Overview

This project is ‘reimagining tech’ through its collective reframing of AI futures and creativity in the cultural heritage sector, engaging new methodological approaches and research partners to deepen knowledge and understanding. The project interrogates the impact of AI on cultural heritages and the presentation of these AI-fuelled cultural futures through public-facing exhibition spaces across the UK and Germany. We will examine the agency of AI, exploring its role in creativity as a device that is both generative and reflective.

The first, UK-based exhibit will examine the reflective role of AI in the creative process, prompting viewers to consider the multi-faceted influences of AI on the creative process (using platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest). The second, Germany-based exhibit will heed Dr Joasia Krysa’s call for an art exhibit explicitly curated by AI, exploring the mechanisms by which an algorithm sees and selects amongst cultural objects. This exhibit will co-occur physically and digitally, questioning the role of the viewers’ embodied experience. These exhibits will be undergirded by a sensory ethnographic investigation of industry best practices for presenting AI, conducted within existing exhibitions at Berlin’s Futurium.

Partnering with international curators and researchers across multiple sites, this programme will consist of three key stages: i) the design and development of the exhibits, ii) the implementation of these on-site, AI-fuelled experiences, and iii) the evaluation and assessment of the audiences’ experience of these exhibits. Focusing on AI futures and curating the visitor experience, this project aims to situate AI’s agency in knowledge transmission and creativity, and to speak back to the ways AI is currently framed and perceived in creative contexts. We consider the narratives and spaces used to frame its “futures”, AI’s agency in the creative process and the embodied experiences of AI generated art.