Google's Art Project Brings Interactive Elements To Indian Art On The Net

Google has extended its Google Art Project to India by joining hands with National Gallery of Modern Art and National Museum. The announcement was made in Google's official blogpost.

Under this initiative, Google will showcase 94 works of art from the National Gallery of Modern Art and 142 pieces from the National Museum including Raja Ravi Varma's oil paintings from the 1890s to Jamini Roy's fusion of tribal and folk culture. There will also be miniatures from the early Chola Art at the National Museum , even bronze image of Nataraja in chatura-tandava posture from Tiruvarangulam and cosmic dance of Lord Shiva symbolizing fivefold aspects of divine control of the universe.

The platform brings an interactive element to access art with brush level strokes of paintings, virtual tour of the museums and a feature that allows one to create a collection to share with friends and family.

Naturally, Google has integrated it with its own social networking site Google+ and the Google+ video conferencing feature Hangouts. This enables users to create personal galleries.  It also includes Google Maps' Street View technology to provide a 360 degree interior virtual tour of the museum.

Apart from offering high-resolution images of the museum collection, the site also features 'Explore and Discover' to enable users to search for artworks by artist's name, the artwork, the type of art, the museum, the country, collections and the time period.

Launched in February 2011, Google Art Project started out as one of Google's 20 percent time project and provided an online platform which allows curators, artists and viewers to collect, share and discover art sculptures, street art and photographs from museums across the world. The platform initially included 1000 images from 17 museums in nine countries.

The internet giant now intends to rope in more museums across India to participate in this program. As a part of its global expansion, Google Art Project has partnered with 151 museums in 40 countries till now.