A New Search Engine Lets You Explore 4 Million Works of Art & Historical Photographs from Museums and Libraries Around the World

We live in an age when you can describe prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing you want to see in words, then see it almost imme­di­ate­ly. Nobody will ever have laid eyes upon that par­tic­u­lar sight before — and quite pos­si­bly, nobody ever will again. There we have both the upside and the down­side of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered image gen­er­a­tion. A con­stant flow of visu­al, aur­al, or tex­tu­al nov­el­ty offers stim­u­la­tion, to put it mild­ly, but it inevitably comes to feel insub­stan­tial. How­ev­er com­plex­ly derived from the work of human­i­ty it may be, it lacks a direct con­nec­tion to that work. Not so the results deliv­ered by Arkivism, a new search engine that responds to descrip­tions by draw­ing on a col­lec­tion of more than four mil­lion pieces of real art and pho­tog­ra­phy.

You may need a “town at sun­set,” a “col­or­ful cake,” a “rock­et ship blast­ing off,” a “Japan­ese wood­block print of a cat,” or some­thing else besides. Arkivism will more than like­ly be able to come up with more than a few images to fit the bill, with sources at hand includ­ing the Library of Con­gress, the NASA Video and Image Library, the Rijksmu­se­um, and Japan’s Nation­al Diet Library. (I notice that its reach extends even to the Gongu Copy­right Com­mis­sion in Korea, where I live, which will make it my go-to site when next I need to evoke the Joseon Dynasty.) The chance of dis­cov­er­ing a work of art you’d nev­er heard of is always high, even if you search a big name like Rem­brandt, Leonar­do, Klimt, or Hoku­sai.

“Every work indexed here is CC0 or pub­lic domain,” says Arkivis­m’s about page. “Down­load it, adapt it, use it in client work — no per­mis­sion need­ed, no strings.” Like all the best online ser­vices, this one was designed to answer the actu­al needs of its cre­ator, “a design­er and video cre­ator who kept need­ing imagery that was gen­uine­ly safe to use — and kept los­ing after­noons to a dozen muse­um search box­es.” Even if your work has noth­ing to do with design or video cre­ation, you nev­er know when you’ll be look­ing for a pic­ture of a cas­tle, a paint­ing of a feast, or a map of the world. Sure, you could always ask AI to gen­er­ate one for you, and you’d get some­thing more or less usable. Some­times that’s what you need; oth­er times, you’re ready to be led down a his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al rab­bit hole. Enter Arkivism here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Mil­lion Works of Art Span­ning 5,000 Years of His­to­ry

Down­load Great Works of Art from 40+ Muse­ums World­wide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

Explore the New­ly-Launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free His­tor­i­cal Images

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.