Displaying items by tag: Google

Thousands of artifacts from the British Museum's priceless collections went online Thursday in a partnership with Google that will allow web-users to take a virtual stroll through its galleries.

The deal with the Google Cultural Institute, which has 800 partners from over 60 countries, also allows objects to be scrutinized by researchers around the world thanks to high-definition Gigapixel technology.

Among artifacts viewable online is the famous Rosetta Stone, which helped unlock the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens.

The Milwaukee Art Museum, in partnership with Google, will offer a semester-long Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), beginning on February 10, 2015. This free course will allow participants to:

• Get comfortable with looking at art by making personal connections with works of art from around the world and in your hometown
• Develop skills such as observing carefully, reflecting and assessing, and creating meaning
• Connect art to unexpected disciplines
• Learn from and interact with a global community of arts-interested people
• Contribute to a worldwide understanding of art through a final project, creatively responding to a work of art of your choice

On Wednesday, December 10, Google announced that it has established a platform that allows museums to share their exhibitions with smartphone users. The Google Cultural Institute, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting culture online, partnered with eleven museums and institutions in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Nigeria, to launch the pilot project. The apps are available for free on the Google Play Store.

The platform helps museums bring their exhibitions into the digital realm by assisting in the creation of smartphone-accessible mobile applications -- Google handles coding and app development and provides participating institutions with tools such as the 360 Indoor Street View and YouTube.

Following the lead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and PBS, Google will launch a series of monthly digital “Art Talks.” The project aims to bring gallery and museum collections to life through virtual hangouts with curators, museums directors, historians, and educators from the world’s most distinguished cultural institutions. The talks will explore various arts-related topics including the curating process, popular themes throughout art history, art education, and the significance of specific masterpieces and artists.

The first Art Talks hangout will take place at 8PM on March 6, 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Deborah Howes, the museum’s Director of Digital Learning, will join a panel of artists and students to discuss the process of teaching art online.

Upcoming Art Talks include Caroline Campbell and Arnika Schmidt from London’s National Gallery discussing depictions of the female nude throughout art history (March 20, 2013) and a panel discussion of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (1525-1569) Tower of Babel featuring Peter Parshall, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (April 2013). Additional talks are planned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico.

The talks will be posted on the Google Art Project‘s YouTube channel after they air.

The latest update to Google’s browser-based map service allows visitors to navigate museums across the world with their smartphones. While sprawling institutions made up of various wings and galleries can appear cumbersome, Google hopes to alleviate confusion by making virtual floor plans for dozens of museums and libraries in nine countries available to users.

The recent update includes interior views of shopping malls, airports, train stations, and convention centers, but the presence of museum layouts is particularly welcomed. While 30 museums in the United States are currently mapped out, museums that are not already included can upload their own floor plans if they wish to be included in the project.

Maps of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, the British Museum in London, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan are currently available.

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art moved into the digital realm on Monday with MOCAtv, the Museum’s YouTube channel devoted solely to contemporary art. In order to up the number of subscribers, MoCA will throw in a free three-month membership to the physical institution for anyone who subscribes to the channel between now and October 21^st.

MOCAtv offers viewers a glimpse into the artistic process via six mini-channels including Artist Video Projects, The Artist’s Studio, Art in the Streets, Art + Music, MOCA U, and YouTube Curated by. MOCAtv debuted with 10 short videos from artists such as Alexis Smith, Mark Bradford, and Robbie Conal that explore the artists’ relationships to their work as well as footage of them in the midst of creating. The Museum also plans to air interviews connected to upcoming exhibitions.

Peppered with advertising content from YouTube’s parent company, Google, MoCA will receive a chunk of the channel’s advertising revenue after Google takes back what the Museum owes them for the development, programming, and operation of MoCAtv.

MoCA and its director, Jeffrey Deitch, have suffered many woes lately. Critics claim Deitch has destroyed the Museum’s integrity during his two-year reign, focusing more on glitz and celebrity than the art itself. This past June curator Paul Schimmel left the museum after 22 years and took all of the artists on MoCA’s board with him including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Barbara Kruger. While many suspected MoCA’s end was near, it doesn’t appear that Deitch or the Museum have given up just yet.

For the first time, the 2,000-year-old, world-famous manuscripts are accessible to anyone in the world with a computer.

Following criticism that only a small circle of scholars could access the Dead Sea Scrolls , Israel’s national museum and Google teamed up to the put the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century online.

Five of the most important scrolls, including the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others have been digitized.

Want to know more about the painting you are standing in front of while visiting the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles? Grab your smartphone and snap a picture of it, says Google.

The team behind Google Goggles, the company's image search and recognition engine, has "Goggles-enabled" the entire permanent collection at the gallery so users can discover much more about the painting than just the small amount of information that fits on the plaque beside it.

"You can use the Google Goggles app on your phone to take a photo of a painting from the collection and instantly access information about it from the Getty's mobile-optimized website and the rest of the web. It's possible to fit only a small amount of information on the wall next to a painting but visitors with Goggles can now enjoy the full story online," explains Google in a post on the Official Google Blog.

Using Google Goggles and a web-connected Android or iOS smartphone users can read or listen to commentary from artists, curators and conservators.