After around six months of funding from the Prototype Fund, the prototype of our GLAMorous Europe web app is finally live! With GLAMorous Europe you can now go on a discovery tour through the digital collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). You can playfully engage with our shared cultural heritage, as GLAMorous Europe not only allows you to browse through the artworks, but also to cut out details of images and put them together as a collage. This creates completely new works of art.

The web app is designed so that you can easily navigate through digitised collections of cultural institutions using a swipe system (familiar from some popular dating apps). Currently, these are mainly paintings, but also prints, sketches, posters, photographs and sculptures. All these items are being retrieved from Wikidata. This means that works of art that have been uploaded directly by cultural institutions to Wikimedia Commons and linked to Wikidata, can be displayed in GLAMorous Europe. We have decided to only upload images to the web app that have an IIIF manifest. This allows us to ensure that the images can continue to be used in the next step of the project, even if this limits the selection somewhat.

First, select your favourite artwork in the selection by swiping to the left or right (or clicking on ‘Thumbs up’ or ‘Thumbs down’). You can then edit the high-resolution images in the collection and select image sections that you would like to use for the future collage. This can currently be done using a rough lasso selection and background cropping. We are still working hard on optimising both. There will be more information on this in an upcoming blog post.

In the third step, you can combine your selected image sections and suggested stickers with prepared backgrounds and frames on the canvas to create your own works of art that you can also share.

Try out the prototype, discover paintings, prints and sketches and create your own artwork at the end. We look forward to your feedback.

Click here to go to the website of GLAMorous Europe 🔗.

Unfortunately, the project launch also marks the end of our time with the Prototype Fund. We have learnt and tried out a lot in these six months. The financial support from the Prototype Fund was just as important as the two design coaching sessions with Lisa Steingräber from Superbloom. A big thanks for that!

And of course we are continuing with the GLAMorous Europe project! We already have a few ideas on how we can expand GLAMorous Europe in the future. For example, we are thinking of optimising the web app for individual museums and adapting it to their own collections. GLAMorous Europe could then function in-house as a media station or as a web app linked to their website. We’ll keep you up to date…