With this new app, art is literally at your fingertips.
As information comes easily to the palm of our hand, so can artwork.
Image recognition and scanning innovations have come together to create what some people are calling the “Shazam for Art”: Smartify.
This app puts art at your fingertips by cross-referencing the image taken with a vast database that the company is constantly updating, offering information about the artist beyond what the label displays, forming a small digital catalogue that helps you archive your favorite picks and share them with other platform users. The app currently doesn’t recognize artworks that are not stored on its database, but the company hopes to change this in the future.
Smartify offers valuable demographic data and aims to become a tool for museums, as they have failed to harness smartphones as a way people can connect more and better to art, serving as a marketing and educational tool.
The app´s participation includes London´s National Gallery, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Moscow´s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
By teaming up with Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization, and Wikipedia, Smartify increases its speed of image recognition. Anne Lowe, co-founder of the app, says “We scan artworks using photos or digital images and then create digital fingerprints of the artwork, meaning it is reduced to a set of digital dots and lines.”
“[We want] to provide information in the most elegant, accessible and unobtrusive way possible,” she continued, “as a social enterprise, we hope the app will encourage more people to think visual art, and visiting museums and galleries is ‘for them’, and also support public museums and artists in engaging differently with existing audiences and reaching new ones.”
Download it today.
Read here about some predictions regarding the app economy in 2018.
