Google Arts & Culture

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. I didn't go to art school, but I love a good art museum, even one they are going to without leaving your couch. 

Betty: And I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school. But I am someone who loves being in art museums. I have been working as a gallery guide at an art museum for the past eight years, although not right now because it's closed. But that's not stopping us from looking at art.

Quinn: So obviously the world is pretty scary right now and we are all dealing with this pandemic in the best way that we can, which is to stay home and to wash your hands and protect yourself and people around you. Or if you have to go to work to take as many precautions as you can in this really difficult time. But if you are someone who is lucky enough that you're able to stay home, then you might be looking for some things to do in this time. And luckily we live in this great age of the internet when there are so many more options for entertainment and education right at our fingertips than there ever have been before. So we decided for a very special coronavirus episode of Pictorial, we’re going through a virtual art museum. And so there's going to be a link in the show notes for a bunch of different versions of virtual art museums that are out there and exhibits that you can walk through on your computer and all that. But today we're focusing on the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea. And this is a virtual exhibit that's run through the Google Arts and Culture website. So there's a lot of different stuff here, and we're going to dive in. 

Betty: As Quinn mentioned, there's lots of virtual museum tours that you can take through Google Arts and Culture, but Google Arts and Culture itself is actually like, a big collection of all kinds of art that's been digitized, around—that’s been digitized, of all kinds of art pieces around the world. So you —even the museums that don’t have a virtual tour of their actual galleries, a lot of their artworks have been like scanned or photographed and digitized in like super, super high-res into the app itself, so you can go on and look at it and zoom in and see all these like amazing detail. And actually in some cases, probably even more detailed than what you could see in an actual art gallery, because usually they don't let you put your face right up against the painting. You can't step too close. Like at the AGO, we usually have like a line in front of every painting and if you walk past it, it sets off on an alarm, or the security guard will like, you know, tell you to back off. But on the Google Arts and Culture page, you can, you can see a lot of things in like amazing detail. Some things are like 30,000 pixels by like 25,000 pixels. It's amazing. But yeah, so they also have these incredible virtual art tours, which is kind of like a cross between the Google Arts and Culture app and Google Street View. So you can like plop yourself actually into the museum and be as if you're standing in it and to like take a street view tour. Obviously, you know, it's, you have to pan around with your mouse. So actually I did download the app onto my phone and you can indeed like pan around with your, your phone, and look around, which is quite, quite nice.

Quinn: Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the whole, like, virtual museum on the website was, they have a couple of sort of featured exhibits that are set up to be internet specific, where it act—like you just flip through the page, the webpage, and it shows you all these different paintings and gives you all these information. And the first featured exhibit on this museum was for a Korean artist named Yoo Youngkuk. And I thought it was really cool flipping through this because as you were saying, they have this basically super zoom and so you have like sort of the wide view of the paintings and you see like, oh, here's what the whole thing looks like. And then when the information in the sidebar is about a specific kind of brushstroke or information that you would benefit from seeing a closeup view, it zooms all the way in and you can see it in such crisp detail and it really is a delightful experience to be doing this, especially when I was doing it for the first time and I had no idea that was about to happen. And then I was like, oh my gosh, look at, look at how zoomed in we can be. 

Betty: Yeah, for sure. You can see like so many brushstrokes in like sharp, crisp detail. It's like, it's almost like an artwork within itself to even see the zoomed in piece. For those of you who are listening, instead of watching—Yoo Youngkuk, like his work is like, he’s probably what we would consider either an abstract expressionists or color field painter. He does these paintings that are big swaths of color, you know, maybe laid over top or around each other. He kind of reminds me a little bit of like a Rothko, but maybe a bit more colorful. And a lot of his paintings when it's zoomed out, like, it looks like it looks like flat pieces of color. But I then notice, when looking through this like online exhibition, it zooms in and then it actually, you can see the brushstroke details in the zoomed in parts.

