It’s hard to put on a show without an audience — and galleries and museums around the world have largely been without audiences over the past year, as covid-19 lockdowns kept many would-be gallery goers at home. Paris’ Louvre saw its visitor rates drop by 70% in 2020, while the British Museum in London saw a 91% drop in the monthly number of visitors to the museum during its reopening from August-December 2020 after months of lockdown. But some art spaces are turning to tech and AI as an alternative way to connect with audiences, patching together different tools to attempt to simulate the experience of viewing great art.

Some curators are outsourcing gallery tours to telepresence robots, with the Hastings Contemporary gallery using one such robot to give hundreds of half hour tours since April. The robot can be controlled remotely via a phone or laptop, and allow both the curator and the audience to remain at home behind their individual screens. Other artists are adopting augmented reality tools to bring their work to audiences outside of screens, and are partnering with apps such as Acute art, which allows users to superimpose artworks onto their everyday surroundings (think Pokemon Go but for art snobs).

There are a number of institutions and initiatives that have been long time adopters of virtual viewing: Google Arts and Culture, launched in 2011, provides high resolution images and immersive 360° experiences of galleries and museums from over 2k partner institutions worldwide. The international Art Fair Art Basel also adopted online viewing rooms for its 2020 edition, while local Egyptian art gallery Gypsum also utilized an online viewing room for a recent solo show.

Besides limitations, online viewing rooms have a number of unexpected advantages, allowing videos, longer texts, and other historically relevant material to be presented alongside the artwork, helping contextualize artwork for viewers in a way a simple wall text in a gallery cannot. “Our hope for these online exhibitions is to use the voices of our dealers and curatorial team to create multi-media environments that really invoke an artist and the context in which they were making their work,” CEO of the US’ Pace Gallery Marc Glimcher told the Guardian.

Online viewing rooms and virtual gallery tours could have a use beyond the pandemic, in allowing distantly located people to experience an art institution’s collection virtually, thereby diversifying audiences. An exhibition in Paris is no longer limited to the people in the city, but can attract attendees from Dubai, Brazil, and Japan. Such tools could also be used to bring the experience art to those who are not able to physically go to a gallery space due to ill health or other restrictions on movement.

But will the new modes of experiencing art innovated during the pandemic outlast its effect? Our guess is, probably not. Galleries and museums were never solely about what hangs on the walls, with many of the buildings that house artworks standing as architectural marvels in their own right. Taking time out of your day to visit a gallery or museum has also been proven to reduce anxiety levels and enhance critical and creative thinking, and sitting in front of a screen may not quite give you the same effect as going for a physical visit. So don’t expect art spaces to fall from favor anytime soon.