Take at look at this YouTube demo for Google’s Art Project, which uses high-definition photography and Street View technology to allow you to walk around some of the world’s great galleries and put your nose right up against the pictures. You can see the detail better than you could with your unaided natural sight.
Jonathan Jones blogs about the project here:
This is a revolutionary age. New innovations change the way we communicate, think and live, and at breakneck speed. What happens to history in such a time? The Google Art Project offers a glorious and exhilarating answer: in this century, it seems, high art will be more accessible and more beautifully available to more people than ever before.
For this virtual tour of great museum collections, contemporary work can be seen among world art treasures – all photographed in magical detail…
You can home in on Seurat’s paintings in New York’s Museum of Modern Art so closely that you can study the dots that create his dappled effects in colossal focus. Only a visit to the museum itself would give a comparable intimacy – and even then you might need to take a magnifying glass.
If it is the high-definition photography of paintings that makes this such a radical moment in the history of art reproduction, the project’s Google Street View-style tours of galleries are not to be sniffed at either. I was able to stroll, on screen, through the rooms of the Uffizi gallery as if I were there in Florence, then focus on favourite pictures – getting a powerful sense of their physical reality, their frames and their scale – before switching to the macroscopic pictures of isolated works…
Google’s Art Project is a profoundly enriching encounter, one that really starts to break down the difference between viewing a reproduction and seeing it in the flesh. It deserves to succeed.
You see everything, but somehow you don’t see all that you wish you could. It’s mysterious – what is it that’s missing on the screen even when you can see more than you could see if you were there yourself? Perhaps it’s a question of monitor size. If I had a 2 metre high-definition monitor on my wall I might feel differently. I’m not sure.
WOW.
How Amazing is that!
Save to favourites immediately.
I believe what’s possible missing is the fully dimensional exposure of all our heightened senses to the true authentic wholesome experience.
The who inspired you to go
The journey there
The weather and emotions on that day
The building and situation of the art work
The people and atmosphere around at that particular time
The smell, the colour, the texture
The wanting to reach out and feel
The actual moment.
The pinnacle of the experience touching us.
The emotions provoked
The artists power
The impression imprinted on us
The going up and the coming down
The Peace at having been.
The sweetness of the memory
Never two experiences the same
Which just makes real life so incredibly mysterious and breathtakingly, poignantly special and unbeatable, fully dimentional. radiant.
God.
This is a wonderful way of experiencing artwork that might otherwise not be seen, either because of not knowing it existed or due to inability to get to the various galleries they are shown in. It’s great to be able to see them ‘under one roof’. I agree with your point, though, Fr Stephen, that a bigger monitor might add to the experience.
This is an amazing way to see art. But it fails in that one is not there to see that actual artwork. Are you in the moment or watching a replay?
I think that art is such a gift of God that to see the actual piece is to view the Glory that the artist has expressed. To see it online and “up close in personal” does let you see the details and is wonderful as a study but God’s gift was in the actual art.
Makes me think of a time when I was watching a world class rider jump a course. . . standing next to a fence I could see him use his aids to get the horse correctly over and I thought “oh how beautiful I will never be able to ride like that” and at that same moment the person next to me said “he makes it look so easy.”
God gives some the ability to reach the top, gives some the ability to see, gives others the joy of seeing, and always keeps His eye on the sparrow.