Explore The Met in new ways with generative AI

For 15 years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has collaborated with Google Arts & Culture to bring advanced technology directly into the galleries to transform how audiences connect with art. Guided by our shared belief that access to art should know no distance, we invited audiences to “virtually visit” The Met in 2011 and digitally explore the Museum’s Open Access collection in 2018. Now, we’re unveiling two generative AI initiatives designed to deepen how people discover art online and experience the museum in person.

We recently completed our Technologist in Residence program — a central focus of this milestone year. For this six-month initiative, The Met engaged creative technologist Julia Daser to investigate how generative AI can enrich each visit to the museum. Using Google Gemini and Vertex AI, Julia collaborated closely with museum curators to rapidly build and live-test prototypes directly in the exhibition spaces.

In tandem with the residency, we are also launching Art Aura, an interactive, multimodal AI experience developed by the Google Arts & Culture Lab in collaboration with The Met. Powered by Google Gemini, Art Aura allows users to drag artworks, styles or descriptive phrases into a digital zone to uncover hidden thematic connections across the centuries of art featured in The Met’s collection, creating a personalized portrait of their unique artistic taste.

To discover more about these projects and continue your journey, visit the new Google Arts & Culture landing page for The Met and browse the Museum’s collection of over 200,000 digitized objects and 50 stories.