This volume addresses a shift in contemporary curatorial field largely attributed to the ubiquitous presence of information and computational technologies, the rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence, and the reclaiming of subaltern knowledges. It poses questions about the implications of these “super-intelligences” for contemporary art and culture, and the new possibilities for curatorial practice and its future forms.

What are the lessons to be learnt? What can the practice of curating learn from AI, what can AI learn from curating, and how can both unlearn knowledges derived from undemocratic, centralised and colonialist frameworks of humans and machines? What kind of future infrastructures and curatorial practices can develop from the coming together of diverse human and non-human entities? What new kinds of curatorial knowledge can emerge from desires to reclaim marginalised categories such as automation, machine, nature, women, black and people of colour, indigenous people, LGBTQIA, from their usual positions in knowledge taxonomies as epistemological objects of study rather than curating subjects? What new understandings, relationships, and new entities can emerge once open to the possibilities afforded by expanded human and machine epistemologies?

The book is part reader and part new commissions, compiled by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Towards Collective Practices with Humans, Machines, and Others by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

I. Conceptual Threads

Towards a Poetics of Artifcial Superintelligence: How Symbolic Language Can Help us Grasp the Nature and Power of What is Coming by Nora N. Khan

A Visual Introduction to AI by Elvia Vasconcelos

Notes on a (Dis)continuous Surface by Murad Khan

The Automation of Creation: From Template Art to AI by Olga Goriunova

MI3 (Machine Intelligence 3), 2018 by Suzanne Treister

Queer Motto API Manual: To Know Exactly How Many Times to Cry by Winnie Soon and Helen V. Pritchard

II. Expanded Curatorial Field

Flexible Contexts, Filtering, and Automation: Models of Online Curatorial Practice by Christiane Paul

Collaboration and Community in Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace by Mikhel Proulx, with Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati

Curating Art platforms in the Networked Environment — A Timeline by Marialaura Ghidini

Curating Platforms for Shanghai Biennale by Mi You

Crash Blossoms/ IF & ONLY IF: A Lo-Fidelity AI Newspaper by Nathan Jones, Sam Skinner and Tom Schofeld

Curating in the Wild: Taming the Indeterminacy of the Networked Image by Nicolas Malevé, Katrina Sluis and Gaia Tedone

Virtual Exhibits: Museum Infrastructures and the Management of Artworks’ Presence by Gabriel Menotti

Beyond Ownership: Sustaining Art as Practices and Processes by Ashley Lee Wong

Smart Contracts and the Becoming-Curatorial of Digital Works of Art by Martin Zeilinger

III. Future Curating

Creative AI Lab: The Back-End Environments of Art-Making by Eva Jäger

Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art × Public AI by Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jäger, Alasdair Milne and Gary Zhexi Zhang

Beyond Matter: An Inquiry into the Modes of Exhibition Practices in the Virtual Condition by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Training the Archive: A Research Project on Automated Structuring of Museum Collection Data to Support Curatorial Practice by Dominik Bönisch

Curation and its Statistical Automation by Means of Artificial Intelligence by Francis Hunger

Rethinking Curating in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine by Joasia Krysa and Leonardo Impett