He is the new czar of digital culture and art space, if we can call him that. Amit Sood, who moved to New York sometime in 1999 after stints of studies and work in Mumbai, is the brain behind the wildly-successful Google Arts & Culture project, which is making galleries and monuments accessible to anyone with a smartphone, a tab or a computer.
Search for Salar Jung Museum, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, National Museum or New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you can have a virtual walk-through, with the artefacts in glorious detail, right down to the cracked paint of the 1565 Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters. Or you can zoom into a I hanging in Delhi’s National Museum, which shows a man in Ottoman headgear feeding his bird from a cup while speaking to a Chinese man.
Sood takes a walk down memory lane as he shares the evolution, challenges and the huge impact Google Arts & Culture is having on society, as it brings millions of artworks home to anyone who is interested. “We recently celebrated Holi with an exhibition about its rituals and customs. People can explore how artists were inspired by these, too. For example, Hanif Kureshi, the street artist, got a group of friends together to cover the streets of Delhi in colour! Or look at our Women in India exhibition: you’ll find stories about the incredible women who shaped India — the first female doctor, legislator or the first women who set up a school for girls in the country,” he shares.
What makes the project fascinating is that Google has put its technological might behind it, and it shows. Open the site and it is like Alice’s rabbit hole, where one discovery leads to another. Using a bespoke technical mechanism — a robotic gigapixel that uses laser and sonar for focusing — each image is captured in stunning detail, right down to the single brush hair stuck in paint. Two years back, the Google Arts and Culture team helped bring a part of Kalakriti Art Gallery’s collection to the world. “The interface is amazingly simple and engrossing. Google brings funds, technology and reach. For galleries, this is a win-win situation, as they lack the resources to keep all their works on display. The team is helping us digitise our map collection, and the best thing is they are doing it for free,” says Prshant Lahoti of Kalakriti, which has one of the largest collections of archival maps in the country.
Sood credits his Indian heritage, as well as his dream to make culture more accessible, for the role the Google Cultural Institute is playing now. “My memories and experiences in India fundamentally shaped what we do at Google Arts & Culture. I was fortunate enough to have spent time across the country, including Mumbai and the Nilgiris. I saw how much there is in India and the world to see and learn about our shared heritage. I remember that, at the time, I didn’t have access to a lot of these museums and artworks. And it wasn’t just me, most of the population lives without real access to the world of arts and culture,” he says. Now, real access to art and culture scattered across the world is a tap, click or a touch away.
Excerpts from an interview with Sood:
What initiated the Google Arts & Culture project?
It stems from Google’s broader mission to organise and make accessible the world’s information. We want to enable users to discover artworks in new ways and help the cultural sector make the most of digital opportunities.
Take us through the journey that now includes the Taj Mahal.
Since we started in 2011, we’ve had the pleasure of working with museums from 70 countries around the world, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to explore millions of artworks, artefacts, wonders of the world and historic gems and learn about their stories. We currently have over 19,000 artefacts related to India, and have so far partnered with 46 institutions across the country.
People can now take a virtual trip to the Ajanta Caves, thanks to the Archaeological Survey of India using the Google Arts & Culture app with Google Cardboard, a virtual reality viewer made of paper. You can experience these beautiful caves and many other cultural locations around the world as if you were really there. We’re also proud to have the first virtual reality tour of the Taj Mahal on the Google Arts & Culture app, providing people around the world with views of areas which are restricted to the public, like from the minar and of the graves. And the 2012-2014 editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale can be revisited, including a curated walkthrough of the exhibits using Google Street View.
Any challenges while dealing with museums, especially in India?
India has an invaluable cultural heritage dating back thousands of years. This means that many of the artefacts and buildings are in a fragile state, requiring extremely careful handling. This is also why we’ve developed technologies that help meet the challenge of preserving these works.
The Art Camera, for example, was built to be able to digitise many more artworks in ultra high resolution, a lot more quickly than what was possible a few years ago. This enables us to work more efficiently, minimising exposure to the elements. Scenes from Life of Krishna is one such, whose every brushstroke can now be viewed in extremely high detail, thanks to the Art Camera.
What kind of a role do you see for AI and interactivity in Google Arts & Culture?
l Recently, some of our software engineers at Google collaborated with artists and creative coders — think of someone who is both a software engineer and an artist — to develop experiments that allow us to explore hundreds of thousands of artworks and the connections between them, using powerful Machine Learning algorithms.
‘X Degrees of Separation’, one of these experiments that you can try online, lets you select any two artworks and the computer will find a visual pathway connecting them through a chain of similar artworks. For example, you can put two images from different eras side by side, to discover their visual connection. I look forward to seeing what else smart computer systems can do in the hands of artists, curators and technologists, and how they in turn can help people connect with culture.
Is this your pet project or do you have more of them?
l It did start as a project. Six years on, I now lead a team dedicated to the goal of making art and culture more accessible. And we’re passionate to do more. We are working to bring more of India’s amazing heritage online. Museums, institutions and experts who’d like our help in sharing their stories can get in touch on our website.
Some people have misgivings about the nature and scope of Google Arts & Culture.
l Nothing can replace the experience of seeing art in person. That’s not our goal. Technology has a role to play to enable anyone, anywhere to explore artworks and to help museums reach new people. People in India can open up Google Arts & Culture and see the three versions of Van Gogh’s famous ‘Bedroom’ painting, one in Chicago, one in Paris and a third in Amsterdam. You can travel around the world’s museums with just a few clicks. And an online encounter with an artwork is the first step towards bringing people through a museum’s door. What’s more, technology can help make your visit to a museum more engaging. That’s why we build exciting experiences inside brick and mortar museums, too.
