Defining Generative Curation
Crucially, we conceive generative curation beyond merely “using AI as a tool”. Instead, generative curation treats curatorial practice itself as a programmable, procedural, and co-authored system. For this symposium, we define generative curation as the design and critical deployment of procedures, models, and rule-based systems (computational or hybrid) for curatorial purposes, including collections of art and cultural data, in the context of exhibitions, archives, museums, and cultural institutions. Moreover, these generative systems can iteratively produce, recombine, or adapt curatorial outcomes over time. These outcomes include (but are not limited to) selection and sequencing of works in terms of spatial, temporal, and narrative arrangement; interpretive layers; public programs; and the circulation of documentation.
This symposium stems from the tradition of curation in museums, archives, collections, and galleries. Historically rooted in the traditions of selection, care, and the scholarly contextualization of artworks, the curator’s role has evolved to become a central form of artistic and intellectual authorship. While we acknowledge the broad expansion of curatorial practice across domains, materials, and institutional framings, this symposium does not rehearse that expansion. Our focus is precise: to define, interrogate, and advance generative curation. But precisely because of the pervasiveness of these technologies, it expands to the more transversal implications of the curation of culture. The symposium, therefore, raises the question: What is the role of curation in the creation of knowledge? The crucial and radical choice of what to include and how, from a large collection, is now of renewed currency—there is so much material, a fight for exposure and public reach, a transformation of languages, media, and social codes that change the status of art and culture, and their mediated formats through internet culture.
Cultural institutions and independent initiatives increasingly rely on data-driven pipelines, digital platforms, fast and mediatized formats and platforms, and also AI-assisted workfl ows. This raises urgent questions about authorship and accountability; consent, bias, and provenance in datasets; institutional governance; reproducibility and documentation; and the ethics of automation in cultural labor. Generative curation offers both opportunities (scalability, responsiveness, new forms of audience address) and risks (opacity, technical capture, aesthetic homogenization) that demand rigorous debate and demonstration.
Within this expanded landscape, the blurring distinction between artist as curator and curator as artist is increasingly complexified, also by the aperture to collective and more-than-human agency. This raises fundamental questions about how we curate images, text, and other materials through/with AI models, and how we curate AI-generated content itself. What are the implications of using these tools and not using them? How are generative tools included in the curation process, and how are we defining curating in both the physical and the digital? How are these tools permeating the curatorial discourse and practice? This definition is a point of departure to be tested, refined, and contested so that, collectively, we can map the concept’s boundaries. Given the complexity and multidimensionality of curation, the implication of AI models constitutes an active surface of contact that both articulates and reconfigures the many elements, concepts, and actors involved, opening new problems and reformulating previous ones, and, therefore, requires an interdisciplinary, collective, and critical discussion.
Emergent Curatorial Practices With and Against AI
We propose to investigate how generative technologies compel us to move beyond anthropocentric models of narrative, taste, and judgment. What does it mean to «curate» when aesthetic decisions, the construction of exhibition narratives, and even the generation of art itself are shared with non-human agents? This symposium invites contributors to question the core tenets of artistic curation: its epistemological foundations, its claims to authority, and its ethical responsibilities in an era of algorithmic logic.
We invite contributions that reflect on the following key topics:
1. The Curatorial Agent: Authorship, Agency, and Judgment
The use of algorithmic techniques and, in particular, AI models is often perceived as a challenge to previous understanding of curatorial authorship and aesthetic agency and authority, but does this constitute a delegation of responsibility or a type of co-authorship? Moreover, how does the imposed worldview encoded in different AI models play a role in curatorial narratives? And, is there a place for non-aligned, dissentive narratives or space for disagreement in curatorial practices with AI?
2. Technological Innovations and New Exhibition Methodologies
New multimodal AI models’ unprecedented capacity to connect disparate artworks and media can help revisit and challenge traditional art historical categorizations and exhibition narratives, including globalized curatorial formats like the ‘white cube’. How might AI’s capacity to process vast visual and textual data reshape our understanding of art history and the canon itself?
3. Ethical Implications: Algorithmic Bias and Specific Context Analysis
There is an increasing awareness of different types of AI biases, but what happens when AI is used for the detection of previously unnoticed biases in collections?
Moreover, does AI’s far-reaching sight lead to both the rediscovery of unnoticed figures and practices and/or a form of algorithmic colonialism? What are the agencies, challenges, and opportunities for generative curation regarding both culturally specific and politically sensitive or conflictual contexts?
5. Future Directions: New Art Experiences and Interdisciplinary Frontiers
Current experiments inhabit a middle ground and bridge between scientific research and artistic practice, pointing to new interdisciplinary forms of creation and exhibition. How should we reimagine generative curatorial practice without losing touch with traditional art historical and curatorial skills? And, in a context of ever-updating technology, do new generative curatorial projects need to forcefully embrace a context of ever-updating technology? How does this context redefine the concept of a ‘finished’ artwork? How might AI-driven curation reshape the experience of the participants and audiences?
