The next biennial should be curated by a machine

The project makes reference to 'The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist' (e-flux, 2003) - which questioned the structures of the art world and the privileged position of curators within it – and extends this questioning to machines. Under this overarching concept, two parallel experiments have been realised to date, applying various machine learning techniques (a subset of AI) to ‘curate’ datasets derived from various biennial exhibitions.

Experiment B³(NSCAM) is a collaboration with artists Ubermorgen, commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art for its online platform artport and Liverpool Biennial. It uses datasets from the two commissioning institutions, amongst others, archival curatorial statements, artists names and biographies from past editions. Processing datasets linguistically and semiotically, the AI algorithms ‘learn’ their style and content, calculating a future probability for words to appear, cutting and mixing them together, to generate endless combinations of possible instances of Biennials in flux.

A parallel experiment, AI-TNB is a collaboration with Eva Cetinić and MetaObjects with Sui, exploring human-machine co-authorship. It uses data from Liverpool Biennial 2021 – the photographic documentation of artworks, their titles and descriptions – and applies Open AI’s ‘deep learning’ model CLIP to generate new interpretations of, and connections between, works and texts. As visitors navigate the project, they create their own paths through the material, each journey becoming a co-curated human-machine online iteration of the Biennial saved to the project’s public repository.

Credits:
Series curator – Joasia Krysa
Series technical concept – Leonardo Impett
Series website – Yehwan Song

Experiment B³(NSCAM) is a collaboration with artists Ubermorgen, 2021. Commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art for its online portal artport and Liverpool Biennial. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-next-biennial

Experiment AI-TNB is a collaboration with Eva Cetinić (experiment machine learning concept and implementation), MetaObjects (Ashley Lee Wong and Andrew Crowe) and Sui (web development and design), 2021. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) programme Towards a National Collection under grant AH/V015478/1. https://ai.biennial.com/

For a larger discussion on AI and curating, see Liverpool Biennial’s journal Stages vol 9/2021, edited by Joasia Krysa and Manuela Moscoso.https://www.biennial.com/journal/issue-9

the next biennial should be curated by a machine

The project explores the relation between curating and Artificial Intelligence, and a possibility of developing an experimental system capable of curating, based on human-machine learning principles. Unfolding as a series of experiments applying machine learning techniques to curating art exhibitions, the project asks how AI might offer new alien perspectives on curatorial practices and curatorial knowledge. What would the next Biennial, or any large-scale exhibition, look like if AI machines were asked to take over the curatorial process and make sense of a vast amount of art world data that far exceeds the capacity of the human curator alone?......More