“With the Art Camera, museums can share these priceless works with the global public while they’re ensuring they’re preserved for future generations.” “Many of the works of our greatest artists are fragile and sensitive to light and humidity,” Google Arts & Culture notes. The technological breakthrough inarguably enhances our experience of art, whether we ever get to see these works in person, and it preserves a cultural legacy for posterity. Once each detail is captured, our software takes the thousands of close-up shots and, like a jigsaw, stitches the pieces together into one single image.
To make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke, it’s equipped with a laser and a sonar that-much like a bat-uses high frequency sound to measure the distance of the artwork. “In the first five years of the Google Cultural Institute,” Google admits, “we’ve only been able to share about 200 gigapixel images.” The process can now be automated, however, expanding the gallery to 1800+ images and counting, with the invention of a sophisticated machine called the Art Camera:Ī robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, taking hundreds of high resolution close-ups of the painting. Yet the point remains: there’s no way you’d be able to get as close to Monet or Van Gogh’s work in person unless you were a conservator or maybe a museum guard.Ĭreating these images has hitherto been an extremely time-consuming affair that required the expert know-how of technicians, a process that has hampered the wide adoption of gigapixel images for the study of art. Google’s enormous art photographs are, in some ways, superior to observation with the eye: “Zooming into these images is the closest thing to walking up to the real thing with a magnifying glass.” Even when painted on flat canvases, works of art exist in three dimensions, and there’s still the matter of color reproduction on your screen…. “You can only fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it.” This kind of intimacy is nearly impossible to achieve in a crowded gallery.
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