Please join us for Critical AI in the Art Museum: Practices & Politics 🤖, a series of online discussions happening in October & November 2023 on Zoom hosted at ANU, all welcome 🤗.

In this moment of environmental, political and pandemic accelerated crisis, art has become increasingly entangled with the cultural logic of analytics platforms, Silicon Valley imaginaries and planetary scale computing. And yet, in the art museum, ‘the digital’ has largely been understood as a tool, rather than a cultural form with specific socio-technical affordances and politics.

Under these conditions, various AI imaginaries💭 have begun to prosper across the art museum’s operations. For the exhibitions team, AI is to be celebrated as a tool of a new artistic avant-garde 🖼; for senior managers, AI is to be championed as a talisman of the institution’s contemporary relevance 👏; for communications teams, AI promises predictive insights into audience behaviours, maximising ‘engagement’🤳; for development teams, AI offers a gateway to lucrative relationships with the tech sector🤝; for museum eductators, AI is a troubling object that demands new pedagogies and literacies 🤔.