SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst

We believe that our upcoming digital service will create an inclusive, personal and altogether useful companion for the SMK guest. But only if we get things exactly right.

For years, at SMK, we’ve almost solely kept our eyes on the open web.

Imagine owning a unique artwork rooted in Danish cultural heritage the moment you are born and assigned a social security number. Does that sound far-fetched? Well, it’s absolutely possible! In this guest post by Stig Møller Hansen, a Senior Associate Professor at The Danish School of Media and Journalism, he lets us in on a highly surprising and thoughtprovoking way of using SMK Open.

Image generated from Constantin Hansen, Prometheus Moulding Man from Clay, 1845, SMK

Celebrating Public Domain month 2023 with a closer look at some of the new artists in SMK’s collection who have entered the public domain

Carl Kylberg, Meditation, 1925, KMS3913, public domain

Aiming for “radical openness” we’ve published SMK collection data in the most liberal fashion we could think of. One aspirational goal is creative re-use, so what happened in practice?

On open.smk.dk users can explore the SMK collection and download material for re-use

Sammensmeltning af den virtuelle og fysiske verden

© Ditte Ejlerskov, The Cult of Oxytocin, Nikolaj Kunsthal (2022). Photo: Jan Søndergaard

Gæsteindlæg af Diana Velasco, kunstner, medstifter af Radar Contemporary og direktør for Museum of Nordic Digital Art — MoNDA, i anledning af Kvinder, Kunst & Algoritmer [link no longer active] 8. marts på SMK, arrangeret i samarbejde med Ingeniørforeningen IDA og Algoritmer, Data & Demokrati-projektet.

An interview with film maker Lucio Arese on his prize winning short film Les Dieux Changeants based on 3D scans from SMK Open

Still image from Lucio Arese’s prizewinning short film Les Dieux Changeants featuring a 3D scan of Hermes Belvedere from SMK Open

Burning churches, rolling hills, and ragged seascapes — we’ve placed them all on a map of Denmark. With a companion social media campaign, this may be the most fun we’ve had with data to date.

L.A. Ring, A Landscape near Bryrup, Jutland, 1888 (on the map).

In March 2021 we placed 4.000 SMK artworks on a map of Denmark. We did it by combining existing data with machine learning and the help of kind human beings. And we did it by leveraging the SMK API which will ultimately ingest the refined location data to allow future re-use.

The online collection of SMK — Statens Museum for Kunst has just turned one. Time flies, I know. But what happened? How did users react? And what did we learn?

C.W. Eckersberg’s A View through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum (1815) on a laptop

This year, we welcome the turn of the year with excitement for several reasons — the obvious one being that we left 2020 behind — but also because a host of new, outstanding artists are now part of the Public Domain.

Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Still Life with White Jar, Orange and Book, 1932–1933, KMS7070. SMK, public domain

What works and what doesn’t? Some photos seem born for social media while others fall flat, failing to engage, impress or inspire. But what is the difference? This article is my best attempt at an answer.