Quinn: Yeah. It's really cool to see, especially for an artist like this where a lot of the artistry is in those details. That aspect of these exhibitions was probably my favorite part. I like it when you could see that clearly there was a lot of design done natively for this website, where it really thought about your experience as a virtual viewer of it. I would say like I also did a bunch of things where you can plop down basically into different floors of this museum and walk around just like in Google street view. This was not my favorite part of it, but that's mostly because I am not a huge fan of the interface for Google street view where you kind of have to click to go forward. I found it kind of disorienting and it was hard for me to get a grasp of where I was in the museum, but I did like how some of the paintings even in that view had a pop up where if you were looking at a painting—air quotes, “looking at this painting,” then a pop up would come up and you could click on it and get more information about that painting. So I thought that was a really cool aspect, but it didn't seem to happen for all of them.

Betty: I didn't even realize you could do that, actually. Let me just check.

Quinn: Yeah, I'm not sure if that's like only a couple of them have them, or… it didn't, it definitely wasn't all of them, or either that or I was not doing whatever trick I needed to do to make it work.

Betty: Yeah. I just, I'm just in a couple of them right now and I'm clicking on the paintings and it doesn't look like you can see the details. But yeah, I actually, I was, when I was doing it earlier, I was like trying to zoom into like the wall labels next to the paintings, and obviously those are blurry, so it's not exactly as the same as a real life experience because you would actually probably be able to read the labels, although there are like the big wall texts and stuff you can, you can read. Those are legible. So yeah, I do agree that like the Google street view interface isn't, isn't the best and most likely seeing these artworks in that context is, you know, not as ideal as seeing it in real life, but as we can't do that right now, as this museum has been closed since the end of February, I think, that's the next best thing.

Quinn: Yeah. I did see one really cool thing in the street view version though, which is, I don't know if you saw the basement floor of the museum in Seoul. If you go and click on that, the whole basement—and I highly encourage anyone listening out there when they get the chance to check this out themselves. The whole floor seems to be one large art piece that's very reflective and like the full—a large room has been taken over by this, lots of lights and reflective pieces. And it's very interesting because… I think I liked it because you could just kind of be in that space and look around and see the whole thing instead of having to try to navigate to different places, which confused me in a lot of the different floors. But it's also really interesting because it's so reflective, but of course this has been done in a way that it's not reflecting anything back because they don't want you to just to like see all the cameras in the, in the street view or whatever. So instead you're just looking, you're standing in this giant space full of fractured mirrors and nothing is being reflected back at you, which is a cool experience.

Betty: Yeah. I would imagine if you were actually in that space in person, you would see yourself or like the people around you reflected back like a hundred times or something, because it's like refracting all over the place. 

Quinn: Yeah. 

Betty: Yeah, I would actually say that it is, this particular artwork or installation is more like, more interesting as like a virtual tour than just like a hallway of paintings. Because I think those, like obviously the pixelation and the resolution on like Google street views, of a, of a painting, like you might as well see the other one, like you mentioned, where it's actually like a picture of the painting and zoomed in and things like that. But when it comes to like, an experience, especially with if it's a sculpture or like a room, an installation, it's very hard to convey that with the still images on a website. And those are the things that could benefit from, you know, like actually being able to see—simulate a sort of 3D-ish type of environment.

Quinn: Yeah, absolutely. This is definitely a bonus that brought it above and beyond just seeing pictures of things in a museum.

Betty: I'm just trying to find like what is the name of that particular artwork.

Quinn: I tried so hard to find the name. I cannot find it, unfortunately. I tried Googling like “basement Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art,” like I really can't find it and I couldn't find it by scrolling through any of the other galleries on this webpage. So if anyone does know the name of the artist or the piece—would be greatly appreciated.

Betty: Yeah, I'm on the website right now and it's not telling me. They have a list of current exhibitions, but it's not like, that's not one of them.

Quinn: If only I spoke Korean, I feel like I could figure this out. 

Betty: Well, they do have an—they do have an English version of the website. However, I don't think it's very helpful either. But anyway. Did you see the one that is like, I guess I would say like a television radio tower. It's like, I think it's like when you like first walk in the museum and then there's like a giant rotunda room and then basically it's like a huge tower that's like, I don't know, like five floors tall of just television and it tapers, it's like round and and it tapers up to a point.

Quinn: Ooh.

Betty: Oh, you know what? I think this museum is kind of like the Guggenheim, cause it looks like there's a ramp and you walk, you can walk all the way up to the top in like a spiral form. 

Quinn: Oh wait, okay. I found it. I'm looking at this now. I also think there are a couple of different buildings. It seems like there's a couple of, this is a very large museum and there's a couple of different branches, but if you were looking at this yourself, this is the one that just shows up plainly as National Museum of Modern Contemporary Art, Korea, with no other descriptive notes. It's just that, and when you click on it, it's this giant tower of screens.

