Reconnecting Art with Its Context: Marius Pasculea on Converging Artificial Intelligence, Contemporary Art, and Immersive Storytelling

As technology continues to advance, how should we experience art? Marius Pasculea, a polymath with a background in economics and business and an interest in contemporary art, observes a disconnect between works of art and their surrounding contexts. When presented to a wider audience, works of art can seem to lose the context that gives them meaning.

Even when people visit art exhibitions or museums, artworks can sometimes appear to be nothing more than objects. In interpreting Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Pasculea argues that meaning, including the meaning found in works of art, depends on context and function.

In this regard, he developed KULTH to bridge the gap between artworks and their audiences. KULTH is an app that uses artificial intelligence to address this gap and create a more immersive experience, allowing audiences to better understand the context surrounding a work of art.

In this interview, Marius Pasculea explains how artworks can find their place in the market by remaining open and well connected to their audiences.

The Journey

Marius, before KULTH, your background was largely rooted in economics, business, and bioeconomy. What led you toward technology, culture, and the art world?

It looks like a change of fields, but for me it was a convergence that took twenty years.

I fell in love with philosophy in high school, the classics first, then modern and contemporary thought. I read as a complete amateur, less to master the domain than to train a philosophical way of thinking. I would later learn this is the most valuable thing a person can build.

Contemporary art entered my life through the woman who became my wife, an emerging professional artist. Together we went through countless exhibitions, galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, art fairs, and I discovered that artists carry a distinct way of seeing the world, one that resonates in a fascinating synergy with philosophical thinking.

Technology arrived last, in 2024. Reading a book on the theoretical foundations of contemporary art, I had an epiphany around Wittgenstein’s language games, the idea that meaning lives in context and use. At the same moment, conversational AI was showing the world that machines could finally hold a real dialogue. The two snapped together: artworks carry entire worlds of meaning, and for the first time technology could converse about them.

I didn’t leave economics for art. Art finally showed me what all of it was for.

Looking back at your entrepreneurial journey, what experiences have shaped the way you think about building businesses today?

My earlier ventures taught me that endurance cannot compensate for building the wrong idea in the wrong ecosystem.

The first was a small speakeasy, a networking and art speakeasy wine bar. It worked on the people inside it. What it taught me is that magic without a scalable structure stays in a lovely room. The second was a food-biotech startup, which I developed up to a point. Its lesson was harder: a venture you don’t fully recognize yourself in will drain exactly the persistence it demands of you.

What stayed with me from both is a conviction about timing. Durable companies are built on phenomena of reality that are becoming inevitable. Capitalism was one. The society now forming around artificial intelligence is another. When you build on an inevitability, persistence is not a character trait; it is consistency with the facts.

That is also why I distrust rushed products. A venture is a means toward raising the level of civilization, and the economics agree: premium products built patiently, for needs that endure, hold far healthier margins than anything shipped to catch a hype cycle.

Hype pays for a quarter. Quality pays for a generation.

What inspired you to create KULTH, and what problem in the contemporary art market were you trying to solve?

KULTH began with a philosophical observation that became a market observation.

Wittgenstein showed that meaning does not sit inside words; it lives in the language games around them, in context, use and shared practice. Standing in front of contemporary artworks, I realised the same is true of visual art. The canvas is never the whole work. Around every piece there is a world of meanings: the artist’s statement, the life of the studio, the poem that inspired it, the debates of its time. Enter that world and the artwork can transform you. Miss it, and you walk past in seconds, politely untouched.

That is the problem we set out to solve. In galleries artist-run-spaces and museums, most visitors give an artwork a few seconds and leave without ever entering its world, not from lack of curiosity, but because mediation cannot scale. A gallery team cannot personally guide every visitor through every work. So attention rarely becomes understanding, understanding rarely becomes connection, and connection, the moment someone decides to bring art into their life, rarely happens at all. The primary market loses its future collectors at the exact point of encounter.

Contemporary art is not inaccessible. Most of the doors are simply closed. We build the doors; artists, curators and gallery staff hold the keys.

KULTH Vision

You describe KULTH as an ‘AI-mediated cultural layer for the primary art market.’ What does that mean in practical terms?

KULTH gives each artwork a permissioned memory and each visitor a way into it.

The memory is built by people. Behind the mobile app sits KULTH Studio, the system that feeds it curated cultural data: galleries, artists and independent curators contribute the knowledge behind each work, the artist’s statement, sketches from the studio, the melody that played while the piece was made, and the boundaries of interpretation the artist sets. Nothing enters without passing through the people who own the voice.

