Curating with AI: Risks and Opportunities

Technologies falling under the umbrella term ‘artificial intelligence’ have been embraced and critiqued by art practitioners and cultural institutions around the world. This session explores the potential uses and risks of incorporating AI into the curation of art exhibitions. The idea that a ‘self-learning human-machine system’ could curate an exhibition was debated by the Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art (Impett and Krysa 2021). In 2023, combined machine curation and audience interaction was incorporated into the Helsinki Art Biennial (Del Caeillo et al., 2023), and in 2024, The Nasher Museum of Art used ChatGPT to curate a supposedly ‘groundbreaking exhibition’ (Richardson 2024).

Researchers have also explored whether computer vision can distinguish between exhibitions curated by a human and by an algorithm (Van Davier et al., 2024). By taking curation out of the hands of humans, can AI be used to decolonize museum practices and propose innovative connections between artworks? Might the sheer use of technology in curation have a democratizing effect by stimulating the interest of new audiences? Alternatively, does the delegation of curation to a machine erode a fundamentally social aspect of museum practice? Aside from its environmental impact, does the use of AI create a hierarchy that privileges those institutions with access to sophisticated technical resources and staff capacities? As public and private funding floods into technology rather than arts and heritage, there is a pressing need to determine the gains and losses of AI curation and the implications of a new techno-curatorial imaginary.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, k.j.brown@lboro.ac.uk

Dr Alison Kahn, Loughborough University, a.kahn@lboro.ac.uk