Use case: Exploring latent culture-space at the Met
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In November, we joined with Open Learning to host the Met’s digital director Loic Tallon for a talk on campus. He shared dreams of making museums into cultural platforms.
In December, we joined with OL and Microsoft to host a hackathon around using AI to build deeper understanding of the Met’s OA collections. This is how that developed, and led to a public showcase at the Met.
December gathering at MS NERD
Ryan Gaspar wanted to find a collab between MS and the Met. Peter K, SJ, and Loic discussed having an event to honor the anniversary of the Met’s OA program. The Met’s Wikimedian in Residence + other wiki collaborators wanted the open metadata to mesh better with Wikidata. Sarah Schwettmann proposed a studio for AI art at the Met.
Invitees:
12 Met curators (invited by Loic) 12 MIT students (invited by Sarah+Lana) 12 MSFT developers (invited by Ryan)
The Met x Microsoft x MIT Open Access AI Hack Teaser
February event at the Met
Planning: MS Teams coordination
Completed projects: 5 full projects
Gen Studio
Search for images in the Met collection that are similar to a generated image on gen.studio
For each object at the Met, we can find a corresponding object in GAN latent space, then traverse the space between objects to discover artworks that could have been made, but never were.
Storyteller caption
Last-minute considerations: (InstaMet algorithmic/image bias) (more work needed for some)
Sharing and publicity: Embargo; difficulty in code sharing
Publicity: Met + MS shared this load. Additional MS press may have come through in March, including a site redesign.
Next steps: Would we all do it again? The Met and OL are keen, each in their own way.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
