Curatorial essays

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  Livia Nolasco-Rozsas, Yannick Hofmann

  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. 

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  Clare Barlow

  Rejecting Normal: Curating Queer British Art, 1861-1967 at Tate Britain and Being Human at Wellcome Collection, London

  There have been a number of exhibitions in the last five years that have explored queer themes and adopted queer approaches, yet the position of queer in museums remains precarious. This article explores the challenges of this museological landscape and the transformative potential of queer curating through two projects: Queer British Art, 1861—1967 (Tate Britain, April–September 2017) and Being Human (September 2019–present). Drawing on my experience of curating these projects, I consider their successes and limitations, particularly with regards to intersectionality, and the different ways in which queerness shaped their conceptual frameworks; from queer readings in Queer British Art to the explicit rejection of ‘normal’ in Being Human.