Artlens Reimagined

ArtLens has been helping to make art meaningful and accessible for over a decade. First launched in 2012 as Gallery One, it has used digital technology in nationally and internationally recognized experiences that initiate visitors' relationship to the permanent collection. ArtLens transforms how we engage with art, making it fun, accessible, and awe-inspiring for all generations.

Built at the intersection of art, technology, and innovation, immersive experiences bring artworks to life by offering visitors to explore the stories behind major artworks in the collection—from creation and historical context to conservation and repatriation, sparking dialogue with the community. Incredible interactives provide entry points for discovery through art and technology.

The artworks on view in ArtLens are favorites among visitors and curators. They represent the diversity and quality of the museum’s collection, and rotate back into their galleries biannually. Visitors can form connections with the objects in this innovative, engaging space, and then follow those objects back into their original galleries to continue that relationship. Artworks from different times, cultures, and places are brought together to create new connections through cutting-edge interactives and inclusive design. Amid the physical artworks, visitors can investigate, create, and explore more through digital experiences.  

ArtLens breaks down barriers and reimagines the space to be more inclusive. Accessibility is at the forefront of the entire process, and every decision is made to further the goal of inspiring deeper engagement and making art matter to everyone. The result is a space with multisensory interactives, tactile maps, braille descriptions, touchable reproductions of select artworks, and even more inclusive experiences.

New Opportunities to Engage

The new ArtLens gallery features a range of innovative interactive experiences designed so every visitor can find a meaningful way to engage with art.These engaging interactives take away the intimidation of an art museum but leave the awe and inspiration. Accessibility and inclusivity are central to our design, with several experiences specifically developed to support visitors who are blind or have low vision. Additionally, several interactives utilize machine learning and AI models to create richer, more responsive experiences that were not technically possible just a few years ago.

Relate

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Start your relationship with the collection. Discover hundreds of artworks from across the collection through engaging, personalized interactives. These innovative, touchless experiences invite exploration across cultures and time periods. Compare and connect with art through movement, observation, and play.

Art Mirror 

See a reflection of yourself made from pieces of art. As you move in front of our digital mirror, it dynamically composes a portrait of you using artworks from the CMA’s collection that move and change with you. 

How does it work? This photo mosaic interactive repurposes a CLD compression algorithm (typically used for shrinking images), to find and match colors and compositions from artworks in the museum’s collection to create your mirror image in art—some of which you may not have had the chance to see before!

Art in Arms Reach

How big is that painting really? Browse our collection at scale by holding your arms apart and seeing art that fills the space. Move your hands farther apart or closer together to see matching artworks that fit the size of your gestures and discover which works are so large they barely fit in your outstretched arms.

How does it work? A digital mirror uses the collection’s dimensional metadata along with body tracking to power the experience. This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to capture your body’s movement in 3-D. RTMPose, a state-of-the-art machine learning pose tracker, tracks the distance between your hands in real time. That distance is then matched with artworks from the museum’s collection based on their actual size, allowing you to “hold” priceless artwork in your hands at their true scale.

Hand Model

What can you say with your hands? Use hand gestures to explore detail. Using advanced motion tracking, the positions of your fingers and hands are dynamically matched to similar depictions in artworks, putting the collection in the palm of your hand. Try different gestures to explore our collection.

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to capture your body in 3-D. It combines OpenCV (a computer vision tool) and RTMPose (a machine learning pose tracker) to track your hand in real time, turning your hand gestures into input for finding your artwork match!

Strike a Pose

Explore the connection between movement and emotion. Strike a pose and discover an artwork that matches your movement and expression. With responsive pose and figure matching capable of tracking multiple people simultaneously, this experience analyzes your poses to reveal the closest matching figures in artworks across collection. Invite a friend and see how creative you can be.

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to capture your body pose in 3-D. It combines OpenCV (a computer vision tool) and RTMPose (a machine learning pose tracker) to track your whole body in real time—turning the poses you strike into input for finding your artwork match!

Create

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Connect with the collection through creativity, inspiration, and artistic experimentation. Create your own experience of the collection. Design digital sculptures, artworks, and immersive experiences inspired by the museum’s open access collection. Through multisensory experiences, digital interaction, and thoughtful uses of AI, connect with art in new ways.

Endless Threads

Weave yourself into a customized textile. Choose from a selection of textile artworks from the collection and design your own, selecting the color, patterns and technique. A camera feed lets you add yourself to your creation, weaving in your face or detail into the design, while matching the look and style of the tapestry. 

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to detect your shape, facial features, and clothing to make a real-time cutout. Then, with OpenCV’s color segmentation, your image is woven into your chosen historical tapestry.

Pottery Explorer

Use your hands to sculpt and shape clay. Experiment with motions to change the shape of your creation. As you work, an array of pots from the collection are revealed based on visual similarity, blending creation and inspiration into a seamless experience. 

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to track your hand movements in 3-D to allow you to shape and sculpt a virtual pot. Then, OpenCV extracts the contour of the form you have created using the depth image. Segment Anything, a machine learning tool from Meta, is used to extract contours from artworks in the museum’s collection. Your form is then matched in real time to similar shapes from the collection.

Portrait Maker

Take a selfie and transform it into a self-portrait inspired by artworks from the collection.

How does it work? A multi-touch interface allows visitors to create a portrait of themselves in the select mediums and styles of the CMA’s artworks based on an image of themselves

Art Morph

Create original art inspired by the museum's open access collection using real-time generative AI. Experiment with the materials in front of you and see how the screen transforms them into works of art. Try different combinations and positions to see how these changes impact the art being generated. New materials are added on a regular basis.

