EVENT: ERWIN WURM LIFE BEAT SOFT MELT/DIGITAL TWIN EDITION (FROM DECEMBER 18 2025, ONLINE)

Erwin Wurm: Life Beat Soft Melt Digital Twin Edition

Ludwig Museum Koblenz

Kuratiert von Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid und Jérôme Sans

Digital Twin Edition und AI Art Mediation: Walter’s Cube

Erwin Wurm’s Life Beat Soft Melt, shown at Ludwig Museum Koblenz from 5 September to 23 November 2025, has been relaunched online as Life Beat Soft Melt/Digital Twin Edition, a persistent, multi-user 3D replica of the exhibition that opens on 19 December. According to the museum’s materials, the project aims to extend the show beyond its closing date while retaining the exhibition’s dependence on bodily movement, shifting perspective, and spatial orientation.

On paper, it is an elegant proposition: an exhibition that “refuses to close” by migrating into a walkable virtual counterpart. The physical installation – curated by Beate Reifenscheid and Jérôme Sans – turned the museum into a chromatic environment in which Wurm’s “Flat Sculptures” and wall-based interventions ask viewers to move in order to “read” distorted words and recompose meaning through distance and angle. The online version, produced with Walter’s Cube, promises real-time co-presence (multiple visitors at once), continuous access (24/7), and free navigation on desktop and mobile.

All of this fits a broader institutional trajectory. Over the past few years, “digital twin” language has become a familiar way of describing scanned, high-fidelity replicas of buildings and exhibitions, often framed as access, conservation, and extended public engagement. A recent overview in Sensors maps how museums are adopting digital twins (and adjacent “virtual museum” formats), while also emphasising the practical trade-offs: capture methods, infrastructure, maintenance, and the gap between photoreal fidelity and meaningful interpretation. A 2024 case study in Journal of Cultural Heritage explicitly describes the goal of producing a digital twin of a temporary exhibition and making it accessible online, so the Life Beat Soft Melt project is entering an already active field, even if its framing is punchier than most.

That background matters, because the announcement leans hard on novelty. The headline claim, “the first exhibition to digitize visitor interactions as sculptural acts”, is difficult to verify in any strict sense. It’s plausible that the specific packaging is new: motion-captured participation reinserted into a shared virtual replica, presented not as a video record but as spatial, avatar-like traces you can move around. Even so, “first in art history” rhetoric tends to collapse a messier reality: many exhibitions have already treated visitor movement as data, and many digital heritage projects have already treated spatial capture as a form of afterlife for sites and displays. The interesting question, then, is not whether the project is unprecedented, but what exactly changes when participation is archived as a manipulable 3D object.

Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures are a useful stress test for this whole enterprise. They reframe sculpture as instruction, social encounter, and temporary bodily arrangement, an oeuvre that has long complicated the boundary between objecthood and performance. The digital twin proposes to preserve this activation by motion-scanning visitors during the physical run, then reinstalling those actions inside the virtual environment as “meta sculptures.”

Conceptually, that is a sharp pivot. What was fleeting becomes persistent; what was private (or at least unrepeatable) becomes replayable; what was contingent becomes, in effect, a collection. The project reads this as an expansion of sculpture into a new register. A more cautious reading would ask what is being gained—and what is being normalised. When participation becomes a database of bodies, “engagement” starts to resemble capture. Consent protocols, data retention, and rights of withdrawal cease to be secondary technicalities; they become part of the work’s ethics, and part of the museum’s public contract.

It also changes spectatorship. In the gallery, One Minute Sculptures often produce awkwardness, comedy, and minor social friction, small events unfolding in shared time. In the virtual replica, those same actions may become closer to diorama or loop: less encounter than exhibit. The museum’s language insists this is not mere documentation; still, the move risks aestheticising participation as an asset class: the visitor’s body, translated into a durable object among other durable objects.

Walter is described as an AI “Art Mediator” embedded in the online environment, a conversational guide that can deliver tours and multilingual explanations while understanding spatial relationships and context. Beyond this exhibition, Walter’s Cube presents the tool as something institutions can “train” on their texts to generate interactive guidance with minimal technical effort. I can only imagine the potential trolling here...

Here, skepticism is not contrarianism; it is basic due diligence. Research on museum chatbots and AI guides routinely finds that such systems can increase satisfaction under certain conditions, yet also raise persistent issues: content quality, tone, visitor trust, evaluation standards, and the awkwardness of automated authority in interpretive settings. Even in optimistic studies, the practical question remains: whose voice is the AI reproducing, and how does it handle uncertainty? In a contemporary art context, where ambiguity is often the point, an always-ready explanatory layer can flatten the encounter into frictionless “understanding,” turning interpretation into customer support.

There is also an institutional politics to this. If Walter functions as a licensable mediation layer, it effectively inserts a platform actor between artwork, curator, and audience. The museum gains scale; the vendor gains a foothold in interpretive infrastructure. That may be fine, but it should be visible as a choice rather than treated as an inevitable upgrade.

If Life Beat Soft Melt/Digital Twin Edition succeeds, it won’t be because it proves the museum can go online. That is already well established. It will succeed if it keeps the stakes of Wurm’s practice intact while resisting the temptation to convert every gesture into content and every question into an AI answer.

In other words: an intriguing experiment, and worth visiting.

Just don’t accept the press-release superlatives at face value.