ART IN EVERY TAB

Portrait of Cornelia, Clara and Johanna Veth, by Jan Veth, via Europeana

I am very excited to talk about this project because to me it embodies so many principles that make up the themes of this blog. A casual way to encounter art every day, over and over again, with no real active effort required for the user. Many people will find themselves overwhelmed at the prospect to actively search for art in online collections. With this wonderful invention one simply has to invest, say 3 minutes of their precious time, in order to install an add-on and can then afterwards enjoy images of art every day henceforth. Oh and something else that lowers the threshold for prospective users even more, it’s entirely for free.

The project I want to present today is the “Art Up Your Tab” add-on by a Dutch team consisting of Kennisland, Studio Parker and Sara Kolster. An add-on for your web browser will add something very specific to it, like blocking advertisement off for instance. By using “Art Up Your Tab” with the opening of a new tab, instead of say landing on Google, the user sees a photograph or other art work from the Europeana Collections. The Europeana Collections is an online platform of digitised images from European arts and heritage institutions. One other aspect that I would say adds to the project’s accessibility is that, the art is mainly historic photographs and representational drawings and paintings. No abstract or conceptual art to be found here. It is art that is, let’s say easier to digest for users that are less familiar with art.

When one opens up a new tab, a number of possibilities ensue. I myself often take one glance at the image, maybe a quick smile passes over my face for a second and I instantly move on to the page I want to go to. I am sure this is the case with the majority of people and that is fine. A couple of times a day however, I will pause, take some time to look at the image, read the short descriptive text that appears by clicking on it and possibly even look up the artist. So, the add-on delivers a very simple, yet effective way, to see a multitude of interesting images every time you use your internet browser. To me, that in itself is already a very rewarding and worthwhile goal. For those who want to, however, it is possible to engage with the images more, in a number of different ways.

You can enlarge the image to look at it in greater detail, download it, get forwarded to the web page of the institution of whose collection it is a part of, or directly share the image via Facebook or Twitter. Those who download the image will find out that they are in high resolution. Also, as part of the short description given for each image comes the information which copyright laws (e.g. Creative Commons) apply.

Screenshot of Art Up Your Tab

One image that I saw these past weeks was a historic photograph of the Brabantbad, an old swimming pool in Den Bosch. I lived in Den Bosch for a couple of months during an internship and felt a warm fuzzy glow when I saw the photograph. It was a great find to discover an image like that. Because of the great variety of images I am sure that many people will find images every once in a while that can be very meaningful to them. Inspire them, make them think, care about the image.

The pool of images that are used gets updated and changed regularly. If I am working with my web browser all weekend, I definitely encounter images that I will have seen before. Because of that it is fun noticing on some days that completely new images appear and I know, that the pool has been updated again. The first set of images focuses on Dutch heritage institutions since the team who designed the app is Dutch. For someone who has lived in the Netherlands for a number of years, I can relate to a multitude of the images, like the one with the swimming pool in Den Bosch. In the future, when more images from a greater number of other European institutions will be included, I think the add-on will be even more meaningful to a greater number of people.

What makes the plug in so accessible is its simplicity, easy way to use and well, once you have installed it, it is just there. No more active effort required of you. The way to use it is very straightforward. You can look, but for those who want to engage even more with the image they can learn, share and reuse.  

Art Up Your Tab is available for Chrome and Firefox and takes absolutely no more than 3 minutes to install. 

The Carriage Path, by Sebastiaan Vrancx via Europeana

Brabantbad: overview of the big swimming hall, by Municipality Den Bosch (photographer unknown), via Europeana, unchanged, is licensed under  CC BY SA 4.0