viz.

While the google “street view” feature has certainly revolutionized the way we look at maps, they’re now taking that technology a step further – over the threshold and into buildings.  The “Art Project,” powered by Google, has partnered with museums all over the world to bring not just the art, but the museums themselves to your computer.

Screen shot of The Art Project home page

The street view technology enables viewers to explore the museums’ galleries in virtual space.  Moving from gallery to gallery, they can zoom in on the works of art.  While not all of the works are available for viewing (some of the pieces have been blurred for copyright reasons), the project enables people to explore museums they would never otherwise be able to see – since the museums involved are scattered across the globe (from New York to Madrid, Prague to Berlin).

Screen shot of street view tour of Gemalgalerie; Berlin, Germany  

Although at times I find myself a bit dubious about the fact that Google seems to be taking over the (virtual) world, I’m all for increased accessibility and availability of artistic and cultural commodities.  In addition to the museum tours, the project includes high-resolution images of some of the museums’ prized possessions.  Selected and curated
by the museums themselves, the images include varying amounts of background information including “Viewing Notes, Artwork History, Artist Information,” and
“Tags.”

Screen shot of Art Project's high-resolution image of Boticelli's The Birth of Venus

Over the past year or so, the viz. team has been working with The Blanton Museum here at UT on the Steve in Action Project – a collaboration between a variety of institutions who are exploring the value of social tagging to increase access and engagement with museum collections.  While The Art Project doesn’t seem to allow tagging by visitors, and the tags currently seem rather limited, it will be interesting to see how this aspect evolves.

A third feature of the site enable viewers with google accounts to “create an artwork collection” from the available images.  This is certainly a much more interactive experience than flipping through the pages of a book, and it opens up untold possibilities for art history classes, let alone the everyday art enthusiast.  It’s also pretty cool in terms of preservation and proliferation of works of art.