The Van Gogh Museum is one of the partners on ArtBabble, an on-line community launched by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in April 2009. This groundbreaking website allows visitors to explore art by means of video. There are interviews with artists, conservators and restorers, and documentaries about works of art and exhibitions. ArtBabble offers high definition video and transcriptions, and it places videos in a wider context by referring to video-related content outside the site.

Of course ArtBabble offers interactive options such as placing reactions, the sharing and embedding of videos, and it is also possible to download videos to iPods and iPhones.

Notes
Alongside each video there are a number of 'notes' that allow the visitor to jump to a particular point in the video, and that point the visitor in the direction of supplementary information about the video, such as exhibitions, works of art, cultural events, photographs on flickr.com, items on Wikipedia, and related videos on ArtBabble and YouTube.

Cultural collaboration
ArtBabble was designed by the IMA so that other museums and cultural organisations that produce high-quality videos about art can collaborate in the site. By joining forces, the website can develop into the most important destination for online art videos. ArtBabble receives funding from the Ball Brothers Foundation.
First generation partners are Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), the New York Public Library, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). As of today, other partners who joined apart from the Van Gogh Museum include Art Institute of Chicago, KQED, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Arts & Design, Norman Rockwell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Guggenheim, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The partnership offers the Van Gogh Museum the opportunity to present, in collaboration with renowned international museums and cultural institutions, their own, in-house produced videos about research, activities and exhibitions on a broad platform devoted to art, where the videos will be put in a wider context by means of the notes. This means that our collection and our activities will be more widely accessible to the public, that we contribute to the availability of online content about art, and that we support this online art community.

www.artbabble.org/partner/van-gogh-museum