An expert curator
for your collection.
And only yours.
ALAN knows your collection the way your best curator does — every work, its history, its condition, the argument it makes in a room. It speaks to your visitors, drafts in your house voice, and helps your staff run the place. It does all of this inside your own private cloud: your data never leaves your tenant, and is never used to train any model.
Your collection stays yours.
Before anything else: a museum's collection data — provenance, condition, valuations, donor records, unpublished research — is among the most sensitive it holds. ALAN is built so that none of it is ever shared, pooled, or learned from.
- It never leaves your tenant. One museum, one private deployment. There is no shared corpus across institutions.
- It is never used to train any model. Your works do not become someone else's training data.
- It answers only from what you give it. When the documents don't hold an answer, ALAN says so — it does not invent one.
- You decide what is public. Every document carries a disclosure tier. Private archive material never surfaces in a public answer.
Imagine these four works are yours.
A small sample collection, so you can watch ALAN work. In a real deployment it holds your entire catalogue — thousands of works, your condition reports, your provenance files, your past wall texts.
Works shown for demonstration. Diagrams are decorative stand-ins, not the originals.
Ask ALAN anything about a work.
In 1982 Denes planted two acres of wheat on a rubble landfill two blocks from Wall Street, harvested it, and gave the grain away. The work puts the price of land and the value of food in the same picture, on the most expensive ground in the world.
For your collection it does two jobs. It anchors a through-line on ecology and economy that several of your other holdings only gesture at. And it gives a visitor one concrete image to stand in front of before any wall text makes an argument — a field where a field should not be. That is rarer than it sounds. Most ecological art tells you what to think. This one shows you something and lets the thinking follow.
ALAN speaks plainly and concretely — present tense, no inflated art-speak. That tone is a setting you control, not a default you're stuck with. You'll see that in a moment.
It answers from your documents — and admits what it doesn't hold.
You hold three documents on this work: the acquisition file, the artist's installation note, and a condition report. The gunpowder marks are stable but light-sensitive — the burns oxidize and shift under sustained UV. Your condition report sets a 50-lux ceiling and a six-month rotation off the wall. The installation note asks that the sheet hang unglazed, with no raking light across the surface.
I'm answering only from those three. I don't hold a loan history or an insurance valuation for this work — if you need either, point me at the file and I'll fold it in.
This is the difference between a search box and a curator. ALAN cites the documents it used, and it tells you plainly where your records stop. It will not paper over a gap with a confident guess.
Sequence a room. With reasons.
A room that moves from the single image to the shared act — confrontation toward care:
- Denes — WheatfieldOpen here. One image, one provocation. It sets the economy-and-land question the rest of the room answers.
- Cai — Drawing for Transient RainbowThe mark made by an explosion, fixed on paper. It carries the idea of a violent gesture held still — a hinge between spectacle and trace.
- Lacy — The Crystal QuiltFrom the lone field to 430 people in a room. The work turns the viewer into a participant and widens the frame to community.
- Tiravanija — Untitled (pad thai)Close on the most generous note: a meal, made and shared. The visitor leaves having done something, not only seen something.
Ask it to argue the opposite order, build a label trail for a school group, or flag which works can't share a wall for conservation reasons — it holds the whole room in view at once.
It writes in your house style.
Cai lays gunpowder on paper and lights it. The blast leaves burns, soot, and torn edges — a picture made by the same force that destroys pictures. Here the marks read as an arc, a rainbow held for the instant before it fades. What you see is the record of a few seconds that already passed.
One curator. Every visitor. Any language.
ALAN already runs as a companion in institution.art's galleries — on screens, on the web, and in a walkable digital space. It knows where the visitor is standing, what they're looking at, and what they asked two works ago.
Knows the room
ALAN tracks the visitor's location — gallery, wall, work — and answers in context, never treating a piece as if it hangs alone.
Remembers the visit
It carries the thread of a conversation across a whole visit, so a follow-up — "tell me more" — stays with the right work.
Speaks their language
The same curatorial depth, in the visitor's language, at any hour — without adding a single guided tour to your staff's week.
Your best curator can be in one room at a time. ALAN gives every visitor that conversation — and it scales to a busy Saturday without a queue.
The same intelligence runs your back of house.
ALAN is the face your visitors meet. Atrium is what your staff use — the private workspace where the same understanding of your collection drives the real work of running a museum.
Exhibitions & loans
Brief a show, draft the checklist, track loan correspondence and condition requirements — with the collection's own records already in hand.
Research & catalogues
Assemble provenance, pull the literature, and draft catalogue entries in your voice — every claim tied back to a source in your files.
Development & grants
Donor briefings and grant applications composed from what the institution already knows about itself — no one re-typing the same facts each cycle.
Press & education
Releases, school materials, and gallery texts, on message and on voice — drafted in minutes, reviewed by your team, sent when you say so.
Eight role-based rooms, one private brain. Your staff stay in charge — Atrium drafts and proposes; a person always approves before anything leaves the building.
Built by curators who have run institutions — not only by engineers.
Fabio Cavallucci
Former director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw and of the Centro Pecci in Prato; chief curator of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale. He works within a curatorial network that includes Hans Ulrich Obrist, Charles Esche, Nicolas Bourriaud, Ute Meta Bauer, and Hou Hanru. ALAN's judgment is shaped by how a working curator actually thinks.
Tom Cebic
Five years building Institution's platform and AI stack — the curator AI in production, the digital galleries, and the private back-of-house workspace. He leads partnerships and the technical architecture, and is the person you'll work with to stand a deployment up inside your own cloud.
ALAN and Atrium are built by institution.art — a five-year curatorial project that is a museum, a research center, and a digital platform at once. The curator AI is already in production; the school runs Decolonized History of Art with international faculty. Partners on the books include MoMA, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), CCA Ujazdowski (Warsaw), the MEET Center (Milan), and Boxes Art Museum (Guangzhou); artists who have said yes include Cai Guo-Qiang, Agnes Denes, Suzanne Lacy, Maurizio Cattelan, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. We build curatorial tools because we run a curatorial institution.
See it on your own collection.
We'll set up a private session with a slice of your catalogue, in your own cloud, and show you ALAN answering on works you know. No data leaves your environment to do it.
A walk through the world, taken through the arts.