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Lukas Amacher Is Building a Chatbot for the Art World

Leveraging A.I., he wants to give every museum and gallery visitor access to the kinds of curatorial insights they didn't know they were missing.

The next time you scan a QR code at an opening, you may find yourself conversing with a digital docent, compliments of the new art‑tech platform CONTXT. The idea behind the customizable software, which is essentially an exhibition-specific A.I. chatbot, was inspired by its founders’ shared belief that art appreciation should be a conversation. Every artwork has a story, but the challenge has always been that there may not be anyone immediately available to tell it. Wall text can’t answer specific questions, and by the time a gallery visitor or museum-goer gets home, they may have forgotten what it was they wanted to know. “People in exhibitions often have questions about what they’re seeing but don’t have access to curatorial insight or background knowledge in real time,” Lukas Amacher, the curator, art collector and entrepreneur who launched the project with developer David Simon, told Observer. “With CONTXT, visitors can ask questions about an artwork and get answers sourced directly from the institution’s knowledge base rather than generic internet results.”

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I was surprised to find out that Amacher, the former managing director of the 1OF1 digital art collection, never learned to code. But “the distinction between computer user and developer is slowly evaporating,” he said in an interview with Seth Goldstein for the Let’s Vibe! Podcast. With Simon building the foundational structure of the platform, Amacher could experiment with its functionality, with the goal of building “the richest citation‑ready context layer for art and culture.”

And that’s CONTXT, an artificially intelligent system that’s trained, project by project, on every catalogue entry, essay, curator note and piece of explanatory text for an exhibition. On the visitor side, CONTXT provides, via a familiar chat interface, real-time answers to questions, compressing reams of material into meaningful conversations about artists and artworks that can happen while the user is still at the exhibition. For........

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