Monday, March 10, 2003		Feature

Rare artwork goes digital

FOR the first time in India, preservation of rare artworks of Amrita Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore will go digital. Global IT major HP in partnership with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has taken up a pilot project to digitise over 200 rare art works of Tagore and Sher-Gil from the Delhi-based National Gallery of Modern Art.

The paintings to be digitally captured using HP equipment and stored at C-DAC’s facility in Bangalore, would enable millions of art lovers to access the paintings online and also get a exact reproduction at an affordable cost.

"We would use high-end digital cameras to capture the images. C-DAC will create the digital library and implement the six month rpt six month project," Dr S. Ramani, Research Director, HP Labs India told reporters.

Using the HP DesignJet printers, accurate reproduction of the paintings including life-size images is possible.

"We are looking at a museum shop the way it is in other parts of the world," NGMA Director Prof. Rajeev Lochan, said.

He said the museum was looking at offering reproduction of paintings to art lovers and also extending it to other art works, based on the success of the pilot project.

NGMA, which gets an annual government grant of Rs 4 crore, has a huge collection of 17,000 works.