Virtual art gallery in google. Google Arts & Culture app for desktop

For several years now, there has been an online alternative to real museums - paintings from MOMA, the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum and other famous institutions can be viewed using Google Art Project. How is this digital “museum” of modernity being formed and how does it affect our perception of art? Luisella Mazza, Program Manager, told Look At Me about this. Google Cultural Academies in Brazil, Italy and Russia, which spoke at the Intermuseum 2014 conference in early June.

Luisella Mazza

Program Manager for Europe at Google Academy of Culture

Why would tech company Google need its own Cultural Academy?

What challenges do you face when digitizing works of art?

One of the biggest challenges is creating high quality gigapixel images. Usually we give museums the opportunity to digitize only one painting from the collection in this quality. However, sometimes we shoot other types of productions that way. For example, we recently published photographs of the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier and it took a long time to work on them. In addition, before we started digitizing, we tested our technology in another building in Madrid to see if we could produce images of the required quality. Ceiling Paris Opera is located at a height of 18 meters, and the painting is not visible from the hall with the naked eye. We decided to digitize it so that you can see what even the visitors of the opera do not see, and consider everything in the smallest details. When the project was finished, we were even able to see Chagall's signature in the corner, which was left in 1964, which is incredible for people who didn't have that opportunity before.

Many believe that the Google Art Project is not changing our perception of paintings for the better, because the artists of the past did not expect their paintings to be looked at in such detail.

It's great that the Google Art Project is sparking a debate about how technology is changing the meaning of a work, the idea of ​​a painting, and the artist's intent. But as I have already noted, cultural institutions themselves choose what kind of work they want to digitize, and we fully trust their choice. We only provide technology and a platform, as well as the ability to embed embeds with paintings on the sites of the museums themselves. In addition, we give tools to users: we allow them to compare works, create their own galleries and share them.

How do scientists use the Google Art Project? Do you know of any interesting research?

Comparing paintings and documents from museums and libraries located in different parts of the world can be very useful tool. This makes it possible to compare Van Gogh's letter from The Morgan Library & Museum, addressed to Gauguin and containing sketches, with the resulting painting, which is kept in the Van Gogh Museum. These digitized artifacts complement each other and give each other meaning because the writing gives the context in which the painting was created. IN real world we have no way to compare them because they are in different countries and on different continents. If you, as a scientist, need to compare them, it is not at all easy.

"Wheat Field with Crows", Vincent van Gogh, 1890

Does the Google Academy of Culture do offline projects?

Yes, we participated in the organization dedicated to creativity Van Gogh exhibition The Man Suicided by Society at the Musee d'Orsay. One of the paintings, Wheatfield with Crows, painted in 1890, could not be brought to Paris because it was too fragile to be transported from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. That is why the curators replaced the painting with a screen with her photograph, which was created using our technology. This good example about how digital versions of paintings can be useful in the real world and in real museums.

In addition, we opened our permanent physical space Lab in Paris in December. This is an experimental cultural platform, and several projects are currently running there: for example, a residence for young artists in collaboration with 89plus - this project promotes artists born after 1989. At the Lab, they work on their digitally inspired projects. The "lab" also has a team of engineers, and in addition, artists can print their works on 3D printers, do laser engraving, etc.

Is the academy concerned with the preservation of digital art, such as the video games of the 1980s or the works of artists who created works for the Internet?

No, but we collect interesting ideas from our partners. If our partners wanted to place such content online, we would definitely listen to them. In addition to photographs, the Google Art Project also publishes videos showing installations and other works of contemporary art, because static images do not convey their essence and the author's ideas.

How will the Academy of Culture develop in the future?

We are constantly coming up with new technologies to help cultural institutions. For example, we recently launched several museum mobile applications: we have come up with a universal scheme that our partner museums can fill in, so as not to be limited by the experience that their sites provide. So far, several Brazilian museums have had such applications: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Lazar Segal Museum and the São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (MAM).