The way in is a conversation. A visitor standing in front of a piece, or discovering it from home, enters its world through dialogue that adapts to their knowledge, their curiosity, the time they have. Before the visit, during it, and long after.

I want to be precise about one thing: this layer is not neutral, and I don’t pretend it is. Every interface frames what it shows. So we make the framing visible, sources traceable, more than one interpretation offered, boundaries set by curators, artists or gallery staff and moments when the system says “we don’t know” or simply stays quiet.

You talk about turning attention around contemporary art into increased engagement and sales conversion. Why is this important to you?

A work that is understood has a chance to become part of someone’s life. That is why engagement matters to me before it matters to any spreadsheet.

I live with an emerging contemporary artist, so I have seen both sides up close: what it costs to make serious work, and how rarely the person standing in front of it gets the context that would let the work land. When someone truly engages, they attach, and a person changed by a work does not need to be persuaded to buy it. The inclination grows out of the experience itself. That chain, engagement, attachment, conversion, is not a sales mechanism for us. It is the core value of KULTH.

The market needs the chain to work. Over 23 million good artworks are created every year and only around 2 million are ever exhibited, while hundreds of millions of museum visitors never cross the door of a gallery. My hypothesis is simple: when attention converts, artists can live from their art, and more galleries and artist-run spaces can develop.

On profit, my position is plain. Cultural value is the cause; durable economics are the test. A company that creates deep, authentic value should be able to prove it commercially, and I intend to.

AI & Art World

AI is changing almost every creative industry. What role do you believe AI should play in the art world?

AI should widen access to human cultural judgment, not manufacture a substitute for it.

Here is the narrower claim I am willing to defend. Culture lives in stories, images, spaces and contexts, and what conversational, multimodal AI can do for the first time is coordinate language, image and context in real time, at the exact moment a person stands in front of a work. Printing carried words, photography carried images, cinema carried movement. This is the first technology that can hold all of it together in a live dialogue, shaped around one person’s encounter.

Living with an artist taught me the boundary condition. Interpretation can extend a work, and it can also overwrite it. My wife’s practice made that concrete: a careless explanation does not add meaning to a piece, it replaces the meaning that was there. So the rule we build by is that interpretation stays traceable to its human source, and the artist’s own boundaries on their work outrank any inference the system could make.

What AI should never do in the art world is impersonate a cultural voice. It should make room for the real ones to be heard, by everyone, not only by the initiated.

How can AI help people discover, understand, and connect with art without taking away the human element?

By remembering that the human element is not something AI adds. It is something AI must refuse to remove.

The first rule is restraint. A good human mediator does not lecture; they ask a question and let you look a little longer. We design for the same behavior, the system protects your moment of thinking instead of rushing to explain everything. The insight you reach yourself is the one that stays.

The second rule is that the voice stays human. Everything the system says originates with artists, curators and gallery teams, and it stays attributable to them. And because no mediation is neutral, we keep it honest: more than one reading where more than one exists, uncertainty admitted when the record is thin, and deliberate silence when silence serves the encounter better.

The third rule is stepping back. The technology helps you find the exhibition you would have missed and understand the world behind a canvas, then it goes quiet, because the meeting between a person and an artwork is not ours to mediate forever.

The measure of good cultural AI is not how much it explains. It is how much more human the experience becomes.

KULTH combines AI, computer vision, and immersive storytelling. How are these technologies changing the traditional art experience?

The decisive moment is the first half-minute in front of a work, when curiosity either opens or closes.

The traditional art experience is weakest exactly there. A wall label offers a few words. The gallery room sheet adds a page of dense, intimidating text. An audio guide talks at everyone identically. Even the finest human mediators can only be in one place at a time, so the most important moment of the encounter usually passes unaccompanied. What is missing is a fitting hermeneutic frame at the moment of contact.

Computer vision makes the artwork addressable: you point your phone and the work’s world opens. But an open door is not yet an encounter. That is where the storytelling comes in,  and ours is built on Socratic questioning: the companion does not lecture, it asks, listens and builds the meaning with you, precisely while you are looking, not in a catalogue you read later. And AI-native design does the part no human system could: it works continuously between the artist’s statement, the gallery’s framing and the cultural identity of the person in front of the work, finding the bridge between the three.

None of this replaces the mediator. It complements them, the way a good question complements a good answer.

