Surprise machines: revealing Harvard Art Museums' image collection
It addresses making large museum collections accessible and engaging for visitors, though it appears incremental in applying AI to museology.
The project visualized over 200,000 images from the Harvard Art Museums to create unexpected views for visitors, using a choreographic interface that linked audience movement to unique displays.
Surprise Machines is a project of experimental museology that sets out to visualize the entire image collection of the Harvard Art Museums, intending to open up unexpected vistas on more than 200,000 objects usually inaccessible to visitors. Part of the exhibition Curatorial A(i)gents organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the project explores the limits of artificial intelligence to display a large set of images and create surprise among visitors. To achieve such a feeling of surprise, a choreographic interface was designed to connect the audience's movement with several unique views of the collection.