Problem
A museum has a finite number of human-guide hours and a global audience.
The curatorial experience of a museum — the part a visitor actually remembers — depends on conversation. An expert guide can hold fifteen, twenty a day. The real audience is an order of magnitude larger. The institutional question is how to extend that conversation without denaturing it.
Context
Institutional museums in Mexico, backed by a public trust.
The project runs within the framework of two major cultural institutions. The counterpart isn't a commercial client — it's a public trust with explicit heritage obligations. That condition changes everything: architecture, governance, public communication.
Decision
Derivative work, not cloning. Curatorship, not a chatbot.
The legal and museographic framing is explicit: the avatars are conceived as derivative work — new creations that engage with the legacy, not reproductions claiming to stand in for the historical person. That distinction isn't decorative; it defines what the AI can and cannot say.
Architecture
RAG over a validated corpus, voice synthesis with a defined timbre, curatorial guardrails.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation against a corpus curated exclusively by the museographic team. Voice synthesis trained within a timbre authorized by the institution. An explicit guardrail for out-of-domain questions, biographical speculation and provocations. Every answer the avatar gives is auditable — piece by piece — against its source.
Execution
Joint work between engineering, curatorship and institutional legal counsel.
Technical delivery is a fraction of the project. Most of the time went into the curatorial table: what gets cited, how it's cited, which questions get answered, which are declined, how the project is communicated to the public. Without that institutional work, the system couldn't be installed.
Result
A historical avatar installed within a public museum's digital ecosystem.
The project is part of the Anahuacalli Digital ecosystem, activated by the museum itself on International Museum Day. Its presence is communicated through the institution's own voice, not the vendor's brand.
Lesson
In heritage work, governance isn't wrapped around the product. It is the product.
A technically impressive historical avatar that can't withstand curatorial audit cannot be installed in an institutional museum. The conversation doesn't revolve around model quality; it revolves around accountability for what the machine says when it speaks on behalf of a historical figure.
Governance
A closed corpus, curatorial review, institutional communication.
A closed, versioned corpus; documented curatorial review; official communication handled by the museum, not the technical team. A board can read this framework and sign it — not because the risk disappears, but because it stays within its lines of defense.
External evidence
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Museo Anahuacalli
"Anahuacalli Digital — the museum activates its digital ecosystem for International Museum Day 2026"
View institutional statement (Spanish) →
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