Abhishek Mande Bhot

Open your closet. If you find something with a seal Paisley also found a connection with the art of the ancient world. Lush design is one of the most common motifs in modern world fashion, but its roots go back several millennia.

The specimen probably left Persia, present-day Iran, and reached Babylon, present-day Iraq. Local scribes compared it to the opening bud of a date palm. It also appeared in various parts of India where it came to be called almond, Kairi or ambaincluding – to describe its teardrop or sleeve shape.

He traveled to the west of the subcontinent several hundred years ago and became very popular. Finally, it was named after a town in Scotland where factories specialized in imitation Kashmiri shawls of world export standard. O Paisley since then it has been in vogue (most often).

travel Paisley through time and across continents was relentless. And this is just one of the many fabric stories brought to life by INTERWOVEN, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual experience from the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bangalore, one of India’s leading technology hubs.

Not INTERWOVEN websiteone click on the image of a fragment of a Kashmiri shawl of the mid-19th-early 20th century with the theme Paisley, takes you on a cultural odyssey that takes you through dozens of places where the name occurs. This includes a church in Britain, a chasuble (a cloak worn over a priestly robe) from Italy, and a cloth panel from ancient Persia, among others.

INTERWOVEN is an innovative tool developed in collaboration with MAP, MAP Academy and initiative AI for cultural heritage from Microsoft. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to uncover links between MAP textile art and art from the collections of other museums around the world.

Microsoft AI for Cultural Heritage uses the power of AI to empower the people and organizations involved in preserving and enriching cultural heritage. The platform demonstrates how technology can serve as a useful tool to help people preserve and connect cultural heritage globally and across generations.

Through this initiative, Microsoft supports individuals and organizations, in this case MAP, through collaboration, partnerships, and investment in AI technologies and resources.

“Using technology to enhance human ingenuity, celebrate human creativity, and build connectionsions is at the heart of how Microsoft works,” said Brad Smith, President of Microsoft. “India has been a melting pot of cultures and the epicenter of world trade for centuries. It’s great to see how INTERWOVEN, our first artificial intelligence project for India’s cultural heritage, reminds us how vibrant different cultures are and how these traditions are shared in a story that spans time and space.”

INTERWOVEN uses Azure Custom Vision and AI Text Analytics services to help find common themes and common stories in art traditions between MAP textile artifacts and the art treasures of partner museums. In this way, you can see the journey of fabrics not only through motifs and patterns, but also through color filters, occasions, places and times, among other things.

The centuries-old traditions and trade of South Asia make textiles an excellent starting point for studying the spread of culture.

“The textiles of the subcontinent were vital to trade, as some of the finest cotton and silk were exported by land and sea. As a result, fabrics have influenced and shaped global politics for centuries,” says Shrei Maurya, editor-in-chief of the MAP Academy, media partner of INTERWOVEN.

“They were a commodity to buy spices sold all over the world,” explains Keith Irwin, curator of clothing and textiles at the Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. “Cotton has been a world industry for a thousand years, and until the 19th century India was the center of this industry; We have a long period of history in which the world is from East Africa and Indonesia to the Arab world and Europe “We need fabrics from South Asia. Therefore, it makes sense to start with these fabrics in order to understand the patterns and artistic language of the whole world; there’s a lot of dense history there.”

INTERWOVEN can help curators, scholars and art historians find commonalities between artifacts and allow them to tell new stories or uncover new connections between different civilizations. Now they can access vast collections in their homes, and artificial intelligence can help determine vague relationships between objects.

But the platform also has the ability to attract someone with a passing interest in the subject. Visitors to this experience can take a curated trip or explore the MAP collection and click through any artwork to explore the various connections for themselves.

“Here you will never look at an object in isolation. The moment you select anything on the platform — even a topic lost in a patch — the algorithm will automatically show you all the connections that exist around the world,” says Maurya. “In doing so, INTERWOVEN helps to develop and maintain an interest in fabrics and art.”

Making art and museum accessible is one of MAP’s main goals, and technology is at the heart of that goal.

“We have always wanted to be the museum of the future. Youth in India are a native user of technology and MAP wants to use this to showcase India’s cultural heritage and show that art can be fun and not elitist,” says Abhishek Poddar, founder of the museum.

So when the COVID-19 pandemic derailed plans to open its doors to the public in 2020, MAP embraced digital solutions as easily as its potential young audience embraced technology.

Among the efforts made by the team to engage with their online communities, Museums without borders, a digital collaboration with partner museums that eventually led to the creation of INTERWOVEN. During this period, MAP also launched the MAP Academy, which is a large online platform consisting of an encyclopedia of art and courses, including a course on the history of textiles in South Asia, which is also featured on INTERWOVEN for users who want to learn more.

“INTERWOVEN started with the idea of ​​exploring the entire MAP collection, but we realized that fabrics are the art form that speaks most eloquently about global connections,” says Kamini Soni, director of MAP.

MAP collaborates with 16 other museums, including Metropolitan Museum of Art Art, in New York, Cleveland Museum of Art this is Victoria and Albert Museum, in London and Smithsonian, in Washington DC to link their collections to the INTERWOVEN experience.

“We are delighted to be part of the INTERWOVEN project led by the Microsoft AI for Cultural Heritage Program and the Museum of Art and Photography of India. It serves as a window into our magnificent collection, allowing people to visually, emotionally or academically connect with the artwork. Cleveland Museum of Art. This project is a great implementation of our collection Open accessJane Alexander, director of digital information at Cleveland Museum of Art. “We know that people may never come to Cleveland to see our collection in person, and this interactive tool allows visitors from all over the world to explore our wonderful collection in a way that offers deeper cultural context and understanding, making art more accessible.” .

Creative technology experts from A_da, an innovation and expertise development agency, helped develop the AI ​​component and deploy it at INTERWOVEN. They have implemented a combination of several Microsoft AI services to provide rich communication results between the MAP digital collection and items in the public access collection from partner museums.

The MAP digital collection has been coded using precise keywords, meta tags and high resolution photographs. The algorithm uses Azure AI Text Analytics to mine these keywords and Azure AI Custom Vision to visually compare and compare models.

While the algorithm is active, the creative team is simultaneously working to improve visual recognition by training the model to recognize visual elements such as flowers, animal patterns, and geometric shapes found in South Asian art.

Mandara Vishwanath of the MAP Academy is still fascinated by the fact that she finds a lot in common in the style and aesthetics of fabrics in different regions.

“For example, we have a lot of fabrics kalamkari in India which show stories and episodes from Ramayana It’s from Mahabharata (Classical Indian works written in Sanskrit between the 7th and 6th centuries BC and the 3rd century BC respectively). These stories are also featured on cotton fabrics printed in Southeast Asia. INTERWOVEN helped us look at the stylistic differences between designs on textiles from India and patterned fabrics from countries like Indonesia and Malaysia,” she says.

For those who are interested in this topic, all this information, classified and contextualized, is presented in an easy to understand way. For others, they are a blank page to start their own journey.

And even as you move from one work of art to another, crossing geographical boundaries and seasonswhat INTERWOVEN reminds you is that despite everything, apart from our differences, we are all on a common journey connected by a plot you didn’t even know existed.

Above: A Kashmiri craftsman working on a paisley shawl (Isam Wani for Microsoft).

Tags: AI for cultural heritage, AI for good, Art, Cultural heritage