Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating
edited by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver
- DATA Browser
- Published: forthcoming
- ISBN: 978-1-78542-157-0
- PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-156-3
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, with contributions by Dominik Bönisch, CROSSLUCID, Marialaura Ghidini, Olga Goriunova, Francis Hunger, Leonardo Impett, Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jäger, Nathan Jones, Murad Khan, Nora N. Khan, Joasia Krysa, Jason Edward Lewis (Kanaka Maoli/Samoan), Mikhel Proulx, Nicolas Malevé, Gabriel Menotti, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Alasdair Milne, Christiane Paul, Helen V. Pritchard, Tom Schofield, Skawennati (Kanien’kehá:ka), Sam Skinner, Katrina Sluis, Winnie Soon, Gaia Tedone, Suzanne Treister, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Elvia Vasconcelos, Ashley Lee Wong, Mi You, Martin Zeilinger, Gary Zhexi Zhang.
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.
Editor Bios
Joasia Krysa is Professor of Exhibition Research and Director of the Institute of Art and Technology at Liverpool John Moores University, with an adjunct position at Liverpool Biennial. She served as curator of Helsinki Biennial 2023, co-curator of Liverpool Biennial 2016, and part of curatorial team for dOCUMENTA (13). Her publications include co-edited books New Directions May Emerge (Helsinki Art Museum/Helsinki Biennial 2023), Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (MIT Press 2015), Curating Immateriality (Data Bowser vol 3, 2016), and chapters in Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of New Media Art (Bloomsbury 2025), Networks (Whitechapel/MIT Press 2014) and The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (2015). She is co-author of an online curatorial software project Kurator (2004) and a curatorial AI series The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine (2021-2023). Her curatorial work was presented, amongst others, at KANAL Centre Pompidou Brussels, ZKM Media Art Centre, The Whitney Museum of American Art’s artport, and Tate Modern London.
Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, director of the Centre for Critical Data Practices at Aarhus University, and an independent curator. Her research explores data-driven digital transformation in knowledge practices. She develops participatory methods for data practices beyond BigTech extractivism through speculative approaches and open data principles in research and educational projects, such as Fermenting Data and Curating Data. She is co-author of Boundary Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-editor of Executing Practices (Open Humanities Press, 2018).