Funding: Data2Sustain EDIH
Big Look Art
Big Look Art is an online education and investment platform for private and corporate art collectors and artists. The company uses digital tools to make art more accessible and engaging through interactive displays and online experiences. Its work helps galleries, cultural spaces, and individuals connect with art in new and practical ways.
Problem To Be Solved
The global art market remains fragmented and heavily reliant on manual evaluations by curators, collectors, and investors, a process that is subjective, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. Traditional image-recognition systems often fail to interpret the symbolic, emotional, and historical depth of fine art.
Big Look Art set out to develop an AI-powered platform capable of understanding and describing artworks with expert-level nuance – automating analytical tasks such as identifying style, genre, emotion, and contextual relationships across large and diverse collections.
WiSAR Solution
In collaboration with Data2Sustain, Big Look Art designed and built a multimodal AI platform that combines advanced visual analysis with natural language understanding, supported by Data2Sustain’s High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.
At the heart of the system is a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that integrates:
· A Vision Transformer (ViT): Extracts detailed visual features from artworks.
· A Task-Specific Attribute Prediction System (TAPS): Analyses style, emotion, and artistic technique.
· An autoregressive language model (Vicuna/LoRA): Generates contextualised, natural language descriptions of each artwork.
The model also includes advanced classification, clustering, and similarity tools, using an Art Influence Graph and Graph Neural Networks to uncover meaningful relationships between artworks and movements.
A curated dataset of thousands of public-domain artworks, annotated through a hybrid AI + expert process, underpins the entire system. Deployed through scalable cloud APIs, the platform delivers real-time, expert-level art analysis for museums, collectors, and researchers.
Impacts & Benefits
The collaboration between Big Look Art and Data2Sustain produced a fully functional AI platform that demonstrates how artificial intelligence can transform art discovery, research, and curation.
Key outcomes included:
· Automation and efficiency: The platform generates consistent, richly detailed descriptions and metadata for any artwork, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.
· Deeper insights: Offers historical, stylistic, and emotional context to support academic and curatorial work.
· Enhanced discovery: Enables galleries and collectors to uncover hidden links between artworks, artists, and movements.
· Curated dataset: A robust, compliant art database supporting ongoing research, education, and innovation.
· Economic and social impact: The technology helps democratise access to art knowledge, bringing expert-level insights to a wider audience. It supports data-driven decision-making across the art market, reduces inefficiencies, and opens new opportunities for art-tech services and cultural digitisation.
· Scalability: Designed to expand across global collections and integrate seamlessly with existing digital heritage systems.
This project has positioned Big Look Art as a pioneering AI innovator in the creative industries, showcasing how high-performance computing and artificial intelligence can advance cultural heritage and modernise the global art ecosystem.