XR & Cultural Mobility

You often talk about “cultural mobility.” What does that concept mean to you?

Cultural mobility is the learned ability to move between works, meanings and places.

Intellectually, it is the capacity to navigate among the meanings of contemporary artworks and, through those meanings, between the works themselves. Most people experience art as isolated islands. A culturally mobile person starts to see the archipelago, movements, dialogues, arguments across decades. That capacity can be learned, and it compounds: every work you understand makes the next one richer.

As a lifestyle, it is something I arrived at last year in a cultural-mobility accelerator run by EIT Mobility Europe: interacting with art can become a form of everyday movement, like exercise for the mind. Imagine finishing a heavy day at the office and your app giving you not just the information but the reasons to stop at a gallery on the way home, a decompression that reaches what I call cultural wellbeing. Or moving through your city’s exhibition spaces the way others move through gyms or cafes.

Cultural mobility means art stops being a destination. It becomes a way of moving through the world.

How do you see physical galleries, museums, public spaces, and virtual worlds becoming more connected?

The connection begins when a cultural object can be recognized, contextualized and revisited across spaces.

It helps to be precise about what the public calls “AI”, because it is not one technology but a stack, and each layer connects spaces differently. Computer vision makes a physical artwork addressable. Multimodal models tie what the eye sees to the world of meanings around the work. Language systems turn that into conversation. And over time, machine learning builds a model of your cultural identity, what moves you, what you return to.

Let me make it concrete with Bucharest, my own city. You see a painting in a gallery on a Saturday. On Tuesday, walking home, your companion recognizes a mural by the same artist and picks up the conversation where Saturday left it. A month later, the gallery’s new show opens and the works already feel like acquaintances. Gallery, street and home stop being separate events and become one continuing route through the city’s culture.

Further out, world models and neural rendering may build immersive spaces from an artist’s universe. That is a possibility we watch, not a promise I am making. The near-term work is more modest and harder: making the physical cultural world of one city feel connected, one encounter at a time.

What could the ideal KULTH experience look like five years from now?

The ideal experience ends more often in an art exhibition space than on a screen.

Five years from now, I want KULTH to be the place people come for mental decompression,  a deliberately finite feed that ends with an invitation to go see the works in a real space. From there, the loop is simple: you build a cultural route through the galleries, studios and artist-run spaces around you; you visit with people from the community and have the kind of conversation that makes you grow; any artwork you point your phone at opens instantly, ready to be explored; and over time a living map of your taste shows you how you are changing, with the works and collections you have saved.

We ran a small first version of this loop in Bucharest in 2025, a three-month pilot with real visitors and real galleries. The five-year picture is that same loop at city scale, with enough depth on the other side that galleries, artists and artist-run spaces learn from every visit and can offer each person a better cultural experience around the works they present.

The Business of Art

How can technology complement the traditional art ecosystem of artists, galleries, collectors, and cultural institutions?

The art ecosystem does not need technology to replace judgment. It needs technology to extend the reach of judgment.

Artists, galleries, collectors and institutions hold something that took decades to build: authority, trust and cultural judgment. No algorithm creates that. What technology can do is carry it further than it has ever travelled, and the clearest place is human mediation, the most valuable layer of the ecosystem and the least scalable. A gallerist can walk ten visitors through an exhibition; they cannot walk ten thousand.

Working with the galleries and curators in our pilot taught us the condition on which any of this works: authority and context must remain with the people who own them. So every conversation an artwork holds stays in the artist’s and curator’s own register, within boundaries they set. For artists and galleries, their interpretive work stops evaporating when the show closes, it keeps engaging, and it tells them what audiences actually asked. For buyers and collectors, understanding comes before acquisition. For institutions, the depth of a private tour at the scale of a public one.

That is the complement: their judgment, carried further, never replaced, never outranked.

What new opportunities do you see for artists and galleries as technology enables deeper understanding of audience engagement?

For the first time, galleries and artists can hear the questions that were always asked silently. Every exhibition has a hidden conversation happening in front of the works,  visitors wondering, hesitating, connecting, and until now all of it evaporated at the door.

If that conversation becomes visible, everything sharpens. A gallery could learn which works stop people, which rooms confuse them, which themes bring them back; curation becomes intuition with evidence. An artist could discover which ideas in their practice actually move people, without surrendering the interpretation of the work. I say “could” deliberately, we are only beginning to test this feedback loop, and I would rather understate it than sell it early.

