To celebrate the second anniversary of their Open Access program, The Metropolitan Museum of Art sought an innovative way to showcase these 406,000 public domain artworks and related metadata.
Working with teams across The Met, MIT, and Microsoft, we hosted a collaborative hackathon designed to bring The Met’s collection to a global audience, making it more accessible in creative ways.
We gathered curators from The Met, PhD students and professors from MIT, and technologists and developers from Microsoft at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a daylong work session.
Inspired by the 5,000 years of human history within The Met’s collection, cross-disciplinary teams worked with Microsoft AI to bring the collection to life.
Five projects were produced, ranging from an Artwork of the Day app to a Wikimedia plugin that will help further categorize artworks, and a web app that illustrates your stories and speech with pieces from the collection.
The projects were revealed at a grand event we produced in The Met’s Great Hall, with Max Hollein, Director of The Met, noting that the program successfully emphasized “that The Met is not just a place you visit. It’s a great service to audiences all around the world.”