Ok, so back to the reason I downloaded this thing in the first place. I mean really man, come on, your an adult, digital enlightenment starts now! If you’re skint and can’t even afford to go down the shop, then it poses an educational alternative to Candy Crush Saga or that game with the birds. It allows you to get in there and start building an image of what to expect. Say your planning a trip to MoMA or Rijksmuseum and you want to get in some pre-reading on what you might discover before you go. Once inside the app, you can explore galleries all over the world, discover the history behind classic paintings and even create your own gallery based on marked favorites. Google hopes it will attract more people to galleries and cultural sites and get us all more psyched about art in general. The app uses facial recognition technology to compare your own face with that of over 1000 classic portraits and I’ll be honest, it is a good old laugh. The reason for this? Some kind of human necessity, or fault, to see ourselves within a broader historical context? That could be it. #Artselfie made Google’s Arts and Culture app go viral and at present, it has been downloaded over 5 million times.

Anyways, my point is everybody loves a good lookalike and I for one am no exception, so when I heard about #Artselfie I was right on it. I once worked in an office so desperately mundane that all of my colleagues were habitually reduced to googling lookalikes and referring to a chosen colleague by a precariously designated doppelgänger throughout the week.

Download arts and culture google