GAU
Wikimedia art selection
2024
Project
A database of handpicked Latin-American artwork available on Wikimedia with alt-text generated by Gemini Flash 1.5.
The Idea
I got inspired by a mastodon bot, named @artbot, which publishes artwork from Wikimedia. I wanted to make a version of it dedicated to artwork from Latin-American countries.
Branding
Galeria de Arte da URSAL is a pun with the name of the mastodon instance that host it (URSAL) and a famous Brazilian song. The brand applies the instance's main color red in a vibrant shade. Its initials are diagrammed in square shape with a typography of irregular shapes and friendly tone.The lowercase g resembles a mastodon silhouette.
Logos and font family.
Wikimedia
Because of the very vast and free nature of the Wikimedia contribution process, it's hard to retrieve precise and regular formatted metadata from its images. So the images where handpicked according to the categories associated with Latin-American countries. This initial set was made in a spreadsheet, for further manipulation, and contains these attributes:
- id
- created_at
- file_name
- attribution_url
- preferred_file_url
- artist
- title
- country
- date
- medium
- alt_text
- is_published
Gemini
Using Python with Wikimedia API, a few of those attributes are added to each entry before downloading all images. Once local, all images are individually proccessed by Gemini Flash 1.5, returning a generated alt-text for it.
Supabase
The full data is stored in a PostgreSQL table on Supabase, in order to allow easy management, controll post status and serve content to the web app.
Web App
The whole collection is made available to easy access and searh by a Nuxt Web App hosted on Netlify, with the front-end build with TailwindCSS and HeadlessUI components.
Desktop and mobile versions in dark and light themes.
Mastodon Bot
A simple bot was set using GitHub Actions and the API from the PostgreSQL database. One random artwork is publish every 7 hours and maked as published to avoid duplication.