ABSTRACT:
Museums seek new ways to engage, enchant and educate audiences.
In the future, Artificial Intelligence will play an increasingly important role in audience-orientated digital learning and engagement offers as well as in scientific terms as a research companion for museum curators. Now first steps in this direction are being taken in small experimental projects as for example in the AI project presented here “The Infinite Loop ring”. It is a joint project between artists
and art museums. AI can inspire artists interested in interrogating the past, working along similar lines as museum curators do in processes of data gathering and interpretation. “The Infinite Loop ring” shows how (art) historical museum collections can be used for new artistic questions and demonstrates the development potential of museum artefacts. At the same time, curators and artists can enter into
an exciting new dialogue with visitors with the help of such creative, forward-looking projects.
The EVA Berlin conference – Electronic Media & Art, Culture and History is the annual forum for electronic documentation and visualisation techniques in the cultural sector. The 27th EVA Berlin TRANSFORM will take place from 29 November to 1 December 2023 in the Kunstgewerbemuseum at the Kulturforum. 'Game-changing' technologies are at the centre of this year's event.
TRANSFORM
Game-changing technologies are at the heart of the EVA Berlin 2023 conference. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain and XReality applications are the innovative drivers in the ecosystems of the cultural sector, in creative industries and in artistic production. Haptic components of a work can be made tangible and pictorial representations can be put into appropriate words. A landscape painting gains an acoustic horizon of experience as a soundscape, or it is embedded in a game setting as an animated weather backdrop.
The educational mission in cultural institutions benefits from these possibilities. There are fundamentally new ways to interact with the audience and to address a broader public. Multimodal access and personalized communication services support the inclusive demands of today’s visitors and open up for a barrier-free perception also by disadvantaged or impaired audiences.
At the same time, innovative technological tools have become firmly established in the fields of documentation, conservation and reconstruction. Machine learning tools ranging from linguistic analysis of historical records to OCR on handwritten texts are already providing valuable metadata for documentation. Digital twins are successfully utilized in the conservation and restoration of artworks to analyse damage, to suggest restoration methods, or even to plausibly reconstruct the colours and textures of destroyed artefacts.
However, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Generatability’ also entails serious risks. The new coexistence of human, machine and objects predictably dissolves familiar ties to the factual, to the material testimony of the artefacts and to the physical presence at the scene of the real. This raises questions of credibility and verification. Who are we actually talking to when entering into dialogue with an algorithmic counterpart?
