The Mona Lisa Has Entered the Chat

During a recent trip to Santa Fe, I visited the original Meow Wolf interactive art museum. As I slid through a washing machine, climbed up into a treehouse and stepped through an ice machine into other worlds, I thought about how different this experience is from the traditional art museum. It reminded me of something my then-five-year-old goddaughter once said while visiting a museum.

“This is how people look when they look at art.”

She then leaned back with her weight on one leg, crossed her arms, squinted her eyes and started caressing her chin with one hand.

Laila may only have been five at the time, but she had been going to art openings and museums with her parents and me since before she could walk. In that time, she picked up on the unspoken social rules of experiencing a work of art.

The arts have operated with longstanding rules of behavior that stretch back centuries. Rules such as clapping at the appropriate time at the symphony or standing at least two feet away from works of art and never, ever touching them.

Stanchions, stanchions, stanchions.

Enter the Age of Interaction

Museums and performance halls are facing a shift in audience behavior as technology ushers in the age of interaction. AI has given us the ability to interact with inanimate things and make them “smart,” from homes and appliances to watches and cars. Nearly everything now has an interactive element, and people are becoming accustomed to personalized, responsive experiences.

That expectation does not exactly align with the longstanding rules of consuming the arts through quiet observation or, as Laila would put it, crossing your arms and caressing your chin.

When museums and theatres lean into interactive experiences, audiences respond and engagement deepens. For example, when the Cincinnati Art Museum brought the interactive Burning Man exhibition to Cincinnati, it became the museum’s highest attended special exhibition at the time. 

A new interactive display at Leeds Castle takes interaction to another level by animating a historical figure using AI. Leeds Castle debuted an interactive AI avatar of Eleanor of Castile alongside an exhibition exploring the medieval queen’s life. The digital queen answers visitors’ questions and is aware of her surroundings. They call the display “Holding Audience with a Queen.” 

Learning about a medieval queen is cool, but chatting with a medieval queen could be unforgettable. This may be heading dangerously close to cheesy territory, but dare I say, it is literally bringing history to life.

Imagine learning about Renaissance Italy while chatting with the Mona Lisa. Learning is no longer limited to the highlights on a museum title card. A young musician could ask about Italian musical traditions while someone interested in painting techniques could learn about artistic practices of the day. Someone fascinated by politics could ask about power and patronage during the Renaissance. Allowing audiences to ask their own questions creates personalized experiences that make history feel more engaging and human.

When Interaction Gets Complicated

AI avatars of historical figures, whether real or fictional, also raise a lot of ethical questions. What personality, demeanor, tone of voice, accent and mannerisms should the Mona Lisa have? Who gets to decide that and why? How could those decisions shape the public’s understanding of history?

There is also the practical challenge of introducing interactive exhibitions into museums with standing collections. It creates zones of behavior within the same building where visitors are encouraged to touch, speak and interact in one gallery, but are expected to immediately return to quiet observation in another. A transition that can be confusing for audiences and could potentially put historic artworks at risk.

Built for Interaction

Some museums and theatres are built for interaction and do not have to navigate the challenges of retrofitting a traditional space for a more interactive future.

Meow Wolf is probably one of the clearest examples of this. The Santa Fe locations opened in 2016, and their immersive installations are designed around exploration and participation. Audiences open hidden doors, trigger effects, uncover storylines and physically move through environments that blur the line between art exhibit, playground, theatre set and video game. 

The Cincinnati Children’s Theatre is another example of how performance spaces are evolving. The historic theatre recently added state-of-the-art projection technology that allows scenic elements to extend beyond the stage and into the audience. Instead of simply watching a set, audiences are surrounded by environments that shift and respond dynamically throughout the performance. Following the renovation and technology upgrades, the theatre reopened to tremendous audience enthusiasm and one of the strongest seasons in its history.

The age of interaction will continue to bring new ways to engage with the arts. There will absolutely be stumbles while institutions figure out what works and wrestle with questions we have never had to answer before. But, the possibilities are exciting. 

I mean, who watched the holodeck episodes on Star Trek and did not immediately think, “I wish I had one of those!” While it might have seemed far off at the time, is chatting with an AI medieval queen in her castle really that far off from the holodeck?