AI is heralding a complete Re-Think in the way museums are conceived, designed, curated and experienced. Conventional approaches and time-tested methodologies find themselves on vulnerable grounds with an ironic, forceful fragility that threatens its ossified old guard. The dizzying power of engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, et al, that process millions of data points in milliseconds is simply mind-blowing. AI is redefining design and display principles, where both the past and future are animated in hyper-realistic multi-dimensional ways with the veracity of variables never seen before.
The rapidly changing landscape of learning is directly and continually influenced by ever-evolving technology trends. This is a given. New technologies influence the way we access information that has a measurable impact on how we assimilate, process, programme, analyse and apply it towards the learning process. Museums, as repositories and institutions of non-formal education, are in the crosshairs of AI – ranging from the didactic interpretation of both written and visual curated content to the engaged immersion of experiential exhibits.
With growing resource urgencies and power struggles among nations, data is emerging as the new smart currency. The world is also witnessing a growth in the number of museums being built, expanded or modified, in conjunction with the diversity of content they carry. With metadata comes the increased power to market, driving up visitor attendance, virtual engagement and the ability to update content as new information becomes available – something that previously left museums playing catch-up with upgrades and slow curation processes within an organisational structure constrained by capital and human resources. Museums and science centres are often not leaders or trend-setters when it comes to new ways of learning, engagement, immersion and or experiencing content. They are mostly borrowers and adopters of what germinates in other realms – be it in the entertainment industry or elsewhere.
With 1,200 heritage sites of significance and 95,000 museums of repute, cultural and historic consumption takes 40 per cent of the slice, driven by a tourism economy that tops $11 trillion. The tourism and attractions allied sectors contribute 9.8 per cent of the global GDP, supporting one in nine jobs. This is on the cusp of a metamorphosis, both in terms of exponentially enhanced services and an alarming meltdown in employment numbers, given the rapid advances of AI-driven data tools and 90,000+ mushrooming applications used by an estimated 1.2 billion users.
Museums must adapt or risk relevance. The wake-up call in this AI renaissance is existential. Gone are the days of conventional, laboriously slow curatorial plodding and pondering, with long lead times for developing design parameters. While many museums continue to operate in a bubble under the presumption that AI is good for the peripherals but not so relevant to the core, the ecosystem and externalities will quickly reach a regenerative reality, from which there will be no escape.
While many of these adaptations are being taken for granted, it is clear that the confluence of software and the tech-platforms has made a tremendous measurable difference to the internal and external efficiencies of museums and science centres around the world. It has also incrementally transformed and reshaped the business model of these non-profit institutions. There is consensus among technology professionals, influencers, and planners that all pedagogic institutions of formal and non-formal learning must be leveraged for critical thinking and betterment of humankind as agent provocateurs to penetrate the risk-averse museum immune system, impervious and often resistant to change. The status quo is neither an option nor a rehearsal for the future. Museums are already using a variety of tools to look at analytics from their social media and LinkedIn postings. Everything from trends, to seasonal cycles and aberrations and message open-rate, likes, shares and other indicators are providing valuable feedback to marketing teams within cultural organisations geared towards visitors, gate sales and e-line sales and sales directed through allied engines and service providers like Viator and A-res that are activated by different triggers. Museums are also tracking user patterns and event-based responses, geo-fencing and guerrilla targeting. With the addition of machine-learning, modern museums and cultural institutions are honing in on their operational efficiencies, forecasting and scenario-building prowess.
We only have to look at the aggregate and the macro-impact of transformation to prep for a massive abundance of inevitable change heading our way. Unpacking the integrated aggregate into quantifiable museum metrics is an exercise that has been neglected, largely out of the fear of realising the impending need of the hour to avoid irrelevance as institutions, even as Gen Alpha rears its AI-driven impatience and expectations in cyber curation and quantum clouds.
Imagine an animated character that embodies deep fake and perfects itself as a doppelgänger with each iterative regenerative interaction to the point of harvesting thousands of data points emulating your emotional responses. The empathetic avatar takes on a new life, where the real and virtual edge closer to singularity, merging fact and fiction, taking on life and choice decisions, overriding human logic in favour of advanced machines. Now add to it a layer of cyborg neura-link capabilities that rides on Emotional AI that takes cues from vocalisations, body language, iris movement, dwell time and emotional responses to a spectrum of content from violence to love. The result is a complex matrix – a cyber-maya indistinguishable from reality – the implications of which in the museum learning meta-space are mindboggling!
Even as originality, artistic integrity and technical adaptations take centre stage in concerned dialogues amid policy makers and programmers, Animation has already crossed multiple paradigm shifts in the last decade and is now heading to an app-driven explosion of Open-AI-driven content adaptation, rendering and delivery across platforms seamlessly with just a click of a button. Animation in the multi-verse is already redefining realities and stretching the elasticity of hyper engagement of senses that transcend traditional boundaries.
One of the first shifts in content generation is happening with nonlinear storytelling. It is a process of multiplying several outcomes in a story as guided by the viewer. While much of the action is prevalent in the video-gaming industry, it is making its presence felt in fantasy fiction. Choices made by users take the story on a different twist, amplifying the prospect of participatory problem solving, learning, or simply experiencing a new journey each time one visits the same meta-narrative.
The second shift is happening with animation itself. A Mirza Ghalib avatar, for instance, can narrate compelling prose or poetry using Gulzar’s voice, while walking down corridors of history or choosing to walk the streets of Delhi. Deep learning algorithms may automate certain animation tasks in-between frames or predict character animations without iterative, expensive renderings. Visitors can share the stage with Presidents, climb on-board Artemis II hurtling through space or dive into the deep ocean to visit marine life or explore a sunken vessel. Automatic ecosystems can be layered with visual prompts for a period, specific lighting requests and generative XD dynamics.
The third thrust is in advanced hardware and chip technology that has propelled companies like Nvidia to a global juggernaut. Its edge draws on the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices to deploy fast embedded data processors, bringing AI directly to these devices, instead of a cloud or data centre. This speeds up the AI pipeline and clones repositories for real-time decision-making and autonomous machine adaptations.
The heady combination of material culture and virtual manifestations of controlled or unbridled interactivity holds the kernel for exciting possibilities of the future, where learning, innovation, multi-disciplinary engagement in museums propel human ingenuity to greater heights of affordable means, methods and metrics for higher societal purpose.