NB: This is a guest article by Ariha Setalvad, a writer at mobile and desktop app creator Fueled.
We’ve all been there - you’re in a fascinating foreign city, with decades of art, history and culture all around you...
But it's all set to the drone of your underpaid tour guide’s monotonous recitation of what the artist was trying to say through his art.
So how much is technology helping change the experience of visiting museums, galleries and other cultural events, beyond the use of those clunky headsets or sticks that vibrate when you get to a strategic point?
Perhaps this is where Geocoded Art steps in - an app that purports to have gathered a database of thousands of famous paintings from around the world and coded the precise locations their canvases depict.
In essence, when you’re walking by a certain location, the app will tell you about the work of art that was conceived there, providing information about the painting, its history and the artist.
So this time, the fact that you’re walking around with your head buried in your phone, it’s not going to be taking away from your location but helping you appreciate it better.
The app, when it is eventually released, works by taking a large catalogue of various types of images, which are geocoded to the artist’s vantage point.
These are then integrated into Google Earth and accessible on location on various smartphones and other devices.
The app will deliver fine art images of your location to your location, on your GPS-enabled smartphone or tablet, so you can explore the painting and the place at the same time.
You can also personalize the app by choosing to be notified when you are in the area of a site that has been the subject of a great painting, or browsing from home, picking the sites you want to see and then planning your excursion.
Another area which has grown in the same vein is the Google Art Project, which allows web surfers to move through 17 of the most prominent art galleries in the world.
It includes the option to look more closely at individual art works, including some that will be digitized so exhaustively that individual paint strokes and hairline cracks in the surface will be visible.
Yet another way to explore some of the world’s landmarks is Google Maps Photo Tours, a new feature allows users to take 3D tours of 15,000 different, well-known landmarks; all of which are highlighted when you follow a special link from Google.
More focused on art itself is Art.sy, part of the Arts Genome Project, which is something unlike anything else.
Art.sy evaluates and compiles what they call the DNA of various pieces of art, such as art-historical movements, subject matter and other formal qualities, which makes for a widespread search function that returns a variety of results that may share these DNA with painting you searched for.
This is just a sample of the wide variety of apps available, but what’s certain is that technology is making fine art more approachable and democratic every day and is introducing new ways to admire art outside of the confines of the museum.
Good or bad for tourists? Let them decide...
NB: This is a guest article by Ariha Setalvad, a writer at mobile and desktop app creator Fueled.