe, the NRW-Forum exhibition, which runs to 15 August 2010, presents more than one hundred and fifty photographs representing, “all areas of Mapplethorpe’s work, from portraits and self-portraits, homosexuality, nudes, flowers and the quintessence of his oeuvre the photographic images of sculptures, including early Polaroids. The photographs are arranged according to themes such as ‘self portraits’, which includes the infamous shot of him with a bullwhip inserted in his anus, as well as his almost poetic portraits of his muse, Patti Smith, the photographs of black men versus white women, the body builder Lisa Lyon, the juxtaposition of penises and flowers... and finally those images of classical beauty based on renaissance sculptures, and impressive portraits of children and celebrities of the day”....Read more
Further viewing – the art of Robert MapplethorpeLatest News
Fri 09 July, 2010.
Probably the best collection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography viewable online is presented by the Guggenheim Museum’s main New York site (Collections > Collection Online > Major Acquisition > The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Gift). This online collection presents a selection of the Guggenheim’s holdings of some two hundred examples of Mapplethorpe’s work, gifted to the museum by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation between 1993 and 1998. The gift made the Guggenheim “the most comprehensive public repository of this important American artist’s work”; and, together with a substantial grant, also inaugurated the museum’s photography collection and exhibition programme....Read more
SDk01 press release available from the What is SDk? pageSDk Updates
Tues 06 July, 2010.
We sent our press release to a select list of people very promptly, but, since experiencing such a positive response on the launch of SDk, we now can’t get it out fast enough. So we’ve made the SDk01-launch press release available as a downloadable PDF from our What is SDK? page.
New banners - help spread SomethingDarkSDk Updates
Thurs 01 July, 2010.
We've just added two banners (below) so that if you experience the divine, mad desire to spread SomethingDark over the far regions of the internet, you may certainly do so.
If you want the HTML code that you can copy+paste into your own webpage or blog, then click here and enjoy.
Further reading – Mapplethorpe, art and politicsLatest News
Wed 30 Jun, 2010.
For those interested in our nonfiction main feature for SDk01, “Twenty years later: Mapplethorpe, art and politics”, there was a beautifully presented exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work hosted by the Alison Jacques Gallery in London late last year. Entitled Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell, the exhibition featured not only photography, but also some of the artist’s mixed-media collages, installation and sculptural pieces. Importantly, the exhibition can be viewed on the hosting gallery’s website: see the Alison Jacques Gallery. Alert to such events, because magazine carried an article on the exhibition, choosing to emphasise Patti Smith’s appearance at the gallery (for those who didn’t know, Smith and Mapplethorpe were lovers in New York City in the late ’60s to early ’70s before the latter came out as gay, the two remaining committed friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989).
Copyright © SomethingDark 2010. All rights reserved.
At last… through the haze, we let the magazine speak for itselfSDk Updates
Fri 25 Jun, 2010.
Chris came close to losing his mind, and Mario Puzo would have been proud of Daryl, who had taken to lying on the office floor for an hour or so at night – “hitting the mattresses” in Godfather parlance.
What are we talking about? Through the haze of vision and blur of mind, we are exhilarated, relieved, ecstatic, exhausted, blithering to announce that finally, at last… SomethingDark was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world at around midnight Thursday 24–Friday 25 June.
Since we aren’t capable of saying much else right now, it’s best to let the magazine speak for itself.
The blessing of timeSDk Updates
Thurs 03 Jun, 2010.
Time has been the major factor to negotiate in creating SomethingDark webmagazine; we realised at the beginning it was a mammoth undertaking for two people in their spare time, and the clock certainly hasn't been favourable... until now.
Aside both of us going through significant life changes during SDk's development, it has also provided the opportunity to discuss and then test new ideas regarding the implementation of the magazine – ironically, something the prolonged development period has helped.
Whilst on this topic, the latest is the decision to switch the programming language in which SDk is developed, as well as the implementation of new page-caching techniques, to make the website as efficient as the latest technology will allow. Obviously such radical decisions take a while to implement, but a total re-write of the underlying structure of the website by Chris is almost complete, taking the whole webmagazine out of a beta-style implementation full of ideas and hacks, and turning it into a complete, well-oiled machine....Read more
Alive and kicking… and so is our obsessionSDk Updates
Wed 28 Apr, 2010.
We know we have given cause for contrary impressions, but we are both still alive and kicking, and have to say that SDk has become something of an obsession for us, despite, or perhaps because of, all the delays and frustrations we've experienced along the way.
Chris is now taking a two-month break from his day job, and Daryl is likewise busy clearing the decks, to concentrate on the last big push to finish SDk and get it into the real world.
We're looking forward to it.
And the obsession will continue.