Museum Monday: The World’s Art Museums and the Googleplex

Google engineers capture the
 Street View images at the White House
Image courtesy:pcworld.com

Google calls its campus the Googleplex, which combines the words Google and complex. It has been purported by bloggers like Jonathan Strickland, that the Google campus is what you'd get if you combined a typical high-tech Internet company's headquarters with an intellectual think tank and a heaping helping of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

But What If?
However, what if you were to release some of that wonderful geekiness towards bringing together the world’s art under a single space on the World Wide Web?

Suppose for just a moment, the works of the art masters from around the globe could be available at the click of a mouse for you to view, explore in fine detail, or even create personalized digital collections you could share with family and social networks?

Well, it has happened. Introducing the Google Art Project!

Online Project Expands!
Early in 2011, Google announced it was aiming to opening the world’s art collections to online viewers. 'Google Art Project’ included over 1000 works of old world masters from 17 museums around the world.

The project had been 18-months aborning, Google announced; a spokeswoman for the company. Google engineers captured the Street View images of the museums with a special cart with mounted cameras, similar to the gear found on the Street View cars gathering imagery across the world. These images are then compiled into a high-resolution 360-degree panorama that you can zoom in and out of.

At the time of its initial launch Google indicated it would look to add more museums as time went on but offered no information about the timetable for expansion. On April 3, 2012, Google announced the expansion of ‘Google Project Art’ to over 150 museum collections from 40 countries. Now, online viewers have over 32,000 works of art available to them.

Discover the Magic of Art in New & Innovative Ways
Google has taken photography, digitization and combined it with a helping of that Willy Wonka factor to make art available in a way never before possible.

In the Washington Post, Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, called the walk-through technology an interesting experiment, and the kind of experiment that most museums can't produce on their limited budgets.

When asked about the Chicago Art Institute joining the Google Art Project, Director Douglas Druick told the Huffington Post, "By sharing works of art in this way, all it will do is increase the interest in visual works of art and the desire to come to institutions like the Art Institute."

View and Share
The Google Art Project makes the experience of viewing art online more than a solitary experience.

Instead, it seeks to involve the community around us as it allows online viewers to not only personally appreciate these works online and up close, but also permits us to share our favorite artworks with family, friends and social networks. It uses all the major sharing tools, such as Google+, Twitter, Facebook and eMail.

Finally, it is possible to create our own personal collections forged from the vast online selections. Using the ‘My Galleries’ feature, Google Art Project lets you become an art collector par excellence. It is then possible to include your own personal perspective note cards, share your collections, or keep them private.

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