Article published In:
Information VisualizationEdited by Isabel Meirelles, Marian Dörk and Yanni Loukissas
[Information Design Journal 27:1] 2022
► pp. 21–34
Edited by Isabel Meirelles, Marian Dörk and Yanni Loukissas
[Information Design Journal 27:1] 2022
► pp. 21–34
Surprise machines
Revealing Harvard Art Museums’ image collection
Surprise Machines is a project of experimental museology that sets out to visualize the entire image collection of the Harvard Art Museums, with a view to opening up unexpected vistas on more than 200,000 objects usually inaccessible to visitors. The project is part of the exhibition organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard entitled Curatorial A(i)gents and explores the limits of artificial intelligence to display a large set of images and create surprise among visitors. To achieve this feeling of surprise, a choreographic interface was designed to connect the audience’s movement with several unique views of the collection.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, choreographic interface, digital archives, experimental museology, network visualization
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Harvard Art Museums
- 3.Can machines curate?
- 4.How to map 200,000 images
- 5.Designing a post-pandemic, choreographic interface
- 6.A substantial drawback
- 7.Conclusions
-
Bibliography
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
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