SHARE YOUR VIEW - AN AI POWERED ART CONNECTION TOOL
Share Your View is an online exploration tool built by Design I/O in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art that introduces an imaginative entryway into the museum’s Open Access collection. Using machine learning and the open source vector similarity engine Milvus, Share Your View detects similarities in shapes, textures, colors, and subject matter to instantly match a user’s uploaded image with an artwork from the museum’s digital collection.
The Share Your View Gallery Page
A SHARED VIEW
Originally a response to the stasis of early quarantine, Design I/O developed the Share Your View concept as a tool for the art community and beyond to capture a view of their quarantine post and repurpose it as a window into CMA’s uniquely expansive digitized collection. With museum closures and an overall loss of communal spaces to be curious, collaborate, and learn, the Share Your View concept ties one’s isolated experience of quarantine to the vast and varied hive mind that is art and art history.
Example match: A View of Naples through a Window, Franz Ludwig Catel (German, 1778-1856)
Example match: Castle on a River, Salomon van Ruysdael (Dutch, 1602-1670)
PLAYFUL CONNECTIONS
Going beyond traditional museum experiences, Share Your View follows in the footsteps of Studio Play, a series of interactive installations built by Design I/O for CMA’s ArtLens Gallery in 2016, which aimed to creatively and playfully engage in-house visitors with the museum collection. Share Your View emerged as part of CMA’s ArtLens AI, the latest in a suite of digital tools that answers the current demand for remote learning while many conventional spaces are on hiatus due to Covid-19.
Example match: Flowers in a Vase, Simon Verelst (Dutch, 1644-1721)
REMIX and EXPERIMENTATION
Unique to other research or sorting tools, Share Your View filters through the entire open access collection looking for visual ties regardless of medium, time period, or origin. This freeform entry into an exceptionally varied collection manages to sidestep any prior artistic knowledge for a truly universal experience that incorporates elements of surprise, humor, and unexpected relationships in color, texture, and composition.
A Share Your View user recreating The Red Kerchief by Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
A surprising match, but you can see the connections between the elements.
A TOOL FOR EDUCATORS
Since launching as a low barrier to entry way to engage with CMA’s collection, Share Your View has gone on to become a versatile tool for research, engaging the public and uncovering narratives between the real world and the art world. CMA’s education team has already begun to share this tool as a way to spark conversations about composition, palette, and pattern. Placing an artwork side-by-side with a contemporary view reveals potential for new comparisons and opportunities for critical thinking.
Example match: Sepia photograph of hands compared to Relief of a King 664-525 BC, Egypt, Late Period, Dynasty 26 or later
Example match: Spindle Whorl
Example match: Inka Khipu (Fiber Recording Device)
HOW IT WORKS
Behind the public facing interface, The Share Your View AI engine performs a reverse image search to extract visual features of an image represented as compactly as possible in a series of stacked layers. This approach, combined with the fast similarity search provided by Milvus libraries, allows Share Your View to match a photo with visually similar artworks within seconds.
One of the members of CMA’s team working on the project tested a photo they had taken in front of the Santa Maria della Salute church in Italy and was astonished when the engine returned an illustration of the same church as the top match. She was completely unaware that there was an illustration of the church she visited in CMA’s collection.
The Santa Maria della Salute church and an illustration of the same building from CMA’s collection.
Social INTERACTION
Keeping outcomes open and varied, users can shuffle through other close lookalikes after making a match with Share Your View, download a composite image to share with friends, or add the image to the CMA visitor gallery. Links to the CMA’s Collection Online offer you more than 36 fields of metadata about each work of art, such as an artist biography, citations, and curator videos. On Twitter, users can attach a photo or an image to a tweet and mention @ArtLensAI to share their view. The Twitter bot will automatically reply with a matching artwork.
An example response when tweeting an image @ArtLensAi
An example response when tweeting an image @ArtLensAi
Credits:
ArtLens AI was created by the Cleveland Museum of Art in collaboration with Design I/O.
Concept, Twitter Bot and R&D by Design I/O.
The website gallery was created in collaboration with Substrate Websoft.