The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non-Human Actors

The essay introduces a new line of research at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe that examines the role and experiments with museum applications of information technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality technologies (e.g., augmented, mixed, and virtual realities). Currently, two projects at the ZKM have taken up the initiative to start practice-based research: Beyond Matter and intelligent.museum. These projects are discussed in this essay with the aim of demonstrating that the museum is being successively transformed into a cognitive system of human and non-human actors. Drawing on the institutional experience of the ZKM, we present a new approach towards the notion of the museum: one that takes computation into consideration.