The IBM and the National Museum in Wrocław present a pioneering mobile application. CoArt uses IBM’s Watson Assistant AI and the IBM cloud to enable those visiting the “Michael Willmann. Opus Magnum” exhibition at the Four Domes Pavilion to interact with the Paradise, one of Willmann’s most intriguing paintings.
Foto: Magdalena Wyłupek
The visitor is issued a smartphone with a headset and by using the CoArt mobile application, they can ask questions about the paintings and receive answers in Polish. The National Museum in Wrocław has thus become one of only several museums in the world where the CoArt application enhances the art experience.
The CoArt project is the culmination of over a year-long cooperation of the IBM Services team of experts with art historians, experts from the National Museum, and educators and students from Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. The IBM Services team was responsible for building the solution, ongoing maintenance, and developing the app on IBM’s cloud – which, in partnership with IBM’s Client Innovation Center in Wroclaw, included training Watson to respond to questions in Polish.
The production launch of the project was preceded by months of thorough quality tests conducted by the IBM and Museum project teams – starting with building a knowledge base about the painting with certain categories and questions that were tested with Watson’s AI to provide the best answer for visitors to the painting. Since IBM Watson has the ability to learn based on the questions asked to it by each visitor, along with pulling from thousands of data points hosted in the IBM Public Cloud, the app is able to constantly improve quality and accuracy of results.
The exhibition “Willmann. Opus magnum” is held in the Four Domes Pavilion of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a branch of the National Museum in Wrocław. The painting Paradise is one of nearly 100 works shown as part of the exhibition. The Michael Willmann’s works – who is known as the Silesian Rembrandt – have been collected from numerous churches, monasteries and museum collections. The exhibition in the Four Domes Pavilion of the Museum of Contemporary Art will last until 26 April this year.