The Liverpool Biennial is the UK’s largest festival of visual art, and is held in various public spaces, from historic buildings to galleries and art centres. In 2020, the 11th Biennial, entitled The Stomach and the Port, is preparing to explore different notions of the body and different ways of connecting with the world, through the work of 50 artists selected from the international scene.
In this context the activist duo UBERMORGEN, digital humanist Leonardo Impett and curator Joasia Krysa will launch an experimental project to investigate the relationship between curatorship and artificial intelligence, with the proposal of an experimental system which can curate exhibitions or events on the basis of learning principles created by human-machine relations. A series of experiments will be carried out, the first of which will be launched at Liverpool Biennial 2020, alongside a joint commission for Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art for the online gallery Artport.
The first online experiment explores the curatorial process of Liverpool Biennial 2020 and begins with the acquisition of data which the team are currently seeking to gather by inviting institutions and curators to provide information about the procedures used in curating past exhibitions and biennials, in the form of images, text, diagrams, videos, musical scores, contracts and other sources, either named or anonymous.
In recent years there has been much discussion of the role of the curator and the curator-artist. Now the focus is reconvening on a debate which sees our planet increasingly seeking to imagine a future of cohabitation between humans and machines, undoubtedly already on the way to defining the role of humans. Humans will be certainly involved in the training of the Artificial Intelligence.
Contributors of historical and contemporary exhibitions and biennials are invited to submit materials of any kind related to the process of curating (images, texts, diagrams, scores, files, audio, video, accounting records, legal contracts, and contextual information by curators and art institutions). Data can be transparent, subject-anonymous, or even sender-anonymous. Expressions of interest or your data can be sent to datasets [at] biennial.ai, or upload them anonymously on data.biennial.ai. Data submitted will be used for AI training purposes only, and will not be published or made accessible through the project.
UBERMORGEN, Leonardo Impett, e Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine, 2019 ongoing, co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art for its online gallery space artport.
