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FAD Magazine covers contemporary art – News, Exhibitions and Interviews reported on from London

FAD INTERVIEW: Tobias Boonstoppel and Moenen Erbuer from Curiator

Curiator_2_FAD
Tobias Boonstoppel and Moenen Erbuer. Photography by Adriana Pellegrini.

Another one off FAD’s occasional interviews with the people changing the very fabric of the art world , up now are Tobias Boonstoppel and Moenen Erbuer founders of Curiator.

To catch all of FAD’s interviews with industry leaders from the Art/Tech field please follow this link: bit.ly/Ximzho

1 Tobias/ Moenen who are you? And how did you end up running Curiator?
We are an ex-Google software engineer (Tobias) and an interface designer previously at AKQA (Moenen). We met through a common friend shortly after we moved to New York in 2006/2007. Both of us are art enthusiasts and collectors, and we started building Curiator first and foremost out of our own frustration with the complete lack of an online presence for art. We wanted to find a way to gain a broader understanding of the artistic tastes of people we knew or admired in order to get inspiration and continue to build our own art collections.

Since we started working on this, a number of other art startups have sprung up, but wherever you go it’s all about buy buy buy. No one seems to understand that the relationship people have with art is not transactional, but emotional. Art is so subjective, if there will ever be a meaningful place for art online, it will need to be centered around you, the art enthusiast. It’s about what you like, not about what we like, and definitely not just about what’s for sale.

2 Who are the rest of the team at Curiator and what do they do?
Many people think we are a big company, but the truth is that we’re bootstrapping with a very small team – basically us two, plus an intern. The things we can’t handle ourselves, we outsource, but we do the majority ourselves.
We wanted to build traction while we are still nimble.

3 What is Curiator? How does it work?
Curiator is your digital art collection where you keep your favourite art in one place and discover new art through the community. It’s an enormous and fast growing repository of the world’s greatest art that is entirely user generated.
It’s the biggest collaborative art collection in the world. As you collect more art on Curiator, we get to understand your
taste and can connect you with users and artists similar to the ones you already like and follow.

4 How is Curiator different from ArtStack?
ArtStack is a very similar platform in terms of what it does and what it is trying to achieve. However, we’re very different when it comes down to the experience. We come from a product building background, so if there’s one thing we know how to do, it is how to build a really nice experience. Neither of us comes from an art background, so instead we surround ourselves with people from the art world making sure we understand the needs of users on all levels.

5 You have an API. Has anyone used it for anything really cool yet?
Yes, there are a few really cool projects that came out of this. We launched our API at the Hacking Arts conference at MIT in 2013 and a few attendees built (with a little help from us) an application that analysed the lyrics of a song, matched the words with tags that were added to Curiator and then flashed the relevant art to the beat. Someone else made a Little Printer app that prints out the most popular artwork of the day. You can subscribe to it here.

6 How much art do you have on the platform? And how much is it growing by every day?
As of writing, we have about 35,000 unique artworks by 8,500+ artists. “Unique” because we use image recognition technology to detect any duplicates. We even detect different views from the the same artwork, for example when it’s a sculpture. During our beta phase we had a daily influx of a few dozen to a few hundred new artworks, but this is number is picking up
rapidly since our launch.

7 If you had $49,000 to spend on art who would you buy?
Tobias: I probably wouldn’t spend it all on one piece. There are a some paintings I really like from Walter Robinson or Matthew Schofield. If I could find a piece by Jeremy Geddes that would be nice as well. I love Jeremy’s work because it’s both photorealistic and surrealistic at the same and it transports the viewer into this weird, dreamy almost fantastical world.

Moenen: I would buy a big Shane Hope from his Species-Tool-Being series. I’m very fascinated by algorithmic art, the idea that us humans can instruct computers to create things that are basically out of our control. I graduated design school with a thesis project that revolved around that idea, and I’ve been dabbling in algorithmic design as a hobby for a long time myself. But Shane Hope takes this to a whole new level by extending his algorithms with 3D printing machines, and the result just looks just amazing. Whatever money I have left I’d keep for some emerging artists I have yet to discover.

curiator.com

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