Case: How do you make a (very) old product relevant again?

Five centuries old, yet modern

Dieric Bouts lived mostly in Leuven from 1410 to 1475. There, he painted beautiful panels, powerful portraits, and otherworldly landscapes. But above all, Bouts was an image maker: someone who painted on commission and excelled at it. Think of examples like ‘The Last Supper’ or ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus’.

Want to know more? Contact us

Challenge

Make our exhibition about a 15th-century artist relevant for today’s audience.

Solution

A custom-made AI tool that allows visitors to travel 500 years back in time, enabling them not just to view the exhibition, but to experience it.

We’re all image makers

The fact that Dieric Bouts was an image maker was perfectly linked by M Leuven to the present. What do we do today? Exactly: create images. From sports photographers to filmmakers and game developers ... the museum seamlessly places them alongside the 500-year-old painter. This sparked the idea for us to create the same experience for visitors.

AI catapulting you back in time

Instead of ‘styling the foyer’ with a few designs, we chose to provide visitors with a genuine experience. How? With a modern and interactive element, even before they entered the exhibition. We came up with the Boutsifier: an AI tool that transforms visitors into Bouts-style images. All they had to do was take a selfie or select a photo from their film roll. It was then sent back 500 years in time, ‘Boutsified’ and ... voila: visitors could see themselves through the eyes of image-maker Bouts.

Then, they had the option to receive their portrait or upload it to a screen in the museum. Is there an easier way to instantly become part of an art collection and fully experience an exhibition?

Isn’t this just a Snapchat filter?

Wow ... Bouts would have been insulted. No, although the result may look similar, much more is required to achieve such an accurate outcome. The AI model was trained with various works of Dieric Bouts: Bouts, not Bouts, Bouts ... Furthermore, the Flemish Master painted virtually only white people, meaning we had to train the model on all demographic groups. It’s only through all this training that the tool was able to produce Bouts paintings instead of weak filters or Photoshop-like images.

From the 15th century to the AI era

Boutsify not only provided visitors with an artistic souvenir, but turned the exhibition into an experience. One where 15th-century painting techniques and modern artificial intelligence go hand in hand. And this in a way that allows visitors to immerse themselves entirely in a (very) old yet very modern image maker with the press of a button.