(Working title)
Against the backdrop of current debates about whether artificial intelligence is undermining “the Enlightenment”, this project looks for structural analogies between the presentation of automata in the 18th century and today’s curatorial stagings of artificial intelligence. Historical examples such as Jaquet-Droz’s writing automaton or Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess player serve as a background for current exhibitions in which AI is exhibited as co-curator or interactive object. Based on the assumption that the institution museum, with its history of ideas rooted in historical Enlightenment, offers an analog space to deal with the supposedly anti-enlightenment artificial intelligences in a self-empowering way, it is analyzed how the encounter between humans and AI in the museum constitutes its own ideas of publicity, criticism and participation, and which Enlightenment thoughts and ideas are reformulated in the process.