The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) opened earlier this year as an online art platform. It is currently designing an artificial intelligence (AI) curator for its final show of the year, titled ‘This Show is Curated by a Machine’.
The curator, an AI bot machine, was created to address the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s curatorial question, ‘The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine’.
The AI curator will learn to curate by looking at the data set from the 2021 mowna Biennial, an exhibit by an international group of artists that ran from January through March 2021.
“We are interested in creating a machine that can curate in a diverse and ethical way, that is not founded in white supremacy or structures of inherent racism,” said Cari Ann Shim Sham, mowna’s co-founder and curator.
“Much of the art world is affected and effected by both of these issues. So mowna asks, is it possible to create an AI that looks at the art and curates with diversity, equity and inclusion?”
‘This Show is Curated by a Machine’
She added: “It is important to build this machine now, before other big tech companies design algorithms that erase the artist and define AI curation.”
The show will be available on mowna’s website, as will a detailed summary of the process and results, and thoughts about the future of AI related to art curation.
All mediums of artwork can be submitted to mowna’s show, although the works must have been completed after January 1, 2020. The deadline for submissions is August 20, 2021.
“It’s not about creating this bot that takes over the world. It’s about conversation and human communication with different people,” Joey Zaza, co-founder and curator at mowna, told Jing Culture & Commerce.
‘This Show is Curated by a Machine’ is running at the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art from September 23, 2021 through January 31, 2022.
Image: mowna
