AbstractSurprise Machines is a project of experimental museology that
sets out to visualize the entire image collection of the Harvard Art Museums,
with a view to opening up unexpected vistas on more than 200,000 objects usually
inaccessible to visitors. The project is part of the exhibition organized by
metaLAB (at) Harvard entitled Curatorial A(i)gents and explores the limits of
artificial intelligence to display a large set of images and create surprise
among visitors. To achieve this feeling of surprise, a choreographic interface
was designed to connect the audience’s movement with several unique views of the
collection.