In addition, we are trying to improve our panoramas of the "wonders of the world", created using Google Street View. We recently published a panorama of the Cambodian Angkor Wat temple complex and supplemented it with comments by historians so that users can not only look at this attraction, but also learn all necessary information about her.

Services for searching for doubles by photo have been known for a long time, but Google managed to capitalize on this hype in 2018. The company has added a feature to compare selfies with works of art in the Arts & Culture guide. After that, the application, released back in 2016, topped the top free services in the US. App Store. And received dozens of negative reviews due to the lack of Android support and restrictions on use by country.

The Village found out how the neural network works and whether it is possible to “feed” your photo to it while in Russia.

How a neural network works

New service "Is your portrait in a museum?" helps the user to find out if his selfie looks like any of the thousands of works of artists and sculptors from around the world. To do this, Google uses own technology face recognition. After analyzing the image, the neural network produces a gallery of works of art, which depict the alleged doubles of the user. All of them are accompanied by a percentage estimate of the accuracy of the match. In addition to selfies, the algorithm can also be “feeded” to any other photo, but not from the gallery, but retaken.

This google arts and culture app is pretty amazing. Feel real strong about my 40% 😳 pic.twitter.com/2iyexRkUG5

Pw (@petewentz) January 14, 2018

Also in social networks you can find paired photos, which were jokingly combined by the users themselves. Google representatives explained that a fake can be identified by the absence of a watermark with the name of the picture or a white stripe between the pictures.

How to use the service in Russia

To open access to this section, you will need to convince Apple that you are located, for example, in the United States. Here's how to do it:

Log out. Go to your iPhone or iPad settings, find "iTunes Store and App Store" and sign out of your current Apple ID.

Turn off geolocation. Go back to the settings and in the item "Privacy" deactivate the location of the gadget.

Change region and language. Go back to the settings again, go to "General", and then to "Language and Region" and select US and English there.

Find an app. Go to the App Store, find the app there Google Arts& Culture and click Get.

Register a new Apple ID. When you try to install an app, the App Store will prompt you to create a new one. account. Check it out on email, which was not previously used in Apple services. Enter the United States as your country of residence. The address can be filled in at random - for example, Oakland, 481 51st Street. The state then you need to specify California, the index is 94608, and the phone is, say, 510–201–5760. bank card Do not link to this account.

Activate the VPN. After downloading Google Arts & Culture, take your time to turn on the app. First, install a VPN service - for example, Free VPN - and activate settings in it that mimic you being on west coast USA.

If the App Store gives you an account lockout warning while installing apps, you'll have to spend some time changing your passwords over and over again. Then Apple will give up.

Launch Google Arts & Culture. If, after launching the application, a banner with a link to the "Is your portrait in a museum?" service does not appear in the "Home" section, experiment with the settings. Try turning on Airplane mode, reactivating location services, or reconnecting your VPN. Changing your account or logging out of it in Google in the main menu of the application can also help.

From Google got an interesting feature to compare photos with creations famous artists. With its help, you can find out if you look like a character in a painting or sculpture.

The function is based on face recognition technology and a neural network. The latter will provide a range of options and indicate the percentage of similarity. Often the results are surprisingly accurate, but there are also errors.

On this moment the function is only available in some regions of the United States, however, with the help of, for example, Turbo VPN, anyone can use it. It is important to specify the USA as your location, and not every server is suitable. Of the tested, the function appears only if you connect to New York.

With Android, everything is simple - download the VPN application and connect to the desired server. With iOS, it’s more complicated: you need to disable your current Apple ID, turn off geolocation, change the language to English and the region to the United States, and only then turn on VPN and Arts & Culture.

The function itself is in the main feed. You just need to rewind down a bit to the offer to find your portrait in the museum.

An application such as Google Arts & Culture, in Lately very popular and I think you will be very interested, or there is an opportunity to download it on a PC. I can only say yes, Google Arts and Culture can be installed on a computer.