Betty: So yeah, I think, I think that one is like, is also another example of like a three dimensional artwork, that’s really good to be able to see in like a three dimensional way. 

Quinn: Yeah. One other aspect of this website that I really appreciated that I think is just a general Google Arts and Culture thing is that you could sort the pieces by color. Which I thought was such a brilliant idea. So on one, one of the sections is just items that you can look at and see more in more detail and get more information about, and one of the options is to sort by color, which I think is great because of course, like if you see something in street view or something, or you're just thinking like about an aesthetic, you're looking for all that, of course, you're much more likely to be able to identify it by color then necessarily the name of the artists or the piece. This is also how I was trying to find the basement. I still couldn't find it. And they also have it, everything placed on a timeline as well, so you can see like when things were created, so if you're doing sort of like a chronological look at the museum, you can see like, oh, okay, what is the time difference between when two things were made or something like that. I really appreciate that they give us all these different views so depending on what you're searching for and potentially what you're researching, it's already laid out for you.

Betty: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think, I think that's definitely one of the reasons why like just love the Google Arts and Culture app in general. Like, it's able to.. even despite, you know, coronavirus and quarantine reasons, you know, if you are halfway around the world and don't get a chance to visit Korea, you can see so many of these beautiful and amazing artworks, just from the comfort of your own home.

Quinn: Yeah. I mean, we started this under the premise of like, things you can do on your couch, but I've never been to Seoul. Like I would, I've never had the chance to see this in person regardless of any external restrictions. So, this is cool at any time. I will say, this has made me really want to go to Seoul and to see this, partially because it seems like such a large, beautiful museum, and partially because I want to walk in that basement.

Betty: I know. Yeah. It is so interesting. I mean, I'm actually, I'm kind of scrolling through another one of their online exhibits, and it's called Garden. So it's the one where it's like, it looks like a big green painting that's got like leaves and birds. So if you go in, yeah, it has that zoomed in shot of that painting that's on the thumbnail. So it's called The Days by Kim Bohie. I think, so I believe the theme of this exhibit is like, garden, but it doesn't just have leaves and stuff. They have like a, they have a bunch of different things. Or actually, it's split into a few different themes. Like, the first theme is called Encounter and then, so there's like a screen projection installation and it has like, they look like either little boats or little shoes that's like stringing from the ceiling. It's called Memory of the 20th century by Cho Duck-hyun. So anyway, so it’s—oh, and they also, I guess it doesn't just, they don't just hold Korean art. It's kind of a modern and contemporary art gallery of like all kinds of modern and contemporary art, because another painting they have featured in this exhibition is Dancers by Fernando Botero, who's a Colombian artist. So I guess it would appear that, like, I'm sure there's like a lot of Korean artists in this museum, but they do have collections of artists from all around the world.

Quinn: Yeah, I kinda got the impression while looking through that it's definitely sort of Korean artist focused, especially in sort of their special exhibits. But it is an international museum with lots of contemporary art from around the world. It is really interesting cause like I've never been outside of North America and Europe, so I've never been to a museum that is… that has an international display from our perspective that's non-Western. And I'm very interested in experiencing that someday. We can do it a little bit here virtually. But then seeing like, the differences in how things are laid out and how choices are made when it's coming from just like a different artistic cultural perspective than one that I grew up in, I'm very interested to see like what those differences actually look like. Cause I mean, right now we're looking at it on the Google Arts and Culture website, so I feel like it’s pretty standardized for these different places across the world, cause it's all under one banner, for what this is. But yeah, this is just really piqued my interest about this museum.

Betty: For sure, yeah. I personally like, even though I have been outside of North America and Europe, I haven't really been to a lot of museums or institutions that are outside of North America or Europe. So, yeah, I would definitely like to go to this museum in person one day because—and I do think it's interesting because it is a contemporary art museum, so it shows you like contemporary art that's being made by Korean and international artists. So it'll be interesting to see how different it is, if it is, from like a place like MoMA.

Quinn: Yeah. I love how this started, the premise of this episode is to talk about a virtual exhibits, and then we've just started talking about where we'd like to travel someday.

