An old master in your new pad

The latest televisions can act as an exhibition space, so we can all be cultural tourists without leaving home, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

The Captain Kirk of the software industry, Bill Gates, has equipped his Seattle mansion with a flat-screen display onto which he can project many of the world's great art works, bringing, for example, high-fidelity Monet into the front room. You can now do the same.

While computer technology has permeated every aspect of life - from how we sit, hands perched over the keyboard, to the information we use to deal with everyday living - aesthetics, what we like to look at, rather than rational engineering, is now inspiring technologists to provide new services, ones that target our sense of taste and our artistic desires.

It can be seen in the glasses from which we drink our wine and the suits we wear to work, and first up on the roster of aesthetically-purposed television services is Gallery Player, a TV channel of sorts that shows art works and only art works.

Seattle-based Gallery Player has devised the technology to turn the new generation of televisions into an art exhibition space in the front room, kitchen and corridor. It is betting its business plan on our aesthetic senses being the new driver of modern technology, but so too, in a small way, is Bill Gates.

Microsoft is there, along with many of the world's most prestigious galleries, bringing the masters to you, on screens in the office, home or in public spaces.

THE SCHEME, DREAMT up by Internet advertising technology guru Scott Lipsky, is to distribute high-quality images of great art to any screen capable of doing those works justice.

In an era when the television set is transforming into a high quality plasma or LCD display, that means the world's great art collections will soon become part of the furniture.

So if you want the Mona Lisa in your kitchen - not just a cheap print now but a high-definition digital reproduction - or a Van Gogh, a Warhol, in fact any one of an increasing number of fine art works from the world's major collections, there is a variety of ways to access them. We can all, in effect, become cultural tourists without leaving home.

"We began sceptically," says Michael Belkin of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "and on two levels. Is there a market out there for this and is the technology one that allows us to exhibit at the highest level of quality and prevents private distribution? On the technology we're very satisfied."

The Metropolitan Museum has provided 50 representative images to the Gallery Player service, available for download for a monthly rental.

Scepticism over the possible dumbing-down of great art by exhibiting it on screen has presented one of the most significant barriers to Gallery Players. Founder Lipski, formerly with Amazon.com and a technology pioneer who also owns companies that track advertising effectiveness on the Internet, explains.

"Ever since I started this, I would get asked that particular question. Is this in some way dumbing down art? But art directors and directors in the world's leading galleries and museums love the idea."

Indeed as well as the Metropolitan, Gallery Player has now signed up the Smithsonian, the Andy Warhol Foundation, Life Magazine, National Geographic, and some of the world's leading art photographers. You buy collections: Angels in Art ($17.99), Leonardo a Vinci's Masterpieces (15 images, $17.99), Photo Realism (15 images £14.99) and decide when and for how long they appear on your screen.

"We're approaching the project with enthusiasm and optimism," Belkin concurs, though he adds that it's too early to say if the idea of displaying Van Gogh, Gaugin and Andy Warhol will prove popular.

American social critic David Brooks pointed the way five years ago in his book on bourgeois bohemians: Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. An increasingly wealthy and educated workforce is driving the economic landscape with a broader spread of cultural values. And the idea of technology delivering a satisfying exhibition space for the finest quality art fits neatly with a generation that owes its wealth to technological innovation.

You no longer have to be bourgeois or Bill Gates to afford to turn your home or office into a high-quality gallery, though Gates's own screen gallery, according to Gallery Player, is considerably more expensive than anything the average art fan can afford.

Lipsky's objective, when configuring the technology for Gallery Player, was to bring fine art to the masses. Small elements of the online gallery can be downloaded for as little as five dollars a month. It's just that when exhibited on a computer screen the images are unlikely to impress. They need the higher reproduction values of high-definition television and the plasma screen.

Computer downloads will in any case soon be as passé as queuing at the Louvre. Gallery Player decided to take a bet on a different download and viewing technology.

A new way of delivering high-quality images electronically is about to be launched across the technologically advanced world. Internet Protocol Television or IP TV is a system that uses the communications systems perfected by internet geeks and applies them to a managed telephony network - the ones that currently bring us phone calls and broadband.

Companies such as BT in Britain are about to go live with their own national IP services and when they do, Gallery Player will become accessible through the television screen in homes across Britain and Europe.

That's where Bill Gates comes back into the picture. Microsoft has chosen Gallery Player to be on its new welcome and browser page for IP TV. Microsoft's new Media Center is part computer and part guide to the multi-channel world of IP TV, the arena where the internet technology meets the television.

Gallery Player will be the first page the majority of people see when they turn on the hybrid television-as-computer.

Microsoft's Media Center technology is to IP TV what Internet Explorer is to the web. It ties a number of technologies together and allows users to browse through a variety of new services without realising the hybrid nature of what happens in the background.

IN IRELAND WE will have to wait another three years or more before we can enjoy the multitude of new services that IP TV will bring. Europe's richest economy is so far behind not because of any shortcomings in technology but, according to BT's Dublin-based manager Peter Evans, as a result of a lack of political decision-making. "We've been slow with ADSL [the broadband technology]," says Evans. "And slow with 3G [next generation mobiles]. And it seems we're slow again with IP TV."

To understand what we will be missing, and what IPTV offers as a high-quality, high-fidelity gallery space of the future, a little background is required.

The quality of imaging technology in general is opening up new ways to serve a latent demand for things to look at. Over the past couple of years the old-fashioned "tube" television has been disappearing from showrooms and for the next few years, plasma and LCD flat screens will continue to replace conventional screen technology. On the back of these innovations high-definition television is now a viable option, more than doubling the quality of television images. Researchers are already planning ultra-high-definition cinema for the home.

Extraordinary though it may seem, we all see an average of around 3,000 images a day, on television, posters, in magazines, computer screens, even on T-shirts.

Yet the desire to see more, and higher-quality, images impels millions of people to travel across the continent to witness the works of Da Vinci or Van Gogh. But for the bourgeois bohemian and the lowly dilettante, hauling off to Amsterdam or Paris before the summer is not only unnecessary, it doesn't compare with the experience of high-definition artworks in the bedroom, sitting room or office, and the possibility of downloading a vast gallery of images forpersonal exhibition.

Those who can't wait to try Gallery Player services can check the internet version at galleryplayer.com, though your computer screen might not do the images justice. On the internet, they are not as good as they are on an internet television service.

Hotels in Ireland will, however, be offering IP TV services and, advises Evans, the option might become available on cable networks. When you get the urge to engage with the best of Western culture, what you really want to do is reach for the remote.