What is Eicon, the app looking to make museum visits easier with your camera?

(Image: Eicon App)

“Visualised as an art buddy, the app will help people recognise artworks and share with them relevant details about it. Users can also upload pictures of the works they see and make individual notes like in a diary. This will be a record of their own experiences and observations and act as a storage of sorts of their museum and gallery visits,” says Ashvin Rajagopalan, founder of eicon, Asign and Chennai-based art gallery Ashvita’s.

At present, the platform reads the collections at three New York museums — Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. More museum spaces and galleries will be added soon. “The multiple data sources will include museums and institutions themselves as well as crowdsourced information, where users will be allowed to contribute,” says Rajagopalan.  

The utility of the app might seem limited at a time when an AI engine can also reveal as much information or more on any artwork, but pose this question on the eicon chat box and it offers a defense: “A general AI engine aggregates information from across the internet without that institutional verification, so it can be less precise or outdated. Think of it as the difference between asking a museum curator about a work they steward versus asking a search engine.”