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Long before computers came to pervade every aspect of modern life, museums were collecting, organizing, and storing data. The art museum is a kind of vast machine for making all types of objects interoperable, from Bronze Age figurines to contemporary works of performance art. Like our digital machines, museums engender experiences of wonder and discovery—and they’re also engines of bias, power, and invisibility.

During Spring 2022, metaLAB (at) Harvard will take up residency in the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery to explore contact zones across computers, collections, and culture. In the first phase of the program, called Curatorial A(i)gents, metaLAB’s international consortium of artists, data scientists, and scholars will delve deeply into the holdings of the Harvard Art Museums and other collections. These projects use algorithmic methods to uncover patterns and relationships in the collections, making them sensible and navigable in ways that extend beyond the relations of works on walls. The projects will incorporate a range of critical making and media-driven inquiry. Appearing as a weekly cycle of interactive installations, projects will be organized not by collection, but by some of the underlying topics that organize museums, databases, and worlds beyond institutional walls.

In the second phase of the program, another series of projects will look beyond the museums’ walls to explore Living by Protocol, asking what it means to treat our lives, selves, and bodies as collections of data to search, navigate, and analyze. While the use of social media has become a daily routine for billions of people throughout the last decade, the problems and possibilities of this new reality were reflected and questioned by artists long before. In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism and Net Art laid a foundation for the digital realm to serve as an artistic medium; today, contemporary art is almost unthinkable without the network effects of Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook. Living by Protocol queries contemporary artists’ reflections on, with, and by social media. Consisting of six weeks of curated, rotating media works and experiments, the program will commence with a week of talks, discussions, and other hybrid programming. Social media will be simultaneously the topic, platform, and space of experimentation.