Start-ups Find Niche Where Art and Technology Meet

Boston Globe Article By Scott Kirsner |  Globe Correspondent

In an industrial building on the South Boston Waterfront, a robotic arm performs the same task that Roman slaves once did for their emperors – crafting tiles into mosaics.

The robot, however, does it much faster. In the span of 15 minutes, it can place colorful glass tiles into a grid measuring 12 inches 12 inches. Glued to a wall and grouted, 10 or 20 of the tile grids coalesce into a mosaic mural. You can see the robot’s handiwork at the Legal Harborside restaurant, Google’s Kendall Square outpost, and G2O Spa on Newbury Street.

Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

While new technology often adds more stress and complexity to our lives, a quartet of Boston-area companies are putting technology in the service of beauty, making visual art more affordable, pervasive, and accessible. Among them are Artaic, which uses robots to transform photos and drawings into elaborate mosaics, and ArtVenue, which makes it easier for cafes or stores to display original art.

Both businesses won $50,000 prizes this fall in the MassChallenge Startup Competition.

Dan Vidal, a cofounder of ArtVenue, says he was attracted to the intersection of technology and art earlier this year when he was in a Cambridge bar and wanted to purchase a piece of art on the wall. “I was told I should e-mail the artist,’’ says Vidal, “but I didn’t hear back for a month and a half.’’

The piece, he learned, had already been sold.

Vidal and his cofounders built a website that makes it easy for the owner of a restaurant to peruse a catalog of artwork and pick an artist to show. When the work is hung, the placard with the name and price of the piece displays a QR code, a pixilated black-and-white pattern that can be read with a mobile phone app.

The code tells the viewer whether a piece is available – and if not, whether the artist has similar pieces for sale. A purchase can be made on the spot with major credit cards.

“The scans give an artist information that they’ve never really had before,’’ Vidal says. “If 12 people all scan the piece, even after it has been bought, maybe the artist will want to make more pieces of art similar to that.’’

The artist receives 70 percent of the sale price; the venue gets 20 percent; and ArtVenue 10 percent.

“For the venue, this is a way to monetize their empty wall space,’’ Vidal says. And for up-and-coming artists, “it takes a lot of time and effort to go door-to-door, inquiring about the possibility of a show,’’ says Katherine Moore, a Boston painter who works a day job in a restaurant. She recently sold a $100 watercolor at a show ArtVenue helped arrange.

TurningArt’s objective is to get more art – both prints and originals – onto living-room walls. The Boston company, which raised $750,000 this year, operates a subscription service for artwork.

For a $10 monthly subscription, the company sends a 16-by-20-inch frame containing the “museum-quality’’ print of your choice. If you tire of it, you roll up the print, send it back, and TurningArt sends another. (You keep the frame, which fits all the company’s prints.)

The money you spend on a TurningArt subscription turns into credit that can be applied toward the purchase of an original piece. A year’s subscription, for instance, would bring the price of a $300 painting to $180.

TurningArt doesn’t pay artists a licensing fee; instead, the incentive to participate is that they may find new fans. “It’s a way for artists to reach a national audience immediately,’’ says founder Jason Gracilieri. TurningArt has more than 1,000 pieces in its catalog and subscribers in each of the lower 48 states, Gracilieri says.

South Boston painter Nick Ward says he recently sold three pieces, in the $400 to $600 price range, to a TurningArt customer. “They seem to have found a market that was really underserved in the past – the ‘entry-level’ art market,’’ Ward writes via e-mail. “They’ve really put together a wonderful service to reach these people.’’ (Artists receive 60 percent of the sale price on TurningArt.)

TourSphere, launched last October, offers software that makes it easy for museums and other venues to build digital guides to their collections that look good when viewed on mobile phones. Chief executive Rob Pyles says about 20 art museums are building apps with the TourSphere software. Due out soon is a free app that will detail the art and architecture of the Boston Public Library.

And then there is the mosaic-making robot at Artaic. Chief executive Ted Acworth is hunting for the strategy to keep it busy around the clock – it was idle when I visited the company this month – and enable the company to build more robots.

“We believe that there is a $10 billion or $15 billion market of people who would want something other than plain tile on a bathroom wall, or a basic pattern,’’ Acworth says. The company’s software, Tessera, translates images into a set of commands that set the robot in motion. Most of the company’s revenue has come from major commissions, like mosaic murals at Children’s Hospital Boston or the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf hotel in San Francisco.

A partnership with Home Depot’s website called Mosaic Loft hasn’t yet gained momentum. It allows homeowners or designers to upload a photograph and have it converted into a mosaic.

But Acworth acknowledges that “even at $35 a square foot, it’s still twice as much as any other kind of tile Home Depot sells.’’ He says the company is working on a new robot to bring the price down to about $10 a square foot. At that price, he believes, we might see a mosaic renaissance, with tile pictures decorating the shower walls and kitchen backsplashes even of those who aren’t emperors.