Majken Overgaard Majken Overgaard

'Interlinked' by Ix Shells photo credit Jonas Heide Smith

Against All Odds – Historical Women and New Algorithms

Exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark, 2023.

During the years 1870-1910, a number of Nordic female artists achieved success against all odds. However, despite their success, they were later forgotten and quietly disappeared from history. What happened? We investigate this question, bring the artists back into the spotlight and explore how artificial intelligence can be used to understand and communicate history in new ways.

I curated two digital installations for the exhibition; Interlinked by Ix Shells and the installation and chatbot based on Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen developed by Professor Morten Mørup, lektor Tue Herlau and students Niels Raunkjær Holm, Andreas Bigom og Michael Harborg from the Technocal University of Denmark. The interface and installation design was developed by Yoke.

The exhibition’s chief curator is Emilie Boe Bierlich. The exhibition had a curatorial team including Yoke, Mathilde Schytz Marvit, Mads Nørgaard, Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard and Laura Nørholt. The digital installations were developed in close collaboration with Jon Lewis.

Why Generative Technology?

The year generative AI models became widely available, 2022, was the year preparations began for the exhibition ‘Against All Odds – Historical Women and New Algorithms’. The exhibition examines the current transition to a new technological age and its significance for art, museum archives and our collective memory. The generative installations in ‘Against All Odds’ does not adopt a specific position on whether generative AI will be our salvation or downfall; rather it examines how art and museums can use AI to actively influence our outlook, our perception and our evolving recollection of historical material through technology with all the possibilities and limitations this entails.

The two digital installations each use generative technologies in their own distinctive way, and the exhibition can thus be seen as a snapshot of our current time, capturing how artificial intelligence and algorithms are reflected in the art world during the transitional period we find ourselves in right now.

‘Interlinked’ by Ix Shells photo credit Jonas Heide Smith

Interlinked

One of today’s leading digital artists, Itzel Yard (b. 1990), also known as Ix Shells, developed an interactive, immersive installation for the exhibition. In the installation, data about the 24 historical female artists is transformed into abstract forms that surround you and react to your movements. With this work, Ix Shells strives to unite the historical with the digital in a bodily and sensory experience.

‘Interlinked’ by Ix Shells photo credit Jonas Heide Smith

Chatbot based on Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen

The chatbot is an interpretation of sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. When developing a chatbot, access to data is essential. Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was chosen because we have access to a large collection of her digitized letters, diaries, and the literature written about her. It wasn’t possible to select other female artists featured in the exhibition due to the lack of sufficient available digital data about them. Artists not preserved in the past now face even greater challenges in having a voice simply because they don’t exist digitally.

The selection of digitized data ensures Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s place in the present, whereas those artists not preserved in the past face even greater difficulty in being heard in the future. This underscores the importance of not only creating visibility through exhibitions but also providing historical female artists with a digital afterlife.