How does it work? This interactive uses the Stable Diffusion SDXL Turbo model, a powerful AI image generator, adapted with LoRA training to reflect the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection. It uses the real-time generative AI lens to transform a camera feed of your hands, and everyday physical materials into art inspired by the collection. When you place objects like paper or shapes on the platform, the system uses those inputs to instantly generate new digital artwork in the style of the selected collection pieces.

Investigate

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Experience the intersection of art, science, and conservation. Examine how conservation science, ownership history research (provenance), material analysis, original color restoration, and historical context uncover the evolving life stories of artworks, revealing how they were created, experienced, altered, preserved, and understood across time and cultures.

Talk to the Art

Ask the artwork a question. What do you want to know? This voice-driven interactive invites you to ask questions and receive spoken responses from a physical artwork in a natural, conversational style. You can ask the subject to tell you more about their life, the artist, details in the artwork or even off-topic questions.

How does it work? This interactive uses a combination of cutting-edge language and voice tools to bring artworks to life. OpenAI’s Whisper transcribes spoken words, while a locally run language model (Qwen 3.5) interprets and generates responses. The AI tool Kokoro then turns these responses into speech. Combined, these three tools allow you to have a conversation with the artworks, learn more about the artist, and discover the stories hidden within the artworks themselves.

What Does Art Sound Like?

Explore the sights, sounds, and stories of a historical Cleveland landmark or a quiet Civil War scene by touching 3-D recreations of these paintings. Explore sections of an artwork to hear a visual description of the detail you are pointing at in the painting. 

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera and RTMPose to track where you are pointing at an artwork. The area pointed a spoken description of that part of the scene, allowing you to learn more about the artwork: the composition, the artistic technique, and the stories being told across the canvas.

Paint the Past

Uncover the colorful past of a work of art. Move your arms to reveal the pigments that once covered the surface of this artwork. Additionally, you can gesture outside the object area to reveal projections of the likely historical context of the object.

How does it work? This interactive uses a Femto Mega depth camera to track where you are pointing. As you gesture toward different parts of the artwork, projection mapping reveals the original colors that once covered its surface, offering a glimpse into how it may have looked centuries ago.

Look Closer

Use the interactive lens to examine an artwork in 3-D as if it was sitting on the table in front of you and discover clues that reveal its past. Explore artwork in detail and reveal hidden stories using an interactive lens. These details provide insight into how the objects were created, authenticated, or restored, highlighting scientific processes. 

How does it work? This interactive uses an iPad Air with Apple's ARKit framework to let you explore 3D scanned artworks from the museum’s collection. Move around and get closer than ever to reveal textures, brushstrokes, and hidden details you can’t usually see in the gallery.

Rewoven Worlds: Artwork in Context

In this investigate interactive, created by the Cleveland Museum of Art in collaboration with Harvard FAS CAMLab (Cognitive Aesthetics Media Lab), you can reconnect artworks with their architectural, ritual, and cultural environments across three sites in Asia. Encounter monasteries, pagodas, and cave temples that once functioned as places of worship, pilgrimage, and daily ritual. The CAMLab is an interdisciplinary research and design platform exploring how cultural systems are represented, experienced, and reimagined through digital media. Bringing together art history, computation, immersive design, and cognitive aesthetics, CAMLab develops new approaches to the study and interpretation of cultural heritage across time and place.

How does it work? This immersive experience uses Femto Mega depth cameras to track your movement through the space. As you explore, projection mapping transforms the room around you—revealing layers of an archaeological site and letting you see how it may have once looked, piece by piece.

Explore

What more can you find? Surround yourself with art and use this space to make new connections to the collection. Solve puzzles, connect with your community and discover what else you want to explore.

Community Mural

Create, arrange, and remix artworks from the collection. Contribute to our mural based on this week’s prompt. New prompts are added each week.

How does it work? Community Mural uses a custom AI pipeline that consists of an LLM image labelling model combined with Meta's Segment Anything to identify objects in artworks (plants, hats, people), allowing you to easily cut out these elements to use in the mural.

Artlens Puzzles

Challenge yourself with fun and fast-paced puzzles using the collection. Test your memory, find connections, or create a timeline. Each puzzle draws from art in our collection, allowing you to experience and learn about it in a new way.

ArtLens Wall

The 40-foot interactive, multitouch ArtLens wall is one of the largest in the world. This digital visualization of the collection allows you to browse all artworks currently in the galleries as well as a few artworks that are not on view. This is the only component remaining in ArtLens that was part of the original 2012 version; an update is planned for it in 2027.

How does It work? Watch the ArtLens wall move and transform. Every 40 seconds the wall rotates through everything on view, displaying curated selections of artworks grouped by type, theme, purpose, shape, color, and more. See how our artworks relate across cultures and time periods. Touch an artwork on the wall that stands out to you and find where it is located in the galleries. Select the medium, time period, or culture in blue above the artwork to browse across the collection. When you find a favorite, let everyone know by touching the heart icon below the artwork.

Infinite Landscape + You on View

Take a moment to sit back and relax. Check out what other visitors have created and experience a never-ending panorama of the natural world. These experiences switch automatically every few minutes.

In You on View, see the creations of other visitors and use them as inspiration for your own journey through the gallery. With Infinite Landscape, watch the world go by as one artwork blends seamlessly into another. AI connects this endless stream of landscapes by generating the scenery between artworks in real time.

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How does it work? Infinite Landscape uses the Stable Diffusion SDXL Turbo model (a generative AI tool) to seamlessly stitch together a series of paintings using a process called outpainting. The AI fills in the visual gaps between artworks, imagining what could exist beyond each frame and connecting them into one continuous scene. 

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In You on View, a Beacon display of user generated content allows you to see images from other interactives.

Binocular Tension

2024
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
(Canadian, born Mexico, b. 1967)
Canada