VK and the Hermitage have launched digital routes around the museum

On June 17, the digital project of the State Hermitage Museum and VK "One Museum. Three Views", which offers the audience a new experience of exploring the collection of the country's leading museum. Three digital routes around the Hermitage have been created for users, including 33 unique points, accompanied by Sergey Minaev, Evgeny Chebatkov and Klava Koki. You can access them using a chatbot in the Hermitage's VKontakte community or QR codes from the museum's halls.

"One museum. Three Views" is a joint project of the Hermitage and VK, which connects museum and virtual spaces. For him, together with the museum's researchers and art historians, as well as specialists from the Hermitage Media department, three thematic digital routes were developed at 33 points with media personalities popular with different generations as presenters.

The project implements a metaphor about the dialogue between the visitor and the museum: in the videos and audio content, the Hermitage's "voice" sounds, as if acting as a narrator. During the routes, users are accompanied by journalist and writer Sergey Minaev, stand-up comedian Evgeny Chebatkov and singer Klava Coca. Their task is to draw the audience's attention to rare museum exhibits, little—known facts and unusual details in the exhibition halls.

Sergey Minaev will lead the way through the Field Marshal's, Small Throne, Coat of Arms and St. George's Halls. Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director General of the Hermitage Museum, will join the route in the last one. In an atmosphere of imperial spirit, the hosts will together reveal the secrets of the museum space, named after St. George, the patron saint of the Russian army and one of the patrons of the Hermitage. The journalist and writer will show the territory of the Hanging Garden on the roof of the Manege of the Small Hermitage, literally floating above the ground. The historical route leading to the halls of Italian art will end with a story about the feat of museum workers during the siege of Leningrad.

Evgeny Chebatkov's digital route explores the nature of humor using examples of exhibits from the Hermitage collection. With its help, users will learn how a smile could provoke a scandal, where it was acceptable to laugh and what jokes great artists encoded in their paintings. At the Romanov Portrait Gallery, Chebatkov will explain why what was funny during the time of the reformer Peter I might well not even make people smile at the time of Nicholas II. Standing by the painting "Breakfast" by Spaniard Diego Velazquez, the presenter will share a humorous interpretation of the gesture of one of the heroes of the canvas. Researchers who have seen a connection between the plot and the picaresque novels popular in the 17th century agree with her.

Klava Coca invites young people on a journey in which he will take them to the most secluded corners of the museum and reveal many of its secrets. The digital route starts in the Field Marshal's Hall, passes through the Pavilion Hall, the Da Vinci Hall and the Openings — three huge ceremonial halls of the New Hermitage with glazed ceilings in the central part. The singer will show an elegant balcony for the orchestra, inaccessible to visitors, and will tell about musical evenings at the imperial court. Especially for the project, together with Hermitage climatologist Konstantin Klava, Coca will share the secrets of preserving Leonardo da Vinci's paintings in modern conditions.

Each route ends in the space of the Rastrelli Gallery. This is a full-fledged media zone that will help expand your experience of staying at the Hermitage. In the media zone, visitors can use special tablets to immerse themselves in the Hermitage's collection of masterpieces. Everyone will have the opportunity to create a self-portrait in the style of the Renaissance, Henri Matisse, Japanese prints, Cubism, as well as paint the Winter Palace, which has repeatedly changed the color of the facade from its foundation to the present day, fragments from the Raphael Loggia, and imagine what the Peacock clock by James Cox might look like.

"This is a fascinating pioneering project where media personalities and a chatbot connect the Earthly and Heavenly Hermitages, creating a space of unexpected allusions and impressions with which the viewer can make friends and argue. Long—time friends and creative partners of the Hermitage — VK and Samsung - together with the museum have created a new intellectual multidimensional space, an example and example of the correct humanization of numbers and moderate digitalization of art. “One museum. Three Views" stands next to such Hermitage projects as "Virtual Visit", "Magnificent Hermitage", "Land of Light" competition, NFT, "Virtual Blockade bomb shelters", "Digital Collection", "Hermitage Academy", "Memory Line", as well as "Hermitage Encyclopedia", says Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director General of the Hermitage Museum.

"A unique digital project "One Museum. Three Views” combined culture and art with new technologies to take a fresh look at the masterpieces from the Hermitage collection. Our goal was to rethink the role of the museum in the digital age and promote cultural heritage through modern media formats. Today, communities about culture and art gather 72 million users on the VKontakte platform. We hope that thanks to such projects, there will be even more fans and visitors to the Hermitage," said Maria Vorobyeva, Director of VK's Content Partnerships Department.