The AI, Architecture and Exhibition (AAE) research project focuses on critically analysing the current usage and possible further applications of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, in particular within exhibition-making. The research and analyses developed for AAE are based on an interdisciplinary approach between exhibition and other space-related practices (such as architecture) in which matters of space, creativity, data production, collecting, and archiving are exposed and brought into discussion. Here critical thought is given to how AI can be used to develop exhibitions. The research particularly addresses practices that focus on the space itself and critically engages with available tools and processes for exhibition architecture and design. These practices touch upon key matters of the field, including creativity and automation, data awareness and accessibility, and work/labour concerns. 

By recognizing the importance of the “museum as a laboratory” motto for the early twentieth century museum, the present thesis expands the existing documentation with an investigation of the exhibition space as a laboratory within Museum and Curatorial Studies. For this purpose, the thesis centres on two defining moments of the field, that is: on the late 1960s and 1970s, when an anti-white cube critique, aligned with an expanding experimental and participatory artistic practice, prompted debates on the need to re-frame the modern museum and their practices; and on the late 1990s, when a turn towards education in curating and a concern with new digital and networked practices sparked a discussion on the limitations of the exhibition space and its functions. Within these contexts, we see a restatement of laboratory traits within the exhibition space in two particular exhibitions: the 1972 Jovem Arte Contemporânea (JAC) in a Brazil ruled by a dictatorship yet very much in tune with the international debates on the challenges of contemporary practices to exhibition-making and on the restructuring of the modern museum; and the 1999 Laboratorium exhibition in Belgium with their questioning of the forms and functions of the exhibition space as a space of (experimental) production. Matters of space and spatiality, therefore, take on a central role in this investigation. They further situate the notions of both laboratory and exhibition by perceiving them first and foremost as spaces and, most importantly, introduce a very under-represented matter in exhibition histories and its documentation, that is, in contrast to a curator-centred perspectives of past practices. The thesis, moreover, draws from idea of the “laboratory” as an operative term (Wershler et al, 2021) and argues that the search for an analogous relationship with it (the “as a lab” analogy) stands for a wish to transform the exhibition space from its container/content relationship into something that it is not, yet seeks to become. The analysis of the case studies, therefore, aims to identify these possible traits the exhibition space has gained and how it has been transformed through this analogous relationship with the lab. Through this analysis, the thesis offers a refreshed, spatially-oriented perspective on the limitations and transformative potentials of the exhibition space and, by doing so, the thesis brings to the surface a much needed discussion on its roles and formats at a time when matters of space and spatiality are becoming ever more pertinent to Museum and Curatorial Studies.

Based on existing issues associated with exhibiting online-based art and informed by previous approaches, the present thesis presents and analyzes examples of past and current exhibition platforms and curatorial strategies for online-based art in order to identify the potentials and constraints of the field and, subsequently, suggest further developments and possible actions. In order to provide a more grounded background to the current scenario, the thesis first investigated how online-based art has been exhibited since the 1990s. By doing so, it questions how past practices can contribute to a better understanding and development of the field today. For that purpose, the research relied mainly on existing literature from previous studies and on the still available primary sources of the analyzed projects. In addition to these resources, interviews were conducted as complementary references to the selected projects: Welcome to the Wired World (1995) and net_condition (1999); Platform Stockholm’s Curatron (2013 – ongoing); Link Art Center’s Link Cabinet (2014 – ongoing); ZKM’s ArtOnYourScreen (2014); the Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Web Residencies (2015 – ongoing); the Museum of Digital Art’s Hal 101 curating algorithm (2015 – ongoing); and the Archive of Digital Art’s CODeDOC Remediated exhibition (2016). The results of this investigation thus include: an overview of past and present platforms and curatorial strategies for online-based art, which identified significant shifts in their formats and discourses throughout the years (Chapter One); an analysis of current online exhibition platforms, which indicated a need to further question the terminology and to address the potentials of the interface for online-based art (Chapter Two); and, lastly, an overview of past and present community-building platforms, highlighting the current strategies and the importance of the network within the field, which then indicated an ongoing shift in the relationship between curators and artists as more collaborative and less hierarchical (Chapter Three). Furthermore, the thesis concludes that the current scenario asks for a more open, malleable and experimental curatorial practice – one that is aligned with the present culture and structures of the web, which is based on the concept of the perpetual beta, i.e., where platforms and practices are constantly updated and in transformation.

ArtOnYourScreen (2014) was an online exhibition platform developed by ZKM. The research and evaluation of the project consisted of archival document analysis, developing documentations and applying interviews to participating artists, curators and project managers. The result was an internal report, presented to the museum research and exhibition staff and managers. A further analysis of the exhibition platform was added to the Experimental Curating in Times of the Perpetual Beta Master Thesis.

Curating Images will offer an assembly of articles and conversations, with a focus on questions related to different curatorial practices concerning photo-based images: What are the considerations and challenges curator’s face today when they work on photo-based projects, and how do they navigate throughout the constantly changing appearance of the photographic medium? What kind of role do photo-based images occupy in contemporary exhibition- and curatorial practices? How are issues of representations and visibility dealt with? And what kind of mediation takes place while seeking interaction with the audiences? This volume offers the reader insights in a wide range of experiences, reflections and opinions from the perspective of curators, artists, scholars and other professionals in the fields who engage with the curation of photo-based images.

In the last two decades, we have seen a surge of artistic labs dedicated to the making of exhibitions, or exhibiting. Yet, exhibiting has always been a somewhat complex term in the field.

