Proposal
Louvre Abu Dhabi: Into the Collection
An AI portrait experience we proposed to Louvre Abu Dhabi, where visitors step into the painting and keep their own face.
1
ordinary photograph behind every portrait on this page
8
artworks and painting styles, across five centuries
3
motion channels directed separately: face, body and light
Louvre Abu Dhabi asked us for an AI portrait experience that could sit inside the museum. Visitors at their existing booth had been given over-enhanced faces, features they don’t have, such as an invented moustache, and skin that no longer looked like their own.
The standard was clear. Keep the visitor’s real features, skin tone and gender. Invent nothing and beautify nothing. Protect the brushwork, craquelure and palette of the artwork. Make the figure move. Always deliver what the visitor paid for. And fit the museum: refined, quiet, and comfortable for a child, an adult or a tall visitor.
The face stays the visitor’s, the painting stays the painting
Most image models are tuned to make pictures look good, not true. We built our pipeline the other way round: skin tone, facial structure, apparent gender and age are held to the visitor’s photograph, while smoothing, slimming and brightening are actively switched off.
The face is then matched to the host painting’s brushwork, varnish and canvas grain so it belongs to the surface it sits on, and any output that drifts is rejected and regenerated before the visitor sees it. To show the museum, we produced every result on this page from one ordinary portrait photograph: one person, one sitting, no retouching.
One sitter, five centuries
Manet painted a man. Our visitor stays herself
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with the sfumato and craquelure untouched
Delacroix’s Orphan Girl at the Cemetery: the expression carried over, not the face
After Arcimboldo: a likeness rebuilt entirely from fruit and grain
A portrait sitting in the manner of Jacques-Louis David
A Living Portrait after La Tour: the candle flickers and the light answers
One figure inside Delacroix’s crowded Liberty Leading the People
Three ways into the collection
All of it runs on one booth and one visit, with every artwork approved and locked by the museum’s curators.
Enter the Artwork
01The visitor is placed inside a specific, curator-approved work, from the Mona Lisa to a crowded Delacroix canvas
The Living Portrait
02A short loop of the painting they are now inside: the sitter breathes and glances while the rest of the canvas stays still
The Portrait Sitting
03The visitor painted in the manner of a school in the collection, for families, children and returning visitors
Curator-locked templates
04Nothing generates freely. Each work is approved, locked and can be withdrawn remotely the same day
Paid means delivered
05The visitor sees the result before paying, and payment closes only when the print and digital copy are delivered
Privacy built in
06Consent on screen in Arabic and English, images deleted on the museum’s schedule, never used to train a model
Everything on this page was made from public images of the paintings, before a single template had been built on the museum’s own works. For a new client, that is where we start: your approved artworks, your brand, and test portraits of your own team, returned at this fidelity before any commitment.
The same approach works for any museum, gallery, heritage site or brand that wants people to step inside its world without losing themselves on the way in.
The format behind this proposal:
Tell us what you're planning
Buying a booth, hosting one, or building something for an event.
