Diese Bilder wurden mit Hilfe von KI erzeugt — The artist Daniel Heiss applied artificial intelligence to generate these images which are based on the analysis of photos of museum visitors. The StyleGAN-algorithm used for this was developed by Tero Karras, Samuli Liane and Timo Aila at NVIDIA. Photo: Credit Bluefors Oy | Credit Bluefors Oy

Museological research

Intelligent.museum

As part of “Intelligent.museum”, different approaches to AI-supported digital art will be used to critically examine and explore the socially relevant topic of AI from a variety of perspectives.

Content

Intelligent.museum – an artistic-curatorial experimental area for deep learning and visitor participation

Project description

The goal of this project, funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, is to offer the wide public an opportunity to reflect on various aspects of AI through interactive and immersive art presentations on this topic. In addition, accompanying research will also enable a reflection on a higher level of perspective. In the scope of this venture around ten different interactive digital art installations will be developed and tested with the public. The results will contribute to the ongoing work of the partners.

This approach aims to answer the following questions:

What new possibilities of additional interaction, dialogue and communication do digital forms of presentation provide when combined with automatic feedback collection?
How do visitors perceive these new forms of mediation and interaction?, and do these alter the museological dialogue? Which forms of presentation are effective in practice?
Which additional target groups are possibly reached by art installations depicting future technologies?
How does the AI machine acquire video information of the visitor, and which properties and features are of interest to the machine? What does the machine analyse, and which assessments and recommendations does it generate from the results of these analyses?

Open Call for Artists

The joint project intelligent.museum of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Deutsches Museum invite international artists who integrate AI in their artistic practice to apply for the second iteration of its artist residency. We are looking forward to your innovative project proposals at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence (AI).

Content Focus of the Artistic Residency:

As part of intelligent.museum a variety of artistic approaches to AI are used to critically examine and explore socially relevant topics.
The artworks created during the second iteration of the residency develop explicitly artistic perspectives on the future. The artistic use of AI will serve to critically illuminate disruptive changes in a wide range of sociopolitical fields. Thematic complexes to be reflected upon by means of artistic future perspectives include work and everyday life, body and mind, urbanity and democracy, ecology and sustainability, and future technologies.
The reference to the future should be clearly elaborated in the project idea and subsequently communicated to the general public in an appropriate artistic format. The central goal is to promote an intensive social dialogue.

Methodical focus of the Artistic Residency:

The open call addresses artists who, regardless of disciplines and genres, apply machine learning in an innovative way in their artistic practice. For this iteration, special consideration will be given to submissions that experimentally test new possibilities of interaction between artwork and recipients through the use of techniques such as Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

Results of the Artistic Residency:

As a result of the residency, an AI-supported artwork is to be created and produced during the residency. It will be presented at the ZKM | Karlsruhe and the Deutsches Museum Nuremberg - the future museum.

All program codes developed within the framework of the project are to be deposited in the intelligent.museum project’s GitLab code repository under an open source license with comprehensible comments and thus made available to the relevant developer communities as well as to the general public for inspection or for their own further development.

Course and technical framework:

As part of the collaborative project, residences are planned at both institutions – the Deutsches Museum in Nuremberg and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. The residency will take place from January 6 to February 24, 2023. The plan is for the artists to be at the two institutions for the same seven-week period, so that a productive exchange can develop, especially among the fellows, but also with the team.

Each location will offer the fellows access to site-specific resources and opportunities throughout the project. Fellows will have access to a dedicated AI server, built to both outsource inference for edge computing devices and accelerate training of medium- to large-scale deep learning models. The machine features an EPYC 7502P server CPU and two A100 PCIe GPU cards.

Financial conditions:

The scholarship holders receive a stipend. The amount of the scholarship is 5.000 € for a total duration of the residency of 2 months. All material costs for the realization of the artistic project are paid by the scholarship holders from this amount.

For travel to the residencies, the scholarship holders can be reimbursed for their travel expenses up to a maximum of 1,000 €, taking into account the applicable travel expense laws. Accommodation will be organized by the scholarship provider.

Note: You are welcome to apply in teams or collectives, but the amount of the scholarship remains unaffected.

Participation procedure:

The following is required for submission:

Applications to the open call are submitted in two parts:

Part 1: Contact and artist information, project overview, and agreements for submission
Part 2: Project application and accompanying media

Note: The submission of both parts is required for application consideration.

Part 1 is submitted through an online form: Open Call IM Residency 2022 Part 1

Part 2 is submitted as a ZIP file to an online upload folder: Open Call IM Residency 2022 Part 2

The following is required for the Part 2 submission:

- Short summary of the project idea (max. 1000 characters incl. spaces).

- Project description as well as the required technical infrastructure (max. 5000 characters incl. spaces)

- Short biography (max. 1000 characters incl. spaces) as well as contact details

Note: The submission is made in English.

The project application should be submitted up to and including August 31, 2022 as PDF file with a size of up to 5 MB. Package the PDF and any accompanying audio, images, and video into a ZIP file named "lastname_projectname.zip" and upload to us via the Part 2 link.

If you have any questions, please contact mail@intelligent.museum.

The artist-in-residence program »intelligent.museum Residency« is part of the project »intelligent.museum« and takes place in cooperation between ZKM | Karlsruhe and the Deutsches Museum. It is funded by the »Kultur Digital« program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.