Anonymous Painting at MoMA on Google Art Project viewed on the Google Chrome browser, Command+Shift+3

Nine Eye Roger Fry

What is the future of art spaces when institutions are compressed for access as data doubles? Physical proximity is no longer required to view art collections. The screen image is the new exhibition site where all that's required is a bit of time (attention) and internet bandwidth. It's art made easy. But like most novelties, the virtual gallery is an imperfect medium, littered with distortions and artifacts.

Recently, the Museum of Modern Art’s early modern European painting gallery was documented with Google’s nine-eyed Street View cameras, becoming a part of the nascent Art Project (www.googleartproject.com). A web browser provides unobstructed views of many early modern masterpieces. It's a vantage point that carries the liability of uneven incandescent lighting and poor pixel resolution. They are poor images that lean toward abstraction.

The early 20th century critic, Roger Fry, was a proponent of the Post-Impressionist artists. These are the same artists represented in Art Project's virtual MoMA gallery. Our project reworks the impoverished digital renderings of MoMA’s Post-Impressionist gallery into other "post-impressions."

We've produced a group of stretched cotton panels printed with archival Epson Ultrachrome Ink. They are paintings, albeit of digital data (TIFFs), from Google’s Art Project captured from Google's own Chrome internet browser. Viewing Art Project on Chrome while using a unique key command (command+shift+3), splits the virtual museum into red and blue layers for 3D stereoscopic viewing. The 3D effect translates to the wall when color coded glasses are used to view our finished pieces. From a distance, our paintings create the impression of hazy out-of-focus rectangular forms. A closer view fractures the compositions into color bands and pixel artifacts. The paintings are frozen impressions of ruptures in the virtual museum. Each work we've reproduced has been blurred by Google, for anonymity, until Art Project can clear reproduction rights.

Our paintings reclaim the digital referent for a material support. Pixels are blurred when ink absorbs into fabric. These paintings are, essentially, a broadcast medium. According to David Joselit in the Artforum (Summer 2011) article Signal Processing, the act of painting dislocates or transfers populations of images where “screens of several sorts are literally introduced in the process of painting through procedures of photochemical or digital mediation used to generate painting’s motif.”

These pixilated fields challenge our habits of looking to a degree never imagined by the early modern artist with a charge to challenge visual conventions. Now, human perception is inextricably linked to the functional images of the computer eye. There is no better example of this shift in visual mapping than Google’s project to transform the globe into an object of perception and manipulation. Our paintings give material form to what is obscure in Google’s technological determinism. Where else should aesthetic possibilities be mined if not at the great museums, or now, more urgently, within their virtual surrogates?