Two boundaries come before any of it. First, consent and aggregation: the system works on patterns people agreed to share, never on tracking individuals. Second, purpose: engagement data is not a measure of artistic value, and it is not a covert qualification of buyers. It exists to improve mediation and curation. The moment it starts steering what artists make or scoring who is ready to purchase, it has left the cultural domain and I want no part of it.

The opportunity is not more data. It is the first honest conversation the primary market has ever had with its audience.

How do you think the next generation of digitally native collectors will influence the art market?

The next collector will expect context before status.

Over 700 million people visit art museums every year, yet only a thin fraction ever becomes a buyer, not for lack of desire, but because the market speaks a language they were never taught. Digitally native collectors will not wait to be initiated. They expect to understand before they acquire: the work, the artist, the context, the price. They grew up personalizing everything they consume, and they will expect the same depth from culture.

My hypothesis, and it is a hypothesis we are testing, not a law, is that this pulls the market in two directions at once. Collecting opens downward: a first artwork becomes as natural a purchase as a first vinyl, because interpretation makes the decision feel safe and personal. And value concentrates around meaning: works carrying a living, explorable context will hold attention over works that sit silently on a wall.

One caution, because personalization is not automatically good. Used lazily, it just confirms the taste you already have. We want to use what we know about a person to open unfamiliar paths, fit as an entry point, never as the destination.

The Founder

What has been the biggest challenge in building KULTH,  technology, the market, education, or changing people’s mindset?

The mindset, without hesitation. The technology is still hard, but it is the kind of hard that gets solved in stages, and the market is real and measurable. The hardest part is that I am proposing a new reflex to two very different groups at once.

To the art world, I am saying: your interpretive work is too valuable to evaporate when the exhibition closes, let it keep working. That sounds obvious until you realize how deeply the ecosystem is built on scarcity of access. Asking a gallery to open its context to everyone, even permissioned and under their full control, asks them to rethink what their authority is made of.

To the public, I am saying: contemporary art is not a test you can fail, it is a conversation you can have. Most people don’t skip galleries because they dislike art. They skip them because nobody ever gave them a way in without the risk of feeling ignorant.

What keeps me going is that both sides want the same thing. Every gallerist I talk to lights up when they describe what a work means, they just can’t be everywhere. Every visitor I have watched in a gallery wants to ask, they just don’t want to look lost. Building the bridge between those two instincts is the whole company.

What have your previous entrepreneurial experiences taught you that you approach differently with KULTH?

After my economics studies I went deep into research, a PhD and a postdoc in bioeconomy, and then into two ventures that taught me more than any textbook. The first was a small speakeasy: a networking and art wine bar, a concept only a polymath mind would attempt, trying to weave three different domains into one room. The second was a food-biotech startup, which I developed up to a point.

Both were immensely educational, and I knew it even while building them, because throughout, I carried the quiet feeling that I was not developing the idea closest to my identity. What they taught me is exactly two things: focus on a visionary venture you believe only you can execute, and finance it inside ecosystems specialized for that vision.

KULTH is the first time I have felt an aplomb I had never experienced before, the complete absence of that quiet doubt. Every piece of who I am, the economist, the researcher, the polymath, the person who once built a bar around art and conversation, finally points in one direction. That is why my resilience in building it is unusual, even by founder standards.

I don’t build KULTH despite being a polymath. I’ve built it because nothing less than all of me was ever going to be enough.

What is one assumption about entrepreneurship that you no longer believe?

Alignment matters more than grit.

I no longer believe resilience is a character trait. The industry talks about grit as if it were something you are born with, a personality feature you either have or you don’t. My experience says the opposite.

In my earlier ventures I pushed through difficulties like everyone else, but the effort always had a ceiling, because part of me knew the idea wasn’t fully mine. With KULTH I discovered that resilience is not something you summon; it appears when the venture and the person are the same thing. When what you build sits exactly on your identity, persistence stops being discipline. It becomes the most natural state you know.

So I have stopped admiring grit and started looking for alignment. Founders don’t fail from a shortage of toughness. They fail from spending their toughness on ideas that were never truly theirs.

Beyond Art

Your vision extends beyond art into workplaces, homes, and shared spaces. Why do you believe this technology has potential beyond the cultural sector?

Most everyday spaces are culturally silent, even though the people inside them are not.

I learned that years before KULTH, in the speakeasy art wine bar I built. Put real artworks, curious people and a good bottle in the same room and the room changes, conversations go deeper, strangers stay longer, the art stops being decoration and starts being a third voice. That experiment convinced me the appetite for culture outside institutions is real; what is missing is mediation, not desire.

