google-art-camera
The Tibetan “Wheel of Life” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is an exquisite watercolor on cloth. It depicts a menacing red demon clutching the human circle of life, death and rebirth in its claws.
Too bad it isn’t on display.
The delicate piece was created around 1800 and can be shown only for brief periods and always under protective glass.
Now, through a collaboration between the Richmond museum and Google, people can see “Wheel of Life” online, anytime, and at a resolution high enough to reveal details not seen before without a magnifying glass (www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/project/art-camera).
The VMFA has joined other cultural institutions around the world in the Google Art Camera project, which allows Google’s robotic camera to take up to hundreds of photos of one image, piece them together, and create images of more than a billion pixels.
With “Wheel of Life,” viewers can zoom in and study the anguished faces of tortured souls and the weave of the fabric on which the work is painted. They can note that flecks of paint are missing from Buddha’s gold robe.
VMFA has 42 pieces in the project; the site has more than 1,760 images from museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the British Museum in London.
The Richmond venue partnered with Google a year ago. Google started its nonprofit Cultural Institute in 2011 to create a platform for organizations to showcase their works, making them accessible to people who can’t fly to Paris or drive to Richmond. VMFA has more than 200 images on the Google site.
Several programs fall under the Cultural Institute umbrella, including Art Camera and Google Museum Views, which creates virtual tours of locations, such as the stone city Machu Picchu in Peru. VMFA is also exploring joining the museum views system.
Travis Fullerton, VMFA’s chief collections photographer and manager of the imaging resources department, said the museum quickly applied when Google launched the Art Camera system.
“The museum has been looking for as many opportunities as possible to share its collection, and Google is a great vehicle for obvious reasons – it’s Google,” Fullerton said.
Each museum would have access to the camera and its crew for a few days, and only certain works were eligible. The pieces had to be two-dimensional, of a certain size, and free of copyright limitations. Fullerton sent out a note to the museum’s curators, who submitted lists of pieces they thought should be considered. Almost all of the collections are represented, Fullerton said.
According to Google’s Art Camera blog, the robotic camera is equipped with a laser and a sonar that uses high frequency sound – like a bat – to measure the distance of the artwork. It moves automatically from detail to detail and can take hundreds of close-ups of that are fitted together like a puzzle.
“The Art Camera will dramatically increase the scale and depth at which museums are able to provide access to our shared cultural heritage to anyone around the world,” the blog states. “For example, if you wanted to see Van Gogh’s six famous portraits of the Roulin family up close, you’d need to travel across the Netherlands then over to LA and New York. Now the Art Camera can travel for you.”
In Richmond, Fullerton said he was amazed at the never-before-seen details that popped out with the images.
“One of the curators came down to see what he had selected, and he was just floored,” Fullerton said. “There is this whiz-bang feeling. It is really neat.”
Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504, denise.watson@pilotonline.com
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