With the artificial eye to the Museum

It is night in the Metropolitan Museum. The huge marble of the Athena Parthenos statue in the entrance hall (circa 170 BC) has seen a lot, but not yet. In the New York Museum, this Saturday is artificial intelligence at work. A group of hackers, designers, programmers, data scientists and IT researchers has released to the collection of the largest American Museum.

The Metropolitan Museum has made 1,5 million exhibits not only the 7.4 million visitors to the show, which is held annually in the museums, but all of the 3.9 billion people with Internet access. And not only clicking the images on the Website of the Museum, but the art really experience it. "We need digitalization of our Mission," says Museum Director Max Hollein.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a big role. You want to make art interesting for people that whip out prefer to the Smartphone, than to stand for hours in the Museum, the feet are flat, or simply do not have the opportunity to travel to New York, and in the enormous building on Central Park. Art should not be the elites reserved. Artificial intelligence has made in the past years, huge progress. They can understand spoken language and objects in images.

406'000 photos for free use on the Internet

The Metropolitan Museum has organized jointly with Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit), a so-called Hackathon, an event in which the participants worked together on the AI technology for the Museum. Now a machine brain can replace, for example, images from Instagram with images of works of art in the Museum. Who has published a photo of his Japanese dinner in the social media, you can now find a work of art in the Museum collection, which is similar in structure.

AI only works because the data are available – the collection of a Museum from the point of view of a machine finally, a huge set of data. The Metropolitan Museum has decided that in 2017, high-resolution photos of a total of 406'000 art resolved to make works for free use on the Internet. Everyone can do with the images what he wants – in the past, that would have been unthinkable, and also for the "Met" it needed a radical rethink. Because in many museums it is prohibited, still, to shoot photos of the plants. Since then, the number of visitors increased in numbers on the Museum's Website rapidly, and in the case of Wikipedia, tens of millions of people watched the images. The attendance numbers plummet.

From the sports to the Vatican

Google has been working for some time with art. The Internet group has made with the App Selfie for a great Fun in social media. With the App, you can find his DoppelgangeR in the art world. The artificial intelligence searches-portraits from the largest museums in the world and one that looks to the user in a similar place actually.

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) organized a few months ago, a Congress on the topic of AI, because the technology is now available for all kinds of museums to be relevant. In the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Texas, KI captures the faces of the visitors, and to cut as digital touch screens and Virtual-Reality offerings in the exhibition on each Individual. AI just captures the secret archives of the Vatican with documents that date back to the eighth century and, so far, only scientists and a few groups are open.

In the entrance hall of the Metropolitan Museum Athena has an AI by the name of Storyteller. She listens when you tell home stories, and compares the rates with works from the Museum. Who says: "On a Sunny day, I went through the woods", gets a print of the artist Ferdinand Olivier from the year 1823 to see, including the trees and the sun. Matt Zumwalt, one of the programmers, says: "imagine you're telling your child a bedtime story and can follow with him to look at which images on the history fit."

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 23.02.2019, 07:11 PM