Ultimate Companion App
The enormous amount of content and program at (design)festivals and biennials makes it hard for visitors to orient. With VOLUME and Canadian AI developer Innervation we are building an LLM-driven companion for visitors that generates user specific recommendations and offers additional content support in exhibition visits.
2025
“Thankfully, a Dutch architecture magazine, Volume, has come up with a canny aid. Their contribution is a witty critique of the biennale format, in the form of an AI-driven app that helps visitors make sense of the ordeal. You can input your interests, choose the personality type of your guide, and it will create a tailor-made itinerary, as well as decode the impenetrable jargon on the wall, “like a Tower of Babel in reverse”. Based on the written content produced for last year’s (smaller) biennale, Volume editor Stephan Petermann says it would take the average reader more than two years to get thought it. Start now, and you might just have a chance to digest this year’s offerings before the next biennale in 2027. Or, as the curators did to generate their caption summaries, you could feed it all into ChatGPT.”
—The Guardian, Oliver Wainright
“Tussen de landenpaviljoens in de Giardini staat een pimpelpaarse kiosk met daarin een grijpmachine waarmee je een plastic bal met een – door architecten ontworpen – Venetiaans souvenir kunt bemachtigen. ‘Bursting Bubbles’ heet het project, waarmee het Nederlandse architectuurtijdschrift Volume een breder publiek bij de Biënnale wil betrekken. Naast de souvenirs, gemaakt met gerecyclede materialen, bedachten ze ‘de ultieme gids voor de Biënnale’: een app die je, op basis van jouw profiel, door de megatentoonstelling heen loodst.”
— De Volkskrant, Kirsten Hannema
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Fill in personal preferences including how much time you have, whether you like reading, who’s work you enjoy and whether a break for Spritz Aperol is necessary, in order to plan your visit…
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Inside the exhibition the app supports your visit by helping you in understanding content or getting more background information.
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The explosion of Biennale content has turned visits into exercises of choice.
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The soft launch of the app during the 2025 Architecture Biennale in Venice as a special project by the curator Carlo Ratti. Photo by Giulia Virgara
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Tralier to the Ultmate Companion to the Venice Biennale Francesco Degl'Innocenti
Amidst all exhibition content it remains for most Biennale visitors a struggle to effectively plan their time at the Biennale. The Ultimate Biennale Companion, a digital prototype that helps visitors navigate and understand the Biennale Architettura 2025’s exhibitions and presentations, was developed in collaboration with Innervation, Canada’s most advanced Multi-Agent AI platform. As a pilot for a new app, bespoke multi-agent systems (MAS) were designed to create personalized biennale visit itineraries, augmented real-time translation of Biennale content, and image-recognition based interactions. This is experienced via an advanced AI ‘tour guide’ that learns from you and tailors its explanations, interaction style, and suggestions to your specific situation.
Misc.: Stephan Petermann
Innervation: Tyler Kolody, Jameson Jones-Doyle, Jon Nuss.
VOLUME: Lilet Breddels, Francesco Degl’Innocenti