Many began to use heavily this program far from due to the fact that many masterpieces of art can be considered in it.

Let's briefly talk about why it became very popular and then we'll talk about the appearance on the PC. It will be useful and interesting.

What's the application?

Google has released this application for a long time and its main task is to help you get acquainted with works of art around the world without visiting any museum.


You just fire it up and you can even try 3D museum tours. We are living in a very amazing time.

Getting to the point, it became popular because of one function - the search for a double. You take a selfie and then the face search for paintings begins.


At the end, you see the result, how much you are similar to this or that character from the picture. Very unique, which is why many people are interested in this feature.

What else is possible:

• to consider the exhibit in detail will not be a problem, we zoom in and look at the desired part of the picture;
• there are very unique filters that can be used to make an excellent search;
• there is also a schedule of events that take place near you.

Thus, we get a very cool program that will help develop in a cultural direction and, of course, indulge in various features.

Download Google Arts & Culture to your computer

If you do not have the opportunity to enjoy Google Arts and Culture on your phone, then you can always turn to the web version for help, or simply download mobile version to your PC.


If you have Windows 7, 8 or 10, then this is half the battle, because it is on these OS versions that you can install the Android emulator.

Which is simply full of today. In principle, any of them will suit you, because this application does not need much. If anything, here are examples: Memu (www.memuplay.com), BlueStacks (www.bluestacks.com), or Nox App Player (www.bignox.com).

So that you understand what to do, here is a short instruction:

1. do the installation of the emulator by first downloading one of the files on the site;
2. further launch and here you will need to select the future interface language and, of course, sign in to Google;
3. search for "Google Arts & Culture" and install;
4. launch.

I can say right away that the search for a double in our countries is not yet available. But an update has recently been released, which made it possible to use this feature in other countries.

So it is quite possible that we will see it soon. Just need to wait a little more for an update.

Results

So this is roughly how you can use Google Arts & Culture on your PC. Whether it's worth it, the choice is yours.

And do not forget that you can use the program on a computer using the web version. It's still in beta testing, but it's already working pretty well.

Is in the world great amount people who, in principle, are not averse to walking around museums, that's just too lazy to get up from a comfortable easy chair for this. And there are those who are ready to rise from it, but the financial situation or lack of time does not allow them to go to another city or another country to see the Mona Lisa, the Appearance of Christ to the People, and other masterpieces of painting. That's it for such people, and indeed for all lovers visual arts, and the resource appeared Art Project from company Google.

Google Corporation makes the world different. Thanks to her, we really learned how the Cosmos itself looks like, we got the most detailed and voluminous maps in the world, the most convenient and reliable Post service, search engine and much, much more that directly affects our lives.

Another incredibly useful service from Google is Street View, which allows anyone to walk the streets of many cities around the world without leaving their computer screen. And now we can not only walk through the streets, but also go into buildings. True, not in all, but in specific seventeen buildings, which are the world's largest museums of our time.

This opportunity gives us a new service from Google called Art Project, presented on February 1 this year. This, in essence, is the same Street View, only you can walk with it not through the streets, but through museums.

At the moment, seventeen museums from different parts of the world are available in the Google Art Project. This is the Metropolitan Museum and Museum contemporary art in New York, Palace of Versailles in Paris, National Gallery in London and many other institutions of this kind and scale. From Russian museums presented here Tretyakov Gallery and the Hermitage. But this list will continue to expand and expand.

With the help of Google Art Project, right on the project website, you can walk through the halls of museums, look at interiors, paintings, sculptures, read captions to them, the history of their creation, biographies of artists, leave comments, talk about your impressions, give advice, etc.

The paintings themselves were shot with a resolution of 7 gigapixels (yes, exactly 7 billion pixels!) So that connoisseurs of fine art, if they wish, can see every crack on the canvases, examine in detail and enjoy the confident strokes of their favorite artists.