Amit Sood - Vogue India - Sept 2014

IMission impossible

this, making it possible to see minute brushstrokes through a magnifying lens. Taking a virtual stroll through the Musée d’Orsay is also an option—as Sood demonstrates—even if you are miles away from Paris.

BUSINESS CLASS

Hailing from a tech-savvy Parsi-Punjabi family (his brother and sister are based in Silicon Valley), Sood studied business at Mumbai’s Sydenham College, before pursuing an MBA at INSEAD. After stints at Ericsson in Stockholm and the New York outpost of AIESEC, Sood was poached by the Android team at Google and initially based at the company’s global headquarters in Mountain View, California. The Art Project came about with the encouragement of his one-time boss, Rebecca Moore, founder of Google Earth Outreach, who once sent him to the Amazon for a research trip! “That was crazy,” he laughs. Female bosses his career, he admits, citing Megan Smith, vice president at Google, as a mentor.

LEISURE TIME

“I was never actually that interested in art,” says Amit Sood, sipping an early morning cup of English Breakfast tea at the Google headquarters in central London. “But obviously, now I am!” The admission comes as a surprise from the man who has substantially changed the way we experience art today, yet it is indicative of someone who balances being an industry innovator with a genuine lack of pretension.

The Google Art Project, launched in 2011 by this young Hyderabad native, allows museum masterpieces to be examined from a laptop in extremely high resolutions, ensuring that viewers get closer to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night or Michelangelo’s mythological drawings than they ever could in real life. “We had a few goals,” explains Sood, who’s been based in the

make art accessible through a digital platform and make the quality of the viewing experience exceptional ” The zooming technology enables

Admiring Michelangelo from your flat in Mumbai? Meet AMIT SOOD, who’s spearheading Google’s eforts to bring the world’s greatest museums onto the web. By ALLIE

BISWAS

Sood’s move to London unravelled the inspiration for this brainchild. “Growing up in India, it wasn’t like I was going to museums on weekends. When I came to London, I started hanging out in these extraordinary institutions.” Such was the impact that Sood decided to follow his instincts. “Android was big at that point, around 2010. It was a huge risk to leave that behind to focus on the art initiative, which was really just a side project for me then.”

THREE-IN-ONE

After the success of the Art Project, Google formed the Google Cultural Institute, their Project as well as World Wonders (heritage sites such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial) and Archive Exhibitions (Nelson Mandela’s prison letters have recently been published). “At present we have 460 cultural organisations in 55 countries,” says Sood. The statistics are

public engagement—the Institute has had 15 million users over the last nine months. Sood isn’t out to dominate, though. “There’ll never be a substitute for seeing an artwork or cultural treasure in person, but we’ve broken down physical barriers, instigating people to make discoveries they might not have otherwise.”

Sood is the founder of Google Art Project and director of Google Cultural Institute