Netflix of art

new AI-powered game lets you build your own gallery

Nov 25, 2020

maxwell museums magazine - Wednesday 25 November 2020

Hello. It’s another edition of the maxwell museums magazine, which means I’m bringing you another interview with a culture mover and shaker. It’s a brilliant one this week as I speak to the developer of a new online game which is bringing AI and personal recommendations to the art world. Algorithms have transformed how we consume music and TV on Spotify and Netflix by suggesting content they think we will like. The new game, Occupy White Walls, is doing the same for museums. Is this the future? Read the interview and let me know your thoughts on Twitter (@maxwellmuseums).

AND, I’m bringing you another competition! You can win a brand new book thanks to Tate Publishing.

Read on and enjoy!

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competition

Because you’re reading this, it’s fair to say you love art! So I’m very excited to this week bring you a competition with Tate Publishing. I’m giving you the chance to win a copy of their new book ‘Five Hundred Years of British Art’ which takes you through half a millennium of art from these shores via highlights from Tate Britain’s collection. There’s everything from William Blake to William Hogarth, Lucian Freud to Sarah Lucas. It’s a beauty.

To win, just click here and leave me your name and email. That’s it! I’ll pick a winner at random from all entries received by 23:59 on Monday 30 November. You just need to be a subscriber to this newsletter in order to be eligible. GOOD LUCK.

what’s on

Normally here I would list 3 brand new exhibitions you need to see from around the globe. But with ongoing restrictions in England and across Europe, instead here are 3 cultural treats you can still experience:

Winter Commission: Chila Kumari Singh Burman at Tate Britain, London - the iconic façade is transformed in a blaze of Bollywood and neon. Until 31 January 2021
'Artemisia': Curator-led exhibition film from the National Gallery, London - the exhibition might be closed, but you can now visit on-demand from anywhere in the world and support the Gallery at the same time
The Museum of Curiosity from BBC Radio 4 - comedy panel show in which three distinguished guests donate eclectic exhibits to a vast imaginary museum. Listen to the full archive on BBC Sounds.

interview

There probably isn’t a more perfect time to launch an online game for art lovers and budding curators than during lockdown. And so the full release of Occupy White Walls (OWW) serendipitously occurred earlier in the year. This new online platform sees players build and curate their own galleries and exhibitions, and even more interestingly, uses AI technology to learn players’ tastes and help them discover the art that will resonate with them. The Netflixification of art if you will.

With equally astute timing, OWW has just announced their first official museum partnership during the second lockdown: 200 artworks from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s (BMAG) collection have now been added, including iconic Pre-Raphaelite works such as The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown and Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. OWW’s 75,000 “art curious gamers” can now discover these works and include them in their own galleries, where the only limits seem to be the limits to imagination. Here I speak to Yarden Yaroshevski, founder and CEO at StikiPixels the start-up behind OWW, to find out more about the platform bringing AI to the art world.

Where did the idea for OWW come from?

When starting StikiPixels we wanted to make an original game and incidentally came upon the curious fact that there were no games about art - very strange in the super competitive games market. The more we dug into the ‘art world,’ the more we realised it's essentially in a state of market failure, mainly because it still operates like it did in the Renaissance: the medium of displaying artworks is still largely a physical brick wall. In comparison, in OWW our medium is a virtual world, in ‘the cloud’ and AI-driven.

One of the most amazing discoveries we made with our dataset (that tracks millions of interactions of players and artworks) is that taste in art is genuinely unique, you can’t find two people with the same taste, seriously, it's as unique as your fingerprint.

This inevitably poses a problem for traditional museums and galleries, they only have so much wall space and every single visitor is a unique individual with a unique taste in art. This is a fundamental problem because it means that every visitor finds only very few artworks that resonate with them personally and many that don’t.

OWW is different because we don’t have an ‘audience’, we have individual players, with agency, who control their own interest and are able to express themselves through an easy and powerful platform; curating, designing and building their own gallery.

