Dust and Data. The Art of Curating in the Age of AI

DUST AND DATA explores the changing role of curators in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where computers set out to grasp the meaning of works of art and computational creativity is materializing. Whereas the availability of digital versions of every piece of art is already taken for granted, the ability of computers to comprehend, analyse, catalog and arrange thousands of them in mere seconds, is just starting to be understood. At the same time moral and ethic issues concerning the use of AI are surfacing and need to be considered. DUST AND DATA will explore how AI can aid curating in the digitally pervasive 21st century. Curating now includes digital aspects on multiple levels: the curatorial subject matter itself became partly digital, changing curating into a more digital endeavor; museum collections are now more accessible but also contentually boundless due to unlimited digital references to data outside the confines of the respective collection; communication with the always-online audiences is becoming more digital too. DUST AND DATA will set out to rediscover the Glyptothek - a mostly forgotten collection of historical plaster casts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna testing a set of entirely new means for curating in the age of AI. These new means will be developed in an interdisciplinary endeavor uniting curators (Niko Wahl), AI experts (Arthur Flexer) and exhibition designers (Irina Koerdt and Sanja Utech), all jointly bringing this collection of plaster casts to a future where sculptures morph into code and code into works of art. DUST AND DATA will implement curatorial and architectural paths towards the holdings of the Glyptothek turning the often digital findings into physical and functioning shapes. We will use a format in between a hands-on workshop situation and academic and artistic discourse for an ongoing process of developing and assembling the blueprints for specific curatorial and architectural approaches. The ever growing amount of digital content waiting to be curated, plus latest AI progress in computational creativity have the potential to change the art of curating as a whole. AI could bring about a set of tools enabling versatile handling of large amounts of digital content in yet unprecedented ways. Genuinely new curatorial questions and approaches can be developed and tested within this setting. The task of translating the digital findings back to the physical realm will increase the importance of exhibition design in the curatorial process. DUST AND DATA is built around three fundamental research questions: - Can Artificial Intelligence tools be of use in the digital curatorial process? - Does the use of Artificial Intelligence change the art of curation? - Can the digital discoveries be made physical again?

[Text for the final exhibition] DUST AND DATA Artificial intelligence in the museum Wed, 06/09/2021 - Sun, 08/29/2021 The museums are now all digital. Much of the content in museums has also become digital - as copies and scans of the originals or as originally digital objects. Most of the collections are now much more accessible due to their digital indexing, at the same time curators and exhibition visitors have to deal with a flood of content inside and outside the exhibitions. Communication between museums and the now networked public is also becoming a digital endeavor as far as possible - not only in times of the pandemic. How will curating and exhibiting change through the use of new technologies? What publicly relevant options for use, presentation and storytelling are there for the huge digital legacy that is currently being created? How can the development of powerful ground truths and displays of future digital applications be influenced and shaped (and not left solely to the large technology groups)? Dust and Data is an artistic research project that does not deal with digitization per se, but with the possibilities, opportunities and dangers of artificial intelligence that build on it. Using individual museums and collections, we describe new ways of exhibiting and viewing. Our companions and guides are AI-driven machines that not only learn to understand the meaning of works of art and collection objects, but also sometimes become creative themselves. When curators, audience and machines come together, new connections, new analysis results, new narratives emerge. We show a new way of working in a museum and our (partly open) questions about the participation of the new technologies. A drawing machine sketches the thoughts and drafts of the project team throughout the duration of the exhibition. The drawing machine appears as an "endless display". As long as the paper lasts and the project team thinks, their content is inexhaustible and constantly pumps new ideas into the exhibition space. In this project, the Folklore Museum Vienna becomes the host for new insights into the collections and exhibition rooms of the Glyptothek, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Belvedere and also addresses its own collection. Curation: Niko Wahl, Arthur Flexer, Irina Koerdt, Alexander Martos, Sanja Utech