The Art Project

Jim Sill, a former television and movie producer, presented a session on the Google Art Project.  If you have some time after the SOLs and before the end of the year, you may with to create a lesson based on the Google Art Project which is part of a larger effort by Google known as the Google Cultural Institute.

You have probably heard that Google is digitizing books which are out of copyright, and putting them on the internet.  You are also familiar with Google Earth.  Okay, so the Google Art Project kind of combines these ideas for works of art.  The Google Art project, as of this writing, works with 345 museums throughout the world and contains 63,684 works by 8,574 artist, which various users (such as us) have arranged into 26,518 galleries.  At some of these museums the user can go to a ground level view (as with Google Earth) and use the mouse to walk around the museum.  Some of the works of art are featured in extremely high resolution--like ten billion little pixels.  

I especially like the different filters you can use when searching through this volume of material.  A user can search by artists, by collection, by medium (oil, pen and ink, bronze, etc.) by the event that inspired the artwork, by the date it was created, by media type (video, photo, etc.), or by place.  In addition, a user can search the galleries created by other users--for example one might search using “math” as a filter.  In this case the result may be a collection of pictures accompanied by questions on the prominent angles in the picture.  The person who compiled the gallery may also have embedded links, or perhaps even a video on various artworks in the gallery.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the technical aspects of how to use the art project.  Rather, let me just state that as far as “how to use” it, you could certainly use it in teaching art, or math (see above), or history--(search by material and date and the students will immediately be able to see when the bronze age was), or literature (analyze the relationship between the artwork of a period on the literature produced in that period), or science (I find a photo of a solar eclipse taken in 1889--the user included an embedded map showing the exact location where the photo was taken.)  I even found a gallery named “Bias Awareness and Bullying Prevention.”  

I’ve tried to keep this post short and interesting, so that you have the curiosity and time to go to the Google Art Project and check it out for yourself.  Click on Mr. Sill, if you wish to check out all of the resources he made available in relation to this session.  Finally, if you visit the Google Cultural Institute, you might also want to check out the World Monuments and Historic Moments which are there along with the Art Project.