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Google Cultural Institute

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78 pointssytelus17 comments

I was looking at Museo Napoleonico and saw the Google camera in one of the mirrors: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/yAHftz...

It looks very HAL 9000: https://i.imgur.com/TsZ1Q9a.jpg

I'm impressed by the resolution at which some of these paintings have been scanned.

I'd love to hear more about this process - is it a custom scanning rig? A Gigapan-style pan/tilt DSLR? I'm wondering how they would scan something like the Wedding at Cana? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana

According to the presenter at this year's Museums and the Web conference they're using the bike / person-mount Google Street View system. Each partner gets 1 gigapixel scan as a perk and can get more at apparently quite reasonable rates.

It's kind of insane, but I live a block away from the Walters Art Museum, and i've been inside three times, yet i'm spending more time reflecting on the pieces from this website than at the museum itself.

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/collection/the-walt...

That's too bad, the artwork is really amazing in person.. and not even giving the Walters the web traffic (instead, Google gets it).. A troubling Google Art Project concern.

I found this site a few months back and was absolutely impressed. I hope to one day have a 4k tv mounted to a wall and framed in my house with slide shows from a custom curated set of art playing on repeat.

I am building this exact thing, called ArtsMuse (http://artsmuse.io). It's early days yet: signing artists and getting a beta-ready system built. I have the same vision as you: using the screens in my house to show art instead of being a big black hole on the wall.

I love these, but I always have this compulsion to dig into the source and try to find the giant asset itself, if it's accessible and not just tiled and streamed in like a map. Some museums and collection sites have their source images better obfuscated than others.

Anyone else have any luck, for example on getting the full-size pic from this piece?

http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/the-col...

This is amazing! Any thoughts on why Google did this?

The name creeps me out.

Sounds like an institution the Asgard would have named.

I love the concept but these days I mostly wonder how long it will last before getting the Reader treatment and what that will mean for the partners who are using it for their best-quality web presence.

World is impermanent, the internet world magnifies this tenfold. Things will get ever more transient.

Accept the impermanence.

>>Accept the impermanence.

You're talking extremes, which is a little funny considering the time scales of all the links in the chain: artifact/art (millennia to centuries), museums (centuries to decades), google inc (?).

It is a shame google is aiming at Institutions that don't have the resources to know better than to trust them.. meanwhile their usage rights exists in perpetuity.. not simply for duration of the project..

> World is impermanent, the internet world magnifies this tenfold. Things will get ever more transient.

You do realize that we're talking about institutions dedicated to preserving history, right? People work in cultural heritage are justly concerned not only with preserving the physical artifact but making it easy to access. For people in this field “future” usually means decades or centuries, a few business quarters.

If they spend time promoting a Google service, they're not building their own presence or the capacity needed to support it — if Google gets tired of paying for this and all of those links break, there's nothing to show for the time they're investing now.

Ha! When Google is fighting battles with all sorts of European regulators, it's a VERY smart idea to point to where they're investing in European culture. This isn't going away anytime soon...

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