Exhibited at The Great North Museum. June – September 2018
Can you imagine what will be in the museum’s collection one hundred years from now? Think about how many new things have been found, learned, and invented in the last hundred years. We have gone from the first modern traffic lights being installed in 1918 to self-driving cars in 2018. The job of navigating roads safely is something we now trust to technology and artificial intelligence.
When designing the intelligent selections machine, we wanted to see if artificial intelligence could also work to predict the future of the museum’s collection by looking at objects in the archives that relate to the history of invention, industry, and innovation in the north of England. It uses its knowledge of this collection as a starting point to guess what the future will hold. It is a light-hearted look at how intelligent artificial intelligence really is, but it is also a way of thinking about how useful it may be in museums in the future.
Use the touchpad to select some keywords and then look up to see what it imagines. You can go online to www.intelligentselections.online to see a stream of predictions.
Intelligent selections is a speculative artwork by Dominic Smith and Pete Haughie
