When the COVID pandemic started and everyone was forced to shelter in place, especially in San Francisco, I started working on a project that would still allow for access to artwork at home. I wrote an application for the TV screen that would access some of the collection APIs that museums have been making available to the public. I used AirTable to store the APIs and some preferred tags related to certain genres (Japanese art at the Met for example), and curated a list of museums we would be interested in viewing at home – Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, The Met in NYC, the NASA image collection, etc…
The app is written in React and needed to resolve differences in the API data calls between the different museums, display larger versions of the images on the screen, allow a local user to pause, fast forward, or “save” an image they liked using a mobile web interface. I added some other features like coloring the matte according to a complimentary color in the artwork, and in the future I will programmatically control my receiver to launch and play the artwork at specified times.
A Version 2 matched the background of the millwork and had additional experimentation with dynamically colored mattes. I’ve also revised the admin app, for determining the matte color, saving images and latering the museum sources.
Version 1 of the app prior to completion of the Embedded Raspberry Pi host.
