DATA browser 10
CURATING SUPERINTELLIGENCES: A READER ON AI AND FUTURE CURATING

Edited by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver
Published in 2025 by Open Humanities Press
ISBN (print): 978-1-78542-157-0
ISBN (PDF): 978-1-78542-156-3
398 pages

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Outline:

This volume addresses a shift in contemporary curatorial field largely attributed to the ubiquitous presence of information and computational technologies, the rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence, and the reclaiming of subaltern knowledges. It poses questions about the implications of these “super-intelligences” for contemporary art and culture, and the new possibilities for curatorial practice and its future forms.

What are the lessons to be learnt? What can the practice of curating learn from AI, what can AI learn from curating, and how can both unlearn knowledges derived from undemocratic, centralised and colonialist frameworks of humans and machines? What kind of future infrastructures and curatorial practices can develop from the coming together of diverse human and non-human entities? What new kinds of curatorial knowledge can emerge from desires to reclaim marginalised categories such as automation, machine, nature, women, black and people of colour, indigenous people, LGBTQIA, from their usual positions in knowledge taxonomies as epistemological objects of study rather than curating subjects? What new understandings, relationships, and new entities can emerge once open to the possibilities afforded by expanded human and machine epistemologies?

The book is part reader and part new commissions, compiled by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver.

Contents:

Introduction: Towards Collective Practices with Humans, Machines, and Others

Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

I. Conceptual Threads

Towards a Poetics of Artifcial Superintelligence: How Symbolic Language Can Help us Grasp the Nature and Power of What is Coming

Nora N. Khan

A Visual Introduction to AI

Elvia Vasconcelos

Notes on a (Dis)continuous Surface

Murad Khan

The Automation of Creation: From Template Art to AI

Olga Goriunova

MI3 (Machine Intelligence 3), 2018

Suzanne Treister

Queer Motto API Manual: To Know Exactly How Many Times to Cry

Winnie Soon and Helen V. Pritchard

II. Expanded Curatorial Field

Flexible Contexts, Filtering, and Automation: Models of Online Curatorial Practice

Christiane Paul

Collaboration and Community in Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

Mikhel Proulx, with Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati

Curating Art platforms in the Networked Environment — A Timeline

Marialaura Ghidini

Curating Platforms for Shanghai Biennale

Mi You

Crash Blossoms/ IF & ONLY IF: A Lo-Fidelity AI Newspaper

Nathan Jones, Sam Skinner and Tom Schofeld

Curating in the Wild: Taming the Indeterminacy of the Networked Image

Nicolas Malevé, Katrina Sluis and Gaia Tedone

Virtual Exhibits: Museum Infrastructures and the Management of Artworks’ Presence

Gabriel Menotti

Beyond Ownership: Sustaining Art as Practices and Processes

Ashley Lee Wong

Smart Contracts and the Becoming-Curatorial of Digital Works of Art

Martin Zeilinger

III. Future Curating

Creative AI Lab: The Back-End Environments of Art-Making

Eva Jäger

Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art × Public AI

Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jäger, Alasdair Milne and Gary Zhexi Zhang

Beyond Matter: An Inquiry into the Modes of Exhibition Practices in the Virtual Condition

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Training the Archive: A Research Project on Automated Structuring of Museum Collection Data to Support Curatorial Practice

Dominik Bönisch

Curation and its Statistical Automation by Means of Artificial Intelligence

Francis Hunger

Rethinking Curating in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine

Joasia Krysa and Leonardo Impett

The book expands on Liverpool Biennial’s journal Stages 09: The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine, edited by Joasia Krysa and Manuela Moscoso on the occasion of Liverpool Biennial 2021, and ideas first introduced in DATA Browser 03: Curating Immateriality (2006) edited by Joasia Krysa.
Produced with additional support from the Institute of Art & Technology, Liverpool John Moores University, and Digital x Data Research Centre, London South Bank University, and additional support from Aarhus University.