The Echo: An Update to the Intelligence We Use to Talk About Works of Art
Have you ever wanted to share your impressions or ideas about a favorite work, with someone who would actually listen?
We shape ourselves through speaking. The same is true of the inspiration that a work leaves in us. After spending a few weekend hours standing before a work, if the response is left unspoken, the subtle feeling slips quietly into the rush of ordinary days. Repeating that every weekend, just watching it fade, feels like too much waste.
And speaking is also a positive act for the work itself.
What defines a work is sound critique around it. Behind every work that has shifted the course of art history, there has always been a critical language that supported it intellectually. But today, critique is no longer the property of a few specialists. A work, once it leaves the artist’s hand, is reborn in the encounter between people. The viewer ceases to be a mere recipient of meaning and becomes an accomplice in its making.
The “relations” that make a work real are strengthened by sound and fair dialogue among those who engage with it. This is one new form of critique.
Yet in practice, surprisingly few words are exchanged about works.
The deep and delicate sensations and concepts that a work evokes do not fit comfortably into social networks optimized for likes and reposts. Words sharpened to chase engagement are too coarse to record the trembling of an encounter with a work. A different kind of interface is needed.
As one implementation, we’ve started a project.
The project is called The Echo. It unfolds in four stages.
1. Generating the starting dialogue
For a specific exhibition or work, we conduct a dialogue that views the work from multiple angles. The recordings are published on Substack and on our website, and distributed as a podcast on Spotify and other audio platforms.
2. Dialogue between visitors and a generative AI
For the same exhibition or work, we open an interface where anyone can converse freely with a generative AI. The AI responds by referencing the starting dialogue from (1) and the insights drawn from it. If a user wishes, they can save their own conversation to The Echo’s database. Saved conversations may then be referenced when generating responses for future visitors.
3. Establishing a collective intelligence
As more conversations accumulate, the AI gradually becomes a body of impressions and ideas about that exhibition or work. New visitors can converse with the virtual collective intelligence of those who have seen it before them. Artists and curators are welcome here too; to the AI, there is no distinction between them and any other visitor. Every word is added to the database with equal weight, vectorized, and reflected in the prediction of the next character.
4. Inviting new visits
Even those who haven’t yet visited the exhibition or seen the work can learn what to look for and how to enjoy it through dialogue with the AI. That, in turn, gives rise to new visits and to further accumulation of dialogue.
The AI model and the prompt that drives it are always public. User conversations are kept private to protect privacy.
What is new about this project is that AI joins, as a new term in the relationship, what had been a relationship between only people and the work.
Yet at the center of everything, including the AI, is the work itself. In the world of art, nothing is more valuable than the work. Everyone else — critic, curator, collector, viewer, and AI — is a servant to the work.
This is an update to the intelligence we use to talk about works of art. It is an attempt to gather the words that have been scattered across people’s minds, books, and fragmented posts into a single place, and to weave them back into a form that can be spoken with. The next person to visit an exhibition will be in conversation, in front of the work, with everyone who has stood before it before them — and with the AI — all at once.
If from this project a new work of art were ever to be born, nothing would be a greater honor.