‘A Glossary of Lab Techniques—Extending The Lab Book

What techniques help to constitute the hybrid lab? What techniques perform and produce the lab’s real and imaginary, active and collective forms of doing, knowing, making, and unmaking?

The final chapter of The Lab Book provides an initial but incomplete catalog of nine techniques: 3D printing, collaborating, collecting, dis/assembling, experimenting, failing, living labs, prototyping, and testing. But what other terms would help to reflect the diverse practices of laboratories around the globe? In order to grow the catalog and help lab communities across the disciplines to reflect their own conditions of knowledge production, we want to to extend the existing glossary.’

When Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was officially founded in the late 1960s, a movement towards more collaborative approaches between artists and computer scientists and engineers was already in motion. This movement was in part encouraged by the growing accessibility to recent technological developments by those outside of the traditional academic, military and industrial sectors. Although more accessible, those technologies (mainly in the realm of kinetics and telematics) were still quite foreign to many practitioners in the arts, and thus those emerging artistic practices were inherently collaborative in nature. The E.A.T., founded by engineer Billy Klüver, together with Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman and Fred Waldhauer, was then set from the beginning to be a catalysis for “[…] the physical, economic, and social conditions necessary for the inevitable cooperation between artists, engineers and scientists, and members of industry and labor” (E.A.T., 1969a). They, therefore, sought to pave the way to a foreseen future scenario where artistic and scientific practices collide.

Based on existing issues associated with exhibiting online-based art and informed by previous approaches, the present thesis presents and analyzes examples of past and current exhibition platforms and curatorial strategies for online-based art in order to identify the potentials and constraints of the field and, subsequently, suggest further developments and possible actions. In order to provide a more grounded background to the current scenario, the thesis first investigated how online-based art has been exhibited since the 1990s. By doing so, it questions how past practices can contribute to a better understanding and development of the field today. For that purpose, the research relied mainly on existing literature from previous studies and on the still available primary sources of the analyzed projects. In addition to these resources, interviews were conducted as complementary references to the selected projects: Welcome to the Wired World (1995) and net_condition (1999); Platform Stockholm’s Curatron (2013 – ongoing); Link Art Center’s Link Cabinet (2014 – ongoing); ZKM’s ArtOnYourScreen (2014); the Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Web Residencies (2015 – ongoing); the Museum of Digital Art’s Hal 101 curating algorithm (2015 – ongoing); and the Archive of Digital Art’s CODeDOC Remediated exhibition (2016). The results of this investigation thus include: an overview of past and present platforms and curatorial strategies for online-based art, which identified significant shifts in their formats and discourses throughout the years (Chapter One); an analysis of current online exhibition platforms, which indicated a need to further question the terminology and to address the potentials of the interface for online-based art (Chapter Two); and, lastly, an overview of past and present community-building platforms, highlighting the current strategies and the importance of the network within the field, which then indicated an ongoing shift in the relationship between curators and artists as more collaborative and less hierarchical (Chapter Three). Furthermore, the thesis concludes that the current scenario asks for a more open, malleable and experimental curatorial practice – one that is aligned with the present culture and structures of the web, which is based on the concept of the perpetual beta, i.e., where platforms and practices are constantly updated and in transformation.

The motto of “museum as a laboratory” has been recurrently invoked within the museological context and in particular in exhibition-making, and its legacy can be traced since the beginning of the 20th century through figures such as Richard F. Bach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the historian and critic Siegfried Giedion. This analogy has been expanded more prominently to the exhibition space by attributing characteristics traditionally associated with science laboratories to making of exhibitions. In this seminar, Lia Carreira presents, through two historical examples, this complex relationship between the laboratory and the art exhibition space, highlighting its importance and function in the museological and exhibition-making field.

With: Lia Carreira | Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton (UK)

Moderation: Marta Lourenço | National Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon

The laboratory has been recurrently invoked within the Arts since the early twentieth century with figures such as Richard F. Bach in 1922 weaving the ties between art and industrial making under the rubric of the museum as a laboratory to convey the idea of a space for collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and Siegfried Giedion in 1929 calling for an “experimental laboratory” in every public institution as a department which would allow for the art of the present to be heard. This early laboratorisation of the museum has, since then, been extended to the particular space of the exhibition, in which the laboratory has taken many shapes and forms. This paper presents a relatively more recent approach to the exhibition as a lab motto through an analysis of the 1999 Laboratorium exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium. Laboratorium, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden, aimed at exploring the idea of the laboratory, in all its diversity, as a “workplace” by inviting practitioners from different fields to establish a form of “place where people exchange ideas around an experimental set-up”.

Under the theme »Curating AI«, Lia Carreira (moderator), Francis Hunger, Răzvan Ion & Magda Tyżlik-Carver will address the opportunities and challenges associated with the use of AI in the field of curation.

The five-part online panel »Taming AI« on art and AI is dedicated to the various areas in which artificial intelligence technologies are currently relevant for cultural institutions and not least for society.

‘Lia’s PhD project The exhibition space as a laboratory proposes to revisit past initiatives and document current strategies as to insert them within the historicization of curatorial practices, and to expand existing investigations in Curatorial Studies by taking into account the roles of and the relationships between the exhibition space, the laboratory and the experimental within those practices’.

‘Prognostics lectures map new areas of art, which challenge established forms of art, exhibition methods, and shake up societal norms and political thinking. Prognostics lecture series in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation’.