Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum has trumped Tom Hanks and his high-tech Da Vinci Code shenanigans by using Apple's iPad as a virtual museum guide for their Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 exhibition.
The Kimbell supplies the iPads preloaded with an application called iCubist, created specifically for this event by the California-based MegaVision. More like preloaded with awesomeness, in my opinion.
iCubist contains "spectral images" of several paintings at different light frequencies, like ultraviolet and infrared, which allows users to uncover Picasso and Braque's creative process. These images also reveal features otherwise invisible to the human eye while highlighting unique elements of the pieces, the artists and Cubism in general.
Considering Señor Pablo loved him some ladies, who knows what you may see. Think of the possibilities.
There is also an interactive portion of iCubist that allows users to deconstruct paintings piece by piece and explore how they evolved. The fun part of the de/re-constructing of the painting is that what may have originally looked like a lamppost and three monkeys after a whirl through funnel cloud, can be refigured to resemble, maybe, C-3PO in a fight with R2-D2. Good times. (I know they'd never really fight.)
Another interactive feature of iCubist highlights subtle distinctions in the two artists' unique styles. With any luck, maybe it will explain human nature's innate need to put everything in boxes.
Picasso and Braque runs through August 21.
