Project description
In a context of growing visibility for the latin american art, we decided to create a web app that allows the users to navigate through the permanent collections of the most recognized museums of Buenos Aires. It includes contextual information about the author and the piece of art itself, and a map with the multiple locations of the museums.
It’s an innovative initiative that was launched on the week of the annual “Museum Night” that celebrates the city’s vibrant visual arts scene. It is a night where more than 200 museums open their doors, with free entry and special events for the public. So, we thought that concentrating the most relevant and powerful artworks of Buenos Aires on a single web page, would provide a perfect service for the public to enjoy a more organized and pleasant visit. Also, we offer a map that gives the user the opportunity to create a personalized and viable route to visit the paintings and sculptures they find most interesting.
Innovation
It is not just an art catalogue or a guide, it is a valuable and unique tool that can be fully adapted to the users art interests. All of the artwork included in the app has been chosen and curated by a journalist that specializes in the subject. While the photographs and the information of each of the art pieces and authors were provided by the museums itself. Even though we created the app in the context of the “Museum Night”, it is an enduring service for people to appreciate the artwork of Buenos Aires and to choose which Museum they would like to visit. It is the only art’s app available of Buenos Aires that reunites the permanent collection of more than ten museums. We manage to consolidate various museums in one place. The value of the product for tourist or people who want to visit the museums is huge. In addition, the innovation of this product is also the capability of monetization it has. The Ministry of Culture of Buenos Aires payed us just to insert their logo in the web app because they considered it was a way to promote the art life of our country.
The app had a great impact because various museums called us to include them in the platform, and the ones that were already participating promoted our work on their own social media accounts. All of the magazines of our newsroom group asked us to make a banner of the app for them to include on their pages. Even the Buenos Aires government congratulated and thanked us for the app and told us they would provide the url to the tourists.
Creation
The making process was long and difficult because we had to convince each of the museums to provide us with information and photographs of their permanent collection for free. They would have to share space in the app with other museums for art promotion purposes only. We manage to send them multiple Google Form’s for them to complete. They had to fill one form for each of the art pieces. Also, all of the museums signed an electronic legal document to give us all image copyrights for us to publish and use the photographs with no problem. In total we had 90 responses we had to work with from 10 different museums: MALBA, Colección de Arte Amalia Lacroze Fortabat, Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Museo Isaac Fernández Blanco, Museo Mitre, Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Sívori.
We worked with the NPR’S Book Concierge open source code and adapt it to La Nacion’s color design and to our project best interests and objectives. Most of the code was written in Python and we used a Google Spreadsheet that worked as a data base. We also added plenty of other utilities that we thought were essential for this type of app. Furthermore, we included a search engine and used MapBox to locate all the museums to create a route for the visitors.
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