Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

Friday Quick Links

>> Ultimate Dallas
The official site for the definitive glossy soap. Includes preview clips from Justin Lee Collins’ Bring Back Dallas show.

>> Visual Complexity

“A visual exploration on mapping complex networks” – This comes across like a cross between an arts installation and a post-grad dissertation. I can’t pretend to understand it, but it looks pretty, and helps me feel marginally more intelligent just for looking at it!

>> DIY Fixit
Because it’s compulsory for all British citizens to either barbecue or put up shelves on a bank holiday weekend

>> Pirates of the Carribbean: Official
>> The Pirate’s Realm: Online Pirate games
Ahoy me hearties!

Tate Modern & how to create your own Modern Art online

>> Tate Modern: Gilbert and George
>> Explore Tate Modern
>> The Warholizer: Turn your photo into a Pop Art masterpiece
>> Jackson Pollock.org
We don’t do a lot of art on Website of the Day, but Gilbert and George’s appearance on today’s show inspired me to take a look at the Tate Modern site. Explore Tate Modern is an excellent virtual tour of the gallery, which uses a mixture of animated 3D floorplans and an interactive timeline to bring the exhibits to life.
The Warholizer lets you upload a photo and give it the Andy Warhol treatment – automatically creating a Celebrity Squares-style montage of 9 pastel-shaded high-contrast paintings.
At first glance, Jackson Pollock.org appears to be a completely blank site, but start to move your mouse across the screen and it will leave a series of Pollock-style splodges and squiggles in it’s wake, creating your own online work of art.

Monkey Mondays

>> Monkey Mondays
Not many sites promise you a monkey in your mailbox once a week, so (if you’ll allow me a bit of alliterative licence) I reckon I can get away with billing this as your leading web-based postal primate resource. Canadian artist Rob Elliot hopes that the simian artwork he emails to subscribers every Monday will “provide a bit of levity in what is widely agreed to be the worst day of the week”. In fact Rob offers more than just monkeys - the pictures run the full gamut of primates from orang-utans to lemurs and mandrills.

Where chess meets art

Website of the Day: Thursday 14th April

>> The Thinking Machine
Here’s a site that takes an online chess game and turns it into a piece of interactive art. You can play against the computer (and if you’re a reasonably competent player you may well beat it, as it’s programmed to be of average ability). As you play, green and yellow squiggles will illustrate your computer opponent's thought processes as it plans possible future moves many turns ahead, turning the board into a unique piece of online art.

Tall Buildings

Website of the Day: Thursday 11th November

>> Museum of Modern Art: Tall Buildings
We don’t feature many architectural sites on Website of the Day, but this terrific online exhibit from New York’s Museum of Modern Art is well worth a look. The site is an animated comparison of 25 tall buildings designed over the last 10 years for sites around the world. Some of them are already built, some are works in progress and some remain unbuilt. Each building can be seen in the context of its own city skyline, and all buildings can be compared by height, total area and how they deal with design issues like aerodynamics, green technology, and use of public space.

Face of Tomorrow

Website of the Day: Wednesday October 13th

>> Face of Tomorrow
This interesting photographic project is all about using photos of people to try and define the identity of a city – a bit like a visual census summary. Photographer Mike Mike (we don’t think that’s his real surname!) has visited more than 20 cities across the world, and photographed a random sample of 100 locals in each city. He then morphs the results to create a male and female photo to represent each city. You can view the faces for each city or follow Mike’s instructions to photograph 100 people in your own city and send him the results so that he can add the likes of Strathclyde, Newport, or Belfast to the gallery of global faces.

Beano, Viz, Misty and 2000AD

>> Website of the Day: Thursday August 12th

>> 2000AD and British Comics
Hot off the press from the BBC Cult stable, here’s a terrific new site designed to celebrate British comics and show that comics aren’t just for kids. There’s loads of great stuff here including full length Judge Dredd audio adventures, a new exclusive online comic set at the BBC called Work Experience, classic strips from 2000AD, The Beano and Viz, four video documentaries featuring contributions from top comics artists and writers, features on Girls comics from Bunty to Misty and an excellent Caped Crusader Or Vicious Villain Personality Quiz.

Virtual Grafitti Art

>> Zewall
A site to help you get in touch with your inner Rolf Harris – ZeWall offers a range of virtual walls for you to decorate with online spray paint. It’s a perfect way to experiment with graffiti art without actually needing a real wall to practice on! Meanwhile if you want to look at photos of real spraycan art, Grafitti.org.