The model museum: AI at the museum-museum interface

Abstract

** IN PRESS

This chapter establishes the concept of the ‘Model Museum’ as an analytical framework. This holds a double meaning, referencing the use of AI models—which are increasingly shaping how museums operate and are networked—and the idea of museums as a social model. Linking AI algorithms, experimentation, networked practices, and museum constituencies with strategies of commoning, we form a meta-narrative of connective AI at the museum-museum interface. We ask how these practices might enhance forms of participation and experimentation (play), as well as representativeness, inclusion, and a sense of constituencies (common good), to resist the corporatisation of culture through Big Tech