In Search Of The Intelligent Museum

even though my

talk’s title rather boldly declares

that i would be on a mission in search

of the intelligent museum

i have to say that i’ve never seen

myself as a museum person

i can recall from my youth that the art

museum experience

was always too much of an intangible

experience for me so there were artworks

they were hanging on the walls or they

were put on pedestals

but in almost any case there were those

captions saying don’t touch

so it was not very easy for me to engage

with it

i didn’t get any access

later i had my first encounters with

media

arts and participatory artistic practice

and this was like a revelation to me

and today here i stand i’m a media

artist i

quite often use state-of-the-art

technologies in

many different configurations in

artistic projects

i like to observe how

technology can change the societal

status quo

and how it can unfold disruptive

potentials

and basically that’s at what i’m doing

at the zkm

center for art in media where i

currently work

i work at artistic research and

development

the zkm is a rather unique institution

which is operating at the intersection

of art

sciences technology and society

our core mission is to perpetuate the

classical arts

into the digital age and we are not only

doing this

by means of artistically producing

and developing but we also have a

world-class museum

and we have a top-notch art and museum

educational squad

and together with these people i did

have some vivid exchange and we were

discussing the recent developments in

artificial intelligence

because we were observing in how far our

society gradually transforms into

a data-driven society that’s not least

due to the advent of the artificial

intelligence technologies

okay so now you might think oh ai

that’s something for the i.t people or

for the robotics engineers

or for the data scientists but i think

it’s about time

that we make it a matter of public

concern

those technologies they are permanently

surrounding us in the digital

age while some of those might actually

get considered

your everyday little helpers just like

text translation tools auto

transcription

or maybe those handy systems on

youtube netflix spotify etc

some other technologies might actually

fuel your everyday dystopia

and among these are surveillance

technologies

deep fakes and politically motivated

opinion robots

so how can we inspire and encourage

people

to critically engage with artificial

intelligence and together with the

german museum in munich

we made a project out of it the

intelligent museum

that’s a four year spanning project

which we kicked off earlier this year

it is generously funded by the german

federal foundation of culture

and its overall goal is to

experimentally test out a new museum

experience

would like to open up a big field of

experimentation

for art science technology

and public discourse

and with this project we are drawing on

an expanded concept of the museum

so what is the role and the function of

a museum today

is it collecting preserving exhibiting

maybe all three but we believe that it

is about time that we expand beyond that

scope

so to us museums are

social spaces those are open community

places

people come together they meet they

exchange

ideas and they can critically reflect on

those ideas

so i think this already does sound like

the ideal breeding ground

for public discourse to appear

and we would like to enable our visitors

to being able to broadly discuss ai

topics

we would on the one hand like them to

discuss the chances and the potentials

but also the risk then the possible

ethical implications

and we will hook them up with artists

scientists technologists

and then together we can also tackle the

big questions

how might ai change the concept of work

in the future

how might it affect democracy how

could it change generally our concepts

of

what the future might look like so

as we are also strongly believing that

museums

should be catalysts to the people’s

creativity

curiosity and their eagerness to learn

we will

have experiential presentations

we are not the spokespeople of the

industry but there will be

ai technology sandboxes there will be

lots of hands-on demonstrations

we want that the visitors can get their

hands on the technologies

simply trying them out so that they can

then

discuss them properly and as we are an

art institution

there obviously will be artistic

presentations

so the project will be quite open

to a whole variety of international

artists who work

in many different genres this could be

interactive installations this is a very

specific

art form which draws on the activities

of the visitors so it is a responsive

art form it

adapts to the people’s feedback

but there will also be data

visualizations and sonifications

generative video device art web-based

art you name it

we are interested in the questions those

artists

might evoke we are interested in

how far they expand or extend and stress

the notion we have on artificial

intelligence

so they will be given from us basically

money

and time to being able to elaborate on

their ideas

and to actually producing an artwork we

will share our

knowledge and our resources with them

and we will help them out with the

implementation

and if we don’t come any further then we

will just point them to the smart people

who might know better than we do

we also believe that artists can be very

strong catalysts to marginalized voices

and a museum should be a very inclusive

space

those are polyphonic places where every

voice should be heard and where

everybody should have equal access

so we ask ourselves the question could

we use artificial intelligence

to make the museum experience more

inclusive

and more accessible

so we developed that idea we

successfully want to

build a cognitive system the museum

should get

transformed into a cognitive system so

what is a cognitive system

this is a digital system which has

interfaces

between the physical surroundings on the

one hand

and the visitors on the other hand so it

has

sensors which can basically determine

things

based on how people react

the intelligent museum in the end it

will be capable

of exchanging information auditory

information

visual information and textual

information

so it will become like some sort of

conversation or dialogue between the

museum

and the visitors and for this

we will experimentally test out a whole

variety of new interfacing strategies

so we will experiment for instance with

the

conversational user interfaces like chat

bots

or we will have voice interfaces but

there will also be

interfaces which rely on computer vision

technology

this is a kind of technology which

preoccupies itself

with the way machines do see things

how they perceive the environment

okay so what’s the aim the aim is to

create functional applications

which can increase accessibility so

i give you an example at the moment

we preoccupy ourselves with so-called

spoken language identification

so now i would like you to picture the

following scenario

there is a group of let’s say

spanish-speaking people

entering the museum space and then

starting to

discuss and converse in front of an

artwork

but this particular artwork will be

capable

to detect the spoken languages out of

the language of the visitors

and it can adapt to this and it can then

automatically translate a given digital

label

into the corresponding language so you

see

all of a sudden the language barrier

decreases

and the accessibility increases

we consider the intelligent museum a

learning experiment

so what is an experiment in

collaborative learning

we would like to give the visitors a

possibility to learn from the museum but

the museum should also learn

from its visitors and then

collaboratively

they can become more competent and

more knowledgeable together

speaking of accessibility

for this project we will have a very

strict open source and open access

publishing policy we will

follow the slogan given by the free

software foundation

which goes like public money public code

which basically means that if there is

some public funding involved

the code should be made freely

accessible to the general public

and this we will do all codes which we

will develop as part of this project

will get uploaded onto an open code

repository

and this will be done for at least three

reasons

for quite obvious reasons we want

international developers

communities to being able to participate

in this project

they should be able to help us out they

should make propositions

and suggestions or simply draw on the

codes we already elaborated

secondly we want to work very

transparent

because especially when you work in the

field of data driven applications

which rely on big data sets you must

secure that

all voices are equally represented in

these data sets

you would like to avoid data bias

last but not least we strongly desire to

have

a reuse perspective for this project

so we would like to give the others the

opportunity

to draw on our findings nobody needs to

do the same mistakes we might have done

during this project

everybody can draw on this so this um

should go out to all the institutions to

the

software developers the artists

everybody can make use of it

and this is a way of reaching

sustainability

the intelligent museum in the end we

think that it will

transform us and it will

transform the museum experience

it will become more like a dialogue more

like a

conversation so i accordingly invite you

to join us and to participate

and together we can then collectively

make a quantum leap

into the future thank you

you