exhibition
01/03/2022
Harvard Art Museums
Long before computers came to pervade every aspect of modern life, museums were collecting, organizing, and storing data. The art museum is a kind of vast machine for making all kinds of objects interoperable, from bronze-age figurines to Renaissance paintings to contemporary performance-art works. Like our digital machines, museums engender wonderful experiences—and they’re also engines of bias, power, and invisibility. The term “machine learning” represents a family of systems that use algorithms to find patterns in data inferentially, without explicit instructions. Artists and media makers are experimenting with machine-learning tools to create new kinds of artworks. But roles for machine learning in the art museum are still rare in practice. Presented in the Lightbox Gallery, metaLAB’s projects explored emerging possibilities for machine-learning systems while exploring vital issues at the intersection of technology and culture. Variously playful, analytic, and critical, metaLAB’s experiments used the museums’ own data to expressive ends.