Betty: [laughs] Let’s go to Korea. Maybe not right now, but like as soon as it's over, first destination. So I mean, it would be great for us to do like a remote Pictorial episode from like, Korea.

Quinn: Let’s Kickstart it.

Betty: Right. Ideas for once COVID-19 is over. I did just want to point out, like I just saw a piece that I just really like, just cause of how it's stunning it is. It is in that Garden exhibition page. So it's a piece called a Wave Ripple by Cho Yong-won. And so it's like, I think it's actually a big block of wood that he's stained black. And then he’s actually carved these like ripples and rings and it looks like there might be bowls or something in them and it's like, it looks like ripples on the water, but it's carved out of like a block of wood and it's just like so beautiful and obviously so crazy how, you know, like something solid could look like a liquid. And I—it does look like it's really huge. So probably on the screen I'm not even able to see it in its full detail. But yeah, I just really loved that piece of work.

Quinn: Yeah, that's extremely intricate. That's beautiful.

Betty: I would say both of us probably agreed that like the best experience for, for online or for the Google Arts and Culture experience are these like specifically made to be an online exhibit collections. Because, you know, I think the experience in front of your computer screen is still different than going in person. I mean, until they can do like actual VR tours of museums, which I'm sure somebody has done by now.

Quinn: Yeah. But the Google Arts and Culture website does have a lot of resources, especially for a time like this. So there's all those sort of international museums that are highlighted in that article that's linked. But if you didn't, if you just go to the main Google Arts and Culture website, they have like all these featured paintings. You can also do things like look at murals that they photographed. They have the International Space Station you can take a virtual tour of. So there are a lot of other possibilities even beyond doing like a street view walking around in exhibits. And there are some other museums that have like online capabilities as well that aren't included necessarily in the Google Arts and Culture. I mean if—those are more for, tend to be like research focused, like if you're looking for a specific thing, lots of museums have online resources where you can find records of those. But like even like the Louvre has virtual tours if you go directly to their website, you can take like a virtual tour of some of their exhibits. So if there is a museum that you're thinking, oh, I'd like to go there someday, maybe now's the time to take an hour and Google and see if you can check it out virtually.

Betty: Yeah. Actually, you know what, I'm just scrolling through the main Google Arts and Culture page. And I found one of the, I guess, featured articles is four things to do with your camera phone from home. So they have, a list of, I believe apps that you can download. So one of them is called art projector, so you can, I think project a painting onto your, onto your walls, using like, what's it called? Augmented reality. So that you can, I don't know, have like a Van Gogh or Monet painting projected onto your wall.

Quinn: Get that sweet, sweet Instagram pose.

Betty: Yeah, exactly. And then there's the art selfie where you can take a picture of yourself and then it'll tell you which, I guess, painting you look closely, or your face is mostly most closely aligned with. This one I actually knew about before, which I really love. It's called color palette. So you can, I've actually used this before for like design projects. I would take a camera, I would take a picture of a painting that I think has a really cool color scheme. And then it will take a picture and it will actually take the colors that are on the, on the painting and then give you, like, its color palette. And I'm not sure if this is the same app I use, but the one I use, it will actually spit out like the Pantone, the RGB and the CMYK codes of these colors. So you can use it in like a graphic design project. You can use any like interior design project. You can paint your walls with these accents. And I'm just like, oh my God. So anyway—

Quinn: Wow.

Betty: —do that, because I'm sure many people have been home for weeks and are running out of things to do. There are only so many Netflix shows.

Quinn: That's awesome. So much out there. Listen, we hope everyone is staying safe and that you're all doing well, hopefully in your respective homes. And if you are out there in a hospital or, or working in a grocery store or wherever you are, that you have to be out and about, our best wishes are with you and we hope that you're all doing okay.

Betty: Yeah, definitely. Thank you for everyone who is doing something that is, you know, keeping society alive. And I think if we all stay home when we can, then we will, we will continue to survive. 

Quinn: Absolutely. We don't know how long this is going to go on. We will be still making episodes. Most of them are probably going to be back to the usual, and of just like art topics from around the world and probably won't be too pandemic specific in the future. So, stay tuned. Now you can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod, or you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm. 

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationV and I am also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these episodes onto YouTube where we will insert visuals of what we speak about on the video itself so you can watch along. 

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!