Surprise machines: revealing Harvard Art Museums' image collection
Dario Rodighiero Lins Derry Douglas Duhaime Jordan Kruguer Maximilian C. Mueller Christopher Pietsch Jeffrey T. Schnapp Jeff Steward
Surprise Machines is a project of experimental museology that sets out to
visualize the entire image collection of the Harvard Art Museums, intending to
open up unexpected vistas on more than 200,000 objects usually inaccessible to
visitors. Part of the exhibition Curatorial A(i)gents organized by metaLAB (at)
Harvard, the project explores the limits of artificial intelligence to display
a large set of images and create surprise among visitors. To achieve such a
feeling of surprise, a choreographic interface was designed to connect the
audience's movement with several unique views of the collection.