Google India Chief Rajan Anandan thinks that avenues are aplenty for collaboration between art and technology.
“Technology has started positively impacting the art world as well. Just on the cusp lies the idea of artists, who actively work with the technology available to them,” said Mr. Anandan, Google’s Vice-President for South East Asia and India and Managing Director for India, after a guided tour of Aspinwall House, the prime venue of the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
An example of this was the partnership between Kochi Biennale Foundation and Google Cultural Institute in an ambitious archiving and digitising programme that will capture and reproduce artworks from different venues as part of a virtual tour for the benefit of people who could not experience the Biennale first-hand.
Since the opening of the ongoing edition on 12/12/16, visitors have been able to relive the highlights and delights of KMB 2014 through high-resolution images at the Google Arts and Culture Project, captured using specially designed Street View cameras. The shots were then stitched together to enable seamless navigation of the artworks and sites.
360-degree view
The project marked International Women’s Day (March 8) by releasing interactive 360-degree views of artworks and performances by a number of women participating artists at KMB 2016.
“Even once the Biennale gets over, visitors can do a virtual tour of Biennale in 360 degree. This initiative will help preserve KMB and its works for posterity,” said Mr. Anandan, adding that “besides taking walk-throughs of the virtual galleries, users can also learn about the artists’ backgrounds and other details of the art-pieces”.
Noting the wide range of artworks from artists, performers as well as authors at KMB 2016, Mr. Anandan, a KMB patron, said he was most struck by Slovenian litterateur Aleš Šteger’s Pyramid of Exiled Poets. He and his wife, art collector and KMB patron Radhika Chopra, sponsored Chilean poet-revolutionary Raúl Zurita’s installation ‘Sea of Pain’.
