IBM kiosk donation to MuseuMAfricA gives urban teens hi-tech access to international art, culture

IBM SA has donated to MuseuMAfricA, Johannesburg`s principle history and cultural history museum, an Internet-based kiosk that provides free public access to a digital library of the world`s biggest art collection - housed in Russia`s Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

The donation is part of a $2 million investment by IBM in special technology that allows quick transmission of high-resolution images across the Internet. Previous electronic versions of art works were too memory-intensive.

To date, IBM has digitised more than 3 000 of the Hermitage Museum`s three million works of art. They include Old Master paintings (the largest collection in the world), Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work, Classical antiquities, European and Russian applied arts, Oriental art and archaeological items.

MuseuMAfricA curator, Sandra de Wet says IBM`s donation of the Hermitage kiosk is significant for the museum on a number of different levels.

"One of our conventional duties is to provide a facility for cultural exchange. But we simply could never have afforded to bring any part of the Hermitage collection to SA. Now, the IBM kiosk allows us to take our visitors there in the most realistic way - at no cost.

"Also, the Hermitage collection includes crafts and cultural history items as well as art, so we can use the kiosk to draw links between local cultures as exhibited in both their and our own collection.

"At a more unconventional level, unlike European and North American cities, Johannesburg has no ready-made museum-going audience. We have to work at making the museum attractive and entertaining to people who think museums are boring. One of the most difficult groups to attract are black, urban youngsters in their late teens with low or non-existent literacy levels.

"The kiosk, which incorporates all the technologies young people are interested in - like touch-screens and the Internet - is a superb way of getting them through the door.

"So IBM is actually helping the city to build a museum-going audience. That`s an invaluable contribution to cultural life in the city."

Alfred Mandewo, IBM SA`s corporate community relations manager, says IBM focuses on using technology to effect lasting positive change in communities.

"We look for ways to resolve problems that impede social and economic development. In particular, we focus on education as being the most important means of making communities sustainably self-sufficient.

"The Newtown precinct, where MuseuMAfricA is located, is a cornerstone of urban renewal and development and we believe the kiosk will contribute to that by using technology to link the past with the present and one part of the world with another."

IBM has donated Hermitage kiosks to all 170 countries in which it operates. The MuseuMAfrica kiosk is one of three in SA. IBM installed one at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town last year and is donating one this month to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park.

Hermitage kiosks include a zoom facility, giving viewers the ability to examine works of art from different angles and in much closer and sharper detail than they could in the museum itself.

Also, IBM`s unique scanning technology uses filters that record the colour of a piece of art in the same way as the human eye. This guarantees colour accuracy an order of magnitude better than the best conventional photography.