UBERMORGEN, Leonardo Impett, Joasia Krysa: The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine
2021
UBERMORGEN, Leonardo Impett, Joasia Krysa: The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine
UBERMORGAN, screenshot of The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine, 2021
The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine reimagines the future of curating in light of AI as a self-learning human-machine system. Developed by the artist duo UBERMORGEN in collaboration with digital humanist Leonardo Impett and curator Joasia Krysa, the project features a group of technical machine-learning processes collectively named B3(NSCAM).
The B3(NSCAM) software uses datasets from Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Biennial, among other sources. It processes them linguistically and semiotically, calculating the probability of particular words to appear, thus generating endless combinations for potential Liverpool and Whitney Biennials. These imagined occurrences manifest as texts—for example, seemingly conventional artist biographies and curatorial statements—that continuously rewrite themselves. Remaining fluid and ungraspable, the texts appear in windows on a range of animated visual backgrounds that allude to the sixty-four parallel universes of possible biennials constructed by the AI.
Clicking on the interface’s spinning wheels launches a new exhibition world on an animated graphic. Each is accompanied by a soundtrack from a TikTok playlist, referencing the mix of creative expression and preconfigured elements in digital tools. The respective universes are created by subtle changes in the software’s parameters, for example, giving more weight to one dataset—such as the Whitney or Liverpool Biennial—over another, or simply generating variations of biographies for artists with the same first or last name. Taken together, these textual and graphic spaces narrate and visualize the impossible, absurd endeavor of an AI to curate on the basis of what it has learned from human understandings of art.
This project includes a background with a flashing graphic effect.
The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine is commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art, with support from Liverpool John Moores University, Pro Helvetia, Federal Chancellery of Austria, and the City of Vienna.
UBERMORGEN is an artist duo founded in 1995 by lizvlx (b. 1973; Linz, Austria) and Hans Bernhard (b. 1973; New Haven, Connecticut). Their exhibition history includes presentations at the New Museum, New York; Somerset House, London; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; National Art Gallery, Bulgaria (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius (2015); Serpentine Galleries, London (2014); Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia; ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2013); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
Dr. Leonardo Impett (b. 1992; London, United Kingdom) is a digital humanist working at the intersection of computer vision and art history and professor in digital humanities at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He has a background in information engineering and machine learning, and was previously a digital humanities scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome; a digital humanities fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; a member of the Image and Visual Representation Laboratory at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland; and an associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute for Artistic Research in Music, Ghent, Belgium.
Joasia Krysa (b. 1969; Lublin, Poland) is a professor of exhibition research and head of art and design at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom, with an adjunct position at the Liverpool Biennial. Her first curatorial software experiment was launched at Tate Modern, London, in 2005 and published in Curating Immateriality (2006). She was part of the curatorial team of Documenta 13; co-curator of the 2016 Liverpool Biennial; curatorial advisor for the Sapporo International Art Triennale 2020 and the Helsinki Biennale; curator of the Helsinki Biennale 2023, and is artistic director of Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark.
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