In these days when we have to stay away from the world and the others, often from those that we love the most, technology can be a perfect ally to brighten up our days with more joy and hope. In this case, it will be joy, hope and culture, as it is Google Arts & Culture that we will talk about.
Launched in 2011 under the name Google Art Project it is a site maintained by Google in collaboration with museums all over the world. Using Street View technology, the site offers free virtual tours of monuments, museums and some of the world’s largest art galleries. When making your way through the galleries, as if really wandering through them, thirsty for knowledge, you can view high-resolution images of selected works from each museum, digitalised using gigapixel technology, allowing you to view them in up to seven billion pixels.
Technology can be a perfect ally to brighten up our days with more joy and hope.
The project, which is now called Google Arts & Culture, started with the collections of some of the most important museums and galleries in the world. In 2012, however, the platform went from 17 to 151 digitalised collections, thus making more than 32,000 works of art available. Today, Google Arts & Culture, in addition to being translated into 18 languages, including Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, French, Italian and Polish, and in addition to offering an App to use the platform on your mobile phone, has about 4690 museums/galleries on offer for virtual visits. The tool allows you to search by museum name, artist or work of art. The descriptions come with details, from the date, to the material used in the painting, sculpture or photography.
Google Arts & Culture has about 4690 museums/galleries on offer for virtual visits.
Although there are some images from Angola and Mozambique on the platform, there is no exhibition space added. But Portugal, through a partnership between Google Arts & Culture and the Ministry of Culture (General-Directorate for Cultural Heritage -DGPC), is very well represented, offering, anywhere in the world and just a click away, the possibility to enrich the knowledge about the collections of museum spaces and national monuments under the auspices of DGPC.