Offices, homes, lobbies, waiting rooms: people spend their lives in spaces that say nothing about who they are becoming. Watch what they actually do, they personalize everything they can, they want their environment to reflect them. An adaptive cultural layer can serve that: the same technology that lets a visitor converse with an artwork in a gallery can help someone build a home that expresses their taste, or a workplace that stimulates the people inside it.

I am deliberately patient about this horizon. Galleries are where mediation is hardest, and that is where we earn the right to everything beyond. The rest is a consequence, not a distraction.

If KULTH achieves its bigger vision, what would you like to change about the way people experience culture, technology, and creativity?

I want technology to return attention in better condition than it found it.

The distinction that matters is design, not medium. Extraction maximizes continuation,  infinite feeds engineered so you never leave. Cultural attention should maximize depth, recall and return to the world. I have felt the difference personally. I trained myself in philosophy from high school, and I have spent years walking exhibitions with my wife; both taught me that the experiences which change you are the ones that send you back into your life thinking. Culture was never meant to be consumed quickly. It was meant to be thought with.

If KULTH succeeds, the most engaging experience on your phone, or on the devices that come next, will also be the one that leaves you smarter, calmer and more yourself: a finite feed that ends with an invitation to step into the real world, not a trap that keeps you out of it.

And I would erase the idea that culture has prerequisites. The assumption that you need an education before you are allowed a relationship with art has kept hundreds of millions of people outside the door. Everyone deserves a conversation with a great artwork, at their own level, in their own words.

Looking Ahead

What are you most excited about building next, and what keeps you curious as a founder?

I am building trust before features.

Right now that means one thing: proving that a technology product can offer cultural experiences genuinely complementary to the ones people offer each other. I want KULTH to feel like your closest friend who is passionate about art and philosophy, walking beside you as you explore contemporary visual artworks together. Then the premium UX/UI layer, and mixed reality when the devices are ready for it.

The wedge stays narrow on purpose. We started with contemporary galleries and artist-run spaces because that is where mediation is most broken, and that is where the next years of work are. The same layer can later extend to books, monuments, buildings, every material cultural artefact an interactive, context-aware entry point into a living cultural world, but that is the graph expanding after the wedge holds, not instead of it. And around the product, the community: people who develop KULTH through the sheer enthusiasm of using it.

What keeps me curious is philosophical thinking about reality itself, and a question I find endless: what can I create for the human intellect now that AI makes technology so accessible to build with? I spent twenty years collecting domains, economics, management, philosophy, art, technology, and KULTH is the first venture that asks for all of them at once. For a mind like mine, that’s not a job. That’s the reward.

If you could leave the next generation of founders with one idea about technology, creativity, and human potential, what would it be?

Build doors, and be honest about who holds the keys.

I say this as someone who spent years building things that were not fully his, a bar, then a food-biotech venture, before finding the work that was. What those years taught me is that borrowed conviction collapses under pressure. So the first discipline is knowing why you build. Don’t build for the hype. Build for the generations to come.

Technology’s highest calling is not to replace human creativity, it is to carry it further than it could travel alone. Every founder working with AI faces the same choice, every day: use it to flatten what humans make into something cheaper, or use it to deepen what humans make into something further-reaching. The first path is easier and shorter. The second is the only one worth a life’s work.

And here is what I have learned about human potential: it is not scarce. It is badly distributed, locked behind doors of access, education and confidence. Creativity lives in everyone; what most people lack is a way in. Build that way in. Build products that leave people more capable than you found them, smarter, braver, more themselves.

The founders worth remembering won’t be the ones who made machines that imitate people. They’ll be the ones who made machines that made people larger.

Closing

For Marius, KULTH is an endeavor to reconnect contemporary art with its cultural context. He believes that art should be accessible, as artworks can lose much of their meaning when separated from the contexts in which they are created and presented.

By harnessing AI, KULTH seeks to build a bridge between contemporary art and the public, making artworks easier to interpret and understand without stripping away their human dimension.

For Marius, artificial intelligence is not a replacement for the human element in art, but a tool that can help preserve, present, and expand its reach. In this sense, KULTH offers a more immersive way for audiences to engage with contemporary art and discover the stories and contexts behind it.

For another inspiring story on building the future of global content, don’t miss our earlier feature: Lorraine Garcia on Nature, Authenticity, and Finding Meaning in Calm