This video game lets you curate an exhibit at the Birmingham museum

The Birmingham museum has partnered with start-up Smart Pixels to put the works of art from its collection online in the Occupy White Walls game. — Birmingham Museum/AFP

English museums are saying it loud and clear: out of sight, but close to the heart. While the country's cultural institutions remain closed until at least Dec 2, the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has turned to video gaming to make its collections accessible to the public.

The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery recently partnered with London-based start-up Smart Pixels to allow art lovers to mount their own exhibitions in the Occupy White Walls game. They will be able to include works from the British museum's collection, including paintings emblematic of the Pre-Raphaelite movement such as The Last England by Ford Madox Brown and Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Although only 200 of them are currently available on the multiplayer platform, gamers will soon be able to discover all the works of art from the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery that are now in the public domain. These budding curators will then have the opportunity to dress up the walls of their digital gallery with masterpieces from the Renaissance, but also creations by emerging artists such as Rosa Francesca.

"To see gamers from across the world discover and interact with our artworks is exactly the kind of engagement we hoped for when we made our out-of-copyright images available online. We look forward to seeing what the players create (on Occupy White Walls)," declared Linda Spurdle, Head of Digital at Birmingham Museums, in a press release.

Players in search of inspiration can also take a virtual tour of the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, or use an AI known as Daisy to guide them in the creation of their art space. This assistant curator 2.0. takes into account the tastes of each of them in order to offer them a personalised selection of works to acquire. And it turns out that Occupy White Walls art fans are avid 'collectors’, since they have on average 800 of them in their collection. Those who don't want to play but want a virtual tour can also take a peek at the 360° views of the galleries.

Although this partnership between the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and Smart Pixels is the first of its kind, the Occupy White Walls game also hosts works from many cultural institutions around the world. One of them is none other than the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery in London, which has uploaded its entire art collection of 2,300 paintings, most of which have never been exhibited within its walls. Enough to improve your art knowledge significantly. – AFP Relaxnews