This Museum of Modern Art is joining the digital age in a stunningly fun way.
The San Francisco museum has just introduced the Send Me SFMOMA: a service that allows you to request an artwork of a specific topic right through your phone.
For instance, if you text “Send me beaches” or “Send me New York City”, a bot will search the museum’s digitized collection of almost 35,000 works for a masterpiece related to your topic.
“In a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection? How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?” wrote SFMoMA’s creative technologist Jay Mollica.
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“Send Me SFMOMA was conceived as a way to bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users. Send Me SFMOMA is an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public.”
Mollica says that only about 5% of SFMoMA’s collection is currently on display. If a viewer wanted to look at all the museum’s collective works, they would need another 17 museums equal to about 121 miles of spaces in order to house all of the art.
And with such a volume of content, they don’t expect typical viewers to be able to appreciate the works that interest them.
With the artbot, however, users are given a much more creative way of navigating thousands of artworks that are never seen by the public.
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Since the beta service first launched, the artbot has reportedly sent over several million art texts—and they are expecting to send millions more.
“We don’t expect any single Send Me SFMOMA user to ever get through all 34,678 artworks in the collection. But what we have seen, and hope to continue to see, are thousands of people connecting with artwork in fun, new, and very personal ways.”
“Additionally, many of these artworks are currently in storage and rarely seen by the public. When you say ‘Send me a landscape’ you won’t get 791 landscapes, you’ll get a landscape chosen just for you. You may one day be able to visit your landscape in SFMOMA’s galleries, or you may be the only person to see it for years to come.”
If you live in the United States and you would like to test out the service, simply text a topic with “Send me…” to 57251.
(WATCH the video below) – Photo by Good News Network
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