A museum visit can often be intimidating, not just for those with little interest in art but also for seasoned enthusiasts. Most outings involve not just making a list of museum highlights to explore, but also keeping a lookout for the labels and studying the plaque beside a painting on the wall, sometimes unsatisfied that you might now know about the artwork but not as much about the artist.
A recently launched Indian-origin art-recognition app hopes to turn the smartphone into a pocket-sized museum guide. Launched by -based art platform Asign, eicon allows users to point the camera at an artwork, thereby not just identifying it for you, but also sharing details about the artist, title, medium, provenance and related information. So the information that appears on the 1887 Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait With A Straw Hat with The Potato Peeler on the reverse, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, reveals how Van Gogh was his own “best sitter” and Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, we are told, exemplifies the Dutch Golden Age, with “focus on middle-class interiors and the quiet beauty found in everyday life”.
“Visualised as an art buddy, the app will help people recognise artworks and share with them relevant details about it. Users can also upload pictures of the works they see and make individual notes like in a diary. This will be a record of their own experiences and observations and act as a storage of sorts of their museum and gallery visits,” says Ashvin Rajagopalan, founder of eicon, Asign and -based art gallery Ashvita’s.
At present, the platform reads the collections at three New York museums — Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. More museum spaces and galleries will be added soon. “The multiple data sources will include museums and institutions themselves as well as crowdsourced information, where users will be allowed to contribute,” says Rajagopalan.
The utility of the app might seem limited at a time when an AI engine can also reveal as much information or more on any artwork, but pose this question on the eicon chat box and it offers a defense: “A general AI engine aggregates information from across the internet without that institutional verification, so it can be less precise or outdated. Think of it as the difference between asking a museum curator about a work they steward versus asking a search engine.”
