New sensor network protecting art in NY museum

It will take a good eye to spot them, but dozens of tiny, very modern works of art have been installed near the 15th-century unicorn tapestries and other medieval masterpieces at a New York City museum.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is announcing Thursday that a network of wireless environmental sensors designed to prevent damage to the collection is being tested at its Cloisters branch.

The IBM sensors – each housed with a radio and a microcontroller in a case about the size of a pack of cigarettes – can measure temperature, humidity, air flow, light levels, contaminants and more. They are inexpensive and run on low power, and several can be positioned in a room, scientists said Wednesday.

The information collected goes into a three-dimensional “climate map” that can be accessed on a computer, and the data can then be analyzed to adjust the climate, spot trends and even make predictions.

“Nobody in the world at this moment has this kind of information, not at this level of detail,” said Paolo Dionosi Vici, associate research scientist at the Metropolitan. “It’s the analytics that will keep us one step ahead technologically.”

The network now covers about a third of the Cloisters, which houses 3,000 medieval works in several ancient buildings that were disassembled in Europe and rebuilt in northern Manhattan. The Met expects to expand the network throughout the Cloisters and eventually to the main museum on Fifth Avenue.

The climate at museums like the Cloisters is already tightly controlled, with especially fragile items kept in sealed cases. Curators don’t have to worry about the ravages that might happen to a fresco in an open Italian church, for example.

But the artwork is sensitive to small climate variations.

More info here.