The webinar takes its cue from Noam Segal’s essay Notes on the Index in Accelerated Digital Times (2024), exploring how the emergence of AI impacts our understanding of temporality, representation, and cultural signs. This impact is characterized by reconstructions that blend various temporalities and technologies, moving away from the singularity of an original object’s time and place. In this sense, contemporary digital environments and AI technologies are creating new relationships with time, space, and meaning, reshaping how we understand images in both historical and contemporary contexts. According to Segal, AI’s influence on image-making in digital culture creates what could be termed a “post-indexical” reality. What role does curating play when AI cannot account for the historical context or material conditions of an artwork? How can these issues be addressed within museological practice, which increasingly strives to contextualize artworks through provenance research and restitution practices?

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Noam Segal
LG Electronics Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Speakers:

Christiane Paul
Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum of American Art

Barbara Cueto
Independent curator and researcher / Online Curator at LAS art foundation in Berlin

Moderator and Organizer:

Giulia Colletti
Curator, Public Programs and Digital Sphere, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea

Image: IBM Quantum System One machine installed in Tokyo