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