At the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, Charlotte Fechoz is admiring Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. The painting, of course, isn't here; it's been in the MOMA in New York since 1941. Instead, Fechoz - the co-ordinator of Le Lab, as the Paris workspace is known - is viewing the masterpiece on The Wall, an 18m-wide, two-storey-tall screen designed for viewing artworks at massive scale. The Starry Night, one of hundreds of masterpieces to have been scanned using Google's gigapixel Art Camera, is blown up to astonishing clarity.
"You can see the canvas has not been fully covered," Fechoz says, zooming in until a single brushstroke is rendered at twice her size. "According to experts, that means van Gogh painted this in a rush. He had this feeling of necessity."
If Google's core search business is comparable to that of a library - to collect and organise all known information - then the Cultural Institute is its art gallery. "We try to provide access, and we try to preserve," says Laurent Gaveau, the 39-year-old director of Le Lab. The nonprofit platform, he says, has a single mission: "How can people be more engaged with art?"
Launched in 2011 as the Google Art Project, the Cultural Institute sprang from "20 per cent time" projects by employees across Google's internal departments. Since broadened to include historical archives, street art and performing arts, it contains more than six million artworks, photos, videos and documents from 1,000 institutions including the British Museum and MoMA.
At first glance, Amit Sood, the Bombay-born director of the institute, makes an unlikely champion for the arts. "I have zero background in art or history," says Sood, sitting in his London office. Growing up in India, Sood never went to museums. Only after moving abroad, doing engineering jobs in New York, Stockholm, Singapore and Belgium, did he become obsessed with museums as the best way to connect to his new bases. "I found it a very cost-effective way of keeping myself entertained."
At Google, Sood's experience initially prompted him to get in touch with museums in the hope of bringing their collections online. But persuading centuries-old institutions to open their collections initially proved difficult. "There were three or four barriers to trust. The first one is: it's Google, you're going to come, take all this stuff and splash ads on it," says Sood.
The Cultural Institute was created as a non-profit; arts institutions are responsible for uploading their own content on to the site and retain control of copyright. "They choose what goes on the platform, we don't." (The latter is significant, given the recent copyright controversy around Google Books - challenged by authors claiming the scanning of their works amounted to outright infringement rather than fair use, the US Supreme Court ruled in Google's favour in April. Google's arguments included that they made the books and academic papers more discoverable, without making the entire text available online.)
Another fear: that putting art online would reduce footfall in museums. "We worked very hard to debunk this," says Sood. "The only way we could do it was wait. The Art Newspaper reports year-on-year records in museum visits."
The visitors debate, Sood says, also illustrates a gulf between big-name tourist attractions and smaller institutions. "When you talk to museums in remote areas, they're like 'sure'," explains Sood. "Their problem is that people don't know about them."
In Paris, Gaveau's team is developing tools to help audiences experience art in new ways. One of its first developments was the gigapixel Art Camera, which stitches together hundreds of up-close images to capture artworks in astonishing detail. The tool has captured dozens of works, from Munch's The Scream to the Chagall-painted dome of the Paris Opera.
(The latter presented a challenge: the ceiling is obscured by an ornate chandelier, circumvented through innovative image stitching.) The results aren't just visually impressive. "Curators come here to study paintings they have been studying for 30 years," says Fechoz. A recent scan of St Paul's Cathedral dome gave close-up access to work unattainable even to historians.
The institute has also pioneered indoor Street View, which began when Sood approached the Google Maps team to try to capture inside of galleries. The result: a custom-built 360° camera rig atop a moveable trolley, which enables virtual gallery tours. Since 2015, its archive has expanded to include live events such as the Venice Biennale. "For the Grand Palais in Paris we did flying 3D capture, the trolley, the Trekker backpack for the stairs," recalls Gaveau. "We even put a tripod on the roof."
Other creations are focused on discovering art in alternative ways. "We have this database of millions of great assets, and we try to find ways to create new experiences," says Gaveau. One entertaining prototype is Portrait Matcher, which uses a webcam to analyse viewers' facial position and match it to one of the artworks in the database in real time. It's like a fine-art mirror; for kids, it could be a new way into otherwise dry areas of art history.
Some of Le Lab's work has had impact far beyond Paris. Cardboard, Google's low-cost VR headset, began as an experiment by Damien Henry and David Coz, two engineers working in the institute's Paris lab. (The lab's workspace is furnished in cardboard, a tribute to its most famous creation.) "From the beginning, education and culture were at the core of the project," explains Henry. "And now one million children get to experience VR in the classroom." In December 2015, the institute used Cardboard to launch performing arts on the platform, shooting VR films inside the Royal Shakespeare Company and Carnegie Hall.
In March, in partnership with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Sood's team created a VR version of Bruegel's The Fall of the Rebel Angels. "The idea is to step inside a painting," Henry says. "To make a connection between you and a piece of art."
But Sood's vision goes beyond documentation. The lab is also experimenting with what the future of art might look like. In March 2016, Sood's team invited five world-renowned street artists to the lab to play around with Tilt Brush, a VR painting app (which Google acquired in 2015) for the HTC Vive. "We decided to pick street artists at the beginning, because they know already how to draw in this very physical way," says Henry.
Inside Tilt Brush, WIRED watches as the paintings are conjured in mid-air. Sketched outlines, with the addition of colour and shadow, become tangible objects floating in 3D space. Light and texture fill the previously blank room. Moving around inside each piece as they're being created - elaborate calligraphy galaxies, ornate mask sculptures, an exploding metal landscape bursting with light - feels remarkably like being inside an artist's mind. It's hard not to witness a Tilt Brush painting in progress and not suspect one might be witnessing the birth of a new art form.
The Tilt Brush experiments are not part of any Google master plan. For now, they're just a glimpse of what could be. "We want the lab to be the place where we can do things that don't have an immediate takeaway," Sood says. (In April, the artworks were made available for those who own an HTC Vive; they're already planning to invite more artists to experiment with the app.) The same goes for its artists-in-residence programme, which includes a partnership with a young-artist initiative, 89plus, and has hosted the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland.
Increasingly, he says, the Cultural Institute isn't just moving art online; it's also moving into galleries. Portrait Matcher, The Wall and Cardboard have all been developed with physical spaces in mind. In Brussels, Cardboard headsets showing the Bruegel film are as much part of the exhibition as the paintings on show.
"We want to be a bridge between culture and technologies like VR," says Sood. "Museums don't have a lot of money. We can be a place that can fund and source these experiences."
At the start of September, Google Arts & Culture partnered with more than 50 of the world’s leading natural history institutions to bring natural history displays to life online. More than 150 interactive stories from experts, 300,000 new photos and videos, and more than 30 virtual tours are now available.
In a blog post, Google wrote: "With just a few clicks, you can come face to face with a 180 million-year-old giant, as virtual reality raises the colossal sea dragon from extinction. Discovered in Dorset in the UK and residing at London’s Natural History Museum. The Rhomaleosaurus — to give it its formal name — can now be explored in 360 degrees."
And that might be the Cultural Institute's biggest impact - exposing age-old institutions to disruptive ways of thinking about art, just as it is showing the role of art to those inside one of the world's biggest tech companies.
"People have too myopic a view of what art and culture is," Sood says. "For some people, a very long curatorial narrative on impressionist art will not work. But if I say: hey, you want to see what bling used to be like in 1800? I think there's a lot of opportunity for disruption, for changing people's minds."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
