The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has launched an AI-powered tool called ‘Art Explorer’ that allows users to collect and compare artworks in the museum’s collection.
Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the new tool makes the Dutch museum’s 800,000-piece collection more searchable, and offers an interactive digital experience.
Art Explorer asks questions such as “what do you love?”. If you love eating delicious meals, the tool will search the museum’s collection and show relevant artworks.
Dutch museum’s new ‘Art Explorer’ tool
Other questions asked by the AI tool include “what would a movie about your life be called?” and “what taste brings you back to a special memory?”.
Users can digitally collect and compare the works pulled from the collection, save their favourites, and even hang them in a virtual gallery.
Via the Art Newspaper, the Rijksmuseum’s general director Taco Dibbits said the tool can make connections across the museum’s collection of 1.1 million artworks and objects spanning 800 years.
He said at the launch last week: “The Rijksmuseum was the first museum to throw its collection open to the world. We wanted to digitise the whole collection, including scanning the Night Watch in the greatest resolution ever, but there was so much more.”
“The Rijksmuseum is a catalyst for scientific knowledge… but with 800,000 objects online, search was a challenge. We wanted to make them more accessible.”
In 2012, the Rijksmuseum became one of the first museums in the world to make its entire collection accessible online. It later partnered with Dell to digitise its whole collection.
Dibbits added: “We saw that a tool that makes comparisons – something art historians always thought was their domain – is very logical for people who want to compare one thing with another. Because it is AI that learns, in the future it can answer even better.”
Images courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
