We live in an age when you can describe practically anything you want to see in words, then see it almost immediately. Nobody will ever have laid eyes upon that particular sight before — and quite possibly, nobody ever will again. There we have both the upside and the downside of artificial intelligence-powered image generation. A constant flow of visual, aural, or textual novelty offers stimulation, to put it mildly, but it inevitably comes to feel insubstantial. However complexly derived from the work of humanity it may be, it lacks a direct connection to that work. Not so the results delivered by Arkivism, a new search engine that responds to descriptions by drawing on a collection of more than four million pieces of real art and photography.You may need a “town at sunset,” a “colorful cake,” a “rocket ship blasting off,” a “Japanese woodblock print of a cat,” or something else besides. Arkivism will more than likely be able to come up with more than a few images to fit the bill, with sources at hand including the Library of Congress, the NASA Video and Image Library, the Rijksmuseum, and Japan’s National Diet Library. (I notice that its reach extends even to the Gongu Copyright Commission in Korea, where I live, which will make it my go-to site when next I need to evoke the Joseon Dynasty.) The chance of discovering a work of art you’d never heard of is always high, even if you search a big name like Rembrandt, Leonardo, Klimt, or Hokusai.“Every work indexed here is CC0 or public domain,” says Arkivism’s about page. “Download it, adapt it, use it in client work — no permission needed, no strings.” Like all the best online services, this one was designed to answer the actual needs of its creator, “a designer and video creator who kept needing imagery that was genuinely safe to use — and kept losing afternoons to a dozen museum search boxes.” Even if your work has nothing to do with design or video creation, you never know when you’ll be looking for a picture of a castle, a painting of a feast, or a map of the world. Sure, you could always ask AI to generate one for you, and you’d get something more or less usable. Sometimes that’s what you need; other times, you’re ready to be led down a historical and cultural rabbit hole. Enter Arkivism here.via KottkeRelated content:A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Million Works of Art Spanning 5,000 Years of HistoryDownload Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search EngineA Search Engine for Finding Free, Public Domain Images from World-Class MuseumsExplore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical ImagesCreative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine That Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain ImagesBased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.