All around the ‘arty’ world
20 May 2012 10:47 AM GMT
'I look forward to a time when art might be considered not as a separable category, in its own arena and with its own products, but as an atmosphere instilled, almost secretly, within other categories of life,' said Vito Acconci.
Incurable as it may be, the urge for greater glories has thrust the modern man to the brink of the impossible. Denying the scourge of physical, geographical, cultural and economic parameters, the Google Art Project launched on 1 February 2011 in collaboration with 17 international museums including the Tate Gallery, London, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection in New York, the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art in Washington and the Uffizi in Florence, has in effect pioneered a revolution in the sphere of art and its accessibility to the common man.
An ambitious, immersive online cultural museum which invites the navigator-viewer to experience virtually the entire corpus of art extending from the Classical Renaissance of Italy to the contemporary street art of Brazil in Sao Paulo, the Google Art Project has steered the sluggish and predictable course of 'seeing' art to the more expansive and ingenious idea of 'experiencing art vicariously' yet in full fidelity to the original.
The project allows the viewer to not only to access the celebrated piece of art on display, but it also disseminates vital information about the piece, in effect engaging the viewer more subjectively so as to say.
The 'walk-through' enabled within this project is supported by the Google Street View technology. The user interface lets site visitors virtually 'walk through' galleries with Google Street View, and look at artworks with Picasa, which provides the microscope view to zoom in to images for greater detail than is visible to the naked eye.
Additionally, the microscope view of artworks incorporates some of Google's scholarly resources — including Google Scholar, Google Docs and YouTube — so users can link it to an external content to learn more about that particular work.
The partner museums allowed a single piece of art to be photographed at one gigapixel image with over one billion pixels and this was consequently digitised to retain the minutest details of the original. This indoor version of the street view essentially used a camera driven on a trolley to capture the images at their highest possible resolution. The largest image on display, Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's The Apparition of Christ to the People, is over 12 Gigapixels.
Further innovations came to light as the Google team coordinated with the museum authorities in fine-tuning the quality of the exhibited artworks. Tate, London suggested that No Woman No Cry be photographed both in natural light as well in the dark in order to capture in full detail the phosphorescent elements of the work which only comes into view in complete darkness.
Therefore what is denied to art lovers who physically visit the gallery can now be seen on the Google art project online — No Woman No Cry in the dark.
On 3 April, the project announced a major global expansion by inviting 151 museums from 40 countries to partner the initiative. The project has expanded dramatically. More than 30,000 objects are available to view in high resolution, up from 1,000 in the first version. Street View images now cover 46 museums with several innovations brewing still. Amit Sood, Head, Google Art Project, said: 'The Art Project is going global, thanks to our new partners from around the entire world. It's no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.'
The project has technically pioneered a democratisation of culture. Flinging open the doors of exclusive museums globally, it has allowed an unapologetic entry and access of the common man within the precincts of the elitist art. It is albeit greatly Eurocentric, but yet, in a manner of speaking it has forged greater cultural dialectics by allowing multicultural and diverse viewers to not only access the art but also contribute by way of multidisciplinary learning and research.
Incurable as it may be, the urge for greater glories has thrust the modern man to the brink of the impossible. Denying the scourge of physical, geographical, cultural and economic parameters, the Google Art Project launched on 1 February 2011 in collaboration with 17 international museums including the Tate Gallery, London, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection in New York, the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art in Washington and the Uffizi in Florence, has in effect pioneered a revolution in the sphere of art and its accessibility to the common man.
An ambitious, immersive online cultural museum which invites the navigator-viewer to experience virtually the entire corpus of art extending from the Classical Renaissance of Italy to the contemporary street art of Brazil in Sao Paulo, the Google Art Project has steered the sluggish and predictable course of 'seeing' art to the more expansive and ingenious idea of 'experiencing art vicariously' yet in full fidelity to the original.
The project allows the viewer to not only to access the celebrated piece of art on display, but it also disseminates vital information about the piece, in effect engaging the viewer more subjectively so as to say.
The 'walk-through' enabled within this project is supported by the Google Street View technology. The user interface lets site visitors virtually 'walk through' galleries with Google Street View, and look at artworks with Picasa, which provides the microscope view to zoom in to images for greater detail than is visible to the naked eye.
Additionally, the microscope view of artworks incorporates some of Google's scholarly resources — including Google Scholar, Google Docs and YouTube — so users can link it to an external content to learn more about that particular work.
The partner museums allowed a single piece of art to be photographed at one gigapixel image with over one billion pixels and this was consequently digitised to retain the minutest details of the original. This indoor version of the street view essentially used a camera driven on a trolley to capture the images at their highest possible resolution. The largest image on display, Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's The Apparition of Christ to the People, is over 12 Gigapixels.
Further innovations came to light as the Google team coordinated with the museum authorities in fine-tuning the quality of the exhibited artworks. Tate, London suggested that No Woman No Cry be photographed both in natural light as well in the dark in order to capture in full detail the phosphorescent elements of the work which only comes into view in complete darkness.
Therefore what is denied to art lovers who physically visit the gallery can now be seen on the Google art project online — No Woman No Cry in the dark.
On 3 April, the project announced a major global expansion by inviting 151 museums from 40 countries to partner the initiative. The project has expanded dramatically. More than 30,000 objects are available to view in high resolution, up from 1,000 in the first version. Street View images now cover 46 museums with several innovations brewing still. Amit Sood, Head, Google Art Project, said: 'The Art Project is going global, thanks to our new partners from around the entire world. It's no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.'
The project has technically pioneered a democratisation of culture. Flinging open the doors of exclusive museums globally, it has allowed an unapologetic entry and access of the common man within the precincts of the elitist art. It is albeit greatly Eurocentric, but yet, in a manner of speaking it has forged greater cultural dialectics by allowing multicultural and diverse viewers to not only access the art but also contribute by way of multidisciplinary learning and research.
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