Tell me about some of the galleries people have created. What's the biggest, what's the weirdest?

Great question! With thousands of galleries so far, there are so many awesome and unusual galleries which makes it almost impossible to name only one. We have seen galleries which tell stories, doll house replicas, full scale cruise ships, nightclubs, memorials, castles and even prisons. You name it, OWW probably has it.

Gif of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Occupy White Walls

Birmingham Museums is your first official museum partner - why Birmingham, and who might be next?

A big part of our vision as an art platform of the future is to collaborate with museums and galleries who are often full of well-intentioned people but lack the resources, skills and mandate needed to fundamentally address the issues mentioned above. It’s not surprising it requires ‘aliens’ like us at StikiPixels to shake things up.

We have found that collections are often held back by bureaucracy and a conservative outlook. For example, we tried to collaborate with the National Gallery (London), with no success (they wouldn’t reply to our emails) - which resulted in the brilliant ‘unilateral collaboration’. But the Pandemic changes people’s outlook, what is a museum/collection if the very building (brick walls etc.) is closed?

The collaboration with BMAG came through a brilliant artist who is very active in OWW Rosa Francesca, who made the connection between us. Rosa is a Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) local who recently collaborated with Black Hole Club and Birmingham Museums to explore the creative potential of its digital image database. It’s super inspiring to us to see players all over the world, who may never have heard of Birmingham, get inspired by artworks they discover through the AI.

Our vision is to one day be able to support all art ever created (and that of the future), because will never run out of ‘space on walls’.

What's your favourite piece from the Birmingham collection that's now on OWW?

There are so many great images from BMAG in OWW, and my individual taste doesn’t represent anyone else… personally I love Birds (also known as "Canaries") by Albert Joseph Moore. It’s got this super relaxed yet purposeful vibe, most of the painting is almost monochrome (and yellow at that!). I love how she’s looking upwards in a slightly bored stance while the canary is at her feet, I can almost hear ‘dude’ (Big Lebowski) in the background’...

Can real-world museums learn anything from OWW or the players? Could it help them make improvements?

I think the main lesson is to appreciate that the media landscape is very different now to how it was even in the 90s.

Music is a great example, not long ago it was based on a model of scarcity - physical objects - remember hunting down an obscure LP? - dependent on the good will, enthusiasm and knowledge of local record shops. It has since transformed into a model of abundance - Spotify has 60m+ tracks, all are accessible in a tap of a finger, suddenly the value for people becomes not in access but in the recommendations/ curation algorithms, a platform smart enough to know what you, the individual would like to listen to and when - better than you do.

This change is not optional and if the art world is to remain relevant, and even flourish, in the 21st century, it will have to accept it.

BMAG virtual gallery

You've got 75,000 users. How many "art-curious gamers" are out there?

This is a great question. Depends how you look at it. Games are super creative, for example Minecraft which literally revolves around player creativity (it has very little ‘gameplay’ otherwise) is of course a huge success with 90m active users. Pinterest, on the other hand is one huge curation platform, with 400m active users. Does it matter if they curate shoes, cupcakes or artworks? I believe this is about the behaviour, not the objects. I see no reason that under the right conditions many of those people will grow their interest in art.

Lastly, let’s not forget actual museum audiences, which I believe numbered around 200m for the top 100 museums for 2019. These are people that in many cases boarded a plane to visit a museum - they too deserve to have their own voice and agency - sure they’re unlikely to be gamers, today, but as OWW grows to more platforms and becomes more accessible, who knows?

Play Occupy White Walls here, or take a 360° virtual tour of BMAG on OWW here

…and finally

A new book by art critic Jonathan Jones looks back at Tracey Emin’s career. In an article for the Guardian this week, he reveals early works which are seen for the very first time in the book - and why her formative years show a very different talent to that which made her famous. Read the article here - it’s wonderful.