The initiative, called Modelling a Museum of AI Cultures, explores how shared cultural spaces, such as museums, can show how AI has developed, how it is understood, and how it impacts on the environment, work, and daily life.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the £242,200 two-year project runs from March 2025 to December 2026.
It will feature live and virtual events, publications, and interactive resources designed to help publics, museum professionals, and policy makers reflect on how AI shapes, and is shaped by, human experience.
Dr Kathryn Brown, Reader in Art Histories, Markets and Digital Heritage at Loughborough University, who is leading the work, said: “The term ‘AI’ covers such an array of computational systems and models that it can generate confusion.
“Our project tries to dispel myths about AI and to explore how cultural spaces can offer an important forum for people to articulate their ideas and concerns about technologies that are quickly reshaping our societies”.
The project also includes a number of workshops and seminars which discuss the uses of AI in everyday life.
On December 5, Dr Brown hosted an event that explores AI's links to healthcare, the diagnosis of disease, and the creation of solidaristic practices in healthcare settings.
The project will bring together researchers from the arts, humanities and computing to explore questions such as who controls the future of AI, what values are built into it, and how it is represented in the media, popular culture, and museums.
Partners include the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, The Francis Crick Institute, London and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, California.
Dr Brown said: “In the case of the Ashmolean, we're collaborating to interface with the museum’s collection and to explore how technology can build out key themes from its holdings”.
The project will also examine how AI is already being used within cultural institutions – from interactive exhibitions to virtual reality reconstructions of historical artefacts – and what that means for access, ethics, and inclusion.
Dr Brown said she also hopes the project will create resources for researchers, teachers, students, museum professionals and anyone curious about the social aspects of advanced technology.
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