SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst

In June, we had the great pleasure and fortune of a two week visit by Jon Beck and his handscanner! Jon is a volunteer and activist at Scan The World, a community-driven endeavour to scan and share the world’s three-dimensional cultural heritage. SMK Open warmly welcomed his expertise and help to start setting our sculpture collection free in 3D online.

Jon Beck from Scan The World, ready to get to work with the Dying Gaul (c. 241–197 BC), one of the 3,000 plaster casts in the SMK collection.

SMK.DK: On 15 August 2018 SMK gets a new website. Here are some of our modest thoughts behind it.

As of this day you are invited to explore SMK highlights at an unprecedented level of detail. We’ve been working with the good people of Madpixel [link no longer active] to squeeze every little pixel of 11 SMK masterworks into the free SMK Second Canvas app.

The characters in Carl Bloch’s ‘From a Roman Osteria’ may not look pleased to be interrupted in the middle of supper, but don’t let that fool you. Recently, SMK had the opportunity of having this and a number of other works digitized for later use in our very own version of the app Second Canvas by Madpixel [link no longer active].

Carl Bloch’s ‘From a Roman Osteria’ under close examination.

What curator and tireless open access fighter Merete Sanderhoff is holding here, is nothing less than the Danish Open Data Award 2018.

Open data are gaining ground all over the world, including Denmark. In the last couple of years, many museums, archives and libraries have provided open access to digitised cultural heritage, and government bodies like The Danish Geodata Agency have released their data to free public use. This is opening up new powerful opportunities for citizens to engage with, study, repurpose and remix large sets of high quality trustworthy data collected by public institutions over many years.

The first Danish Open Data Award is presented 2 March 2018 at the IT University of Copenhagen

Your Facebook reach is a shadow of its former self, the Instagram algorithm is becoming paranoid, and who knows where Twitter is going other than down? Aren’t you happy you held on to your website and your email newsletter after all?

Where do we go from here?

In The Age Of The Digital Mess

Carl Bloch, In a Roman Osteria, 1866 [link no longer active]

Are you one of the fans of the new Netflix miniseries Alias Grace, adapted from Margaret Atwood’s bestselling 1996 novel? Some of us at SMK Open are following the series closely, not just because the story is compelling, but because our public domain collection is a key source to the scenography in several of the houses where Grace’s destiny unfolds.

From episode 1 of Alias Grace on Netflix, featuring two highlights from SMK’s public domain collection; Pilo’s Frederik V in his Anointing Robes (1750) and Juel’s The Dancing Glade at Sorgenfri (c. 1800).

For open access, reductionism may be the way forward.