Museums are increasingly confronted with the impact of AI, raising questions about authorship and challenging institutions to classify AI as either a tool or a threat. Jonas Lund’s Performance Review experiments with this system by simulating museum operations within a live agentic framework.
The work stages the full cultural pipeline through which art is produced, evaluated, archived and disseminated. An AI agent instructs workers in the production of artworks, it writes wall texts, scores the audience response and creates art historical references. In this way, the museum is treated not as a neutral container, but revealed as a machine for producing legitimacy, value, and public relevance.
Presented in collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe, Performance Review envisions the future museum as a semi-autonomous institution: part factory, part archive, and part evaluation engine. The resulting installation makes visible the often-hidden processes through which institutions transform cultural activity into authority.
Within Future Museology, the AGENT serves as a critical mirror. It does not merely propose one possible future museum; it evaluates the conditions under which such futures are displayed and legitimized. Ultimately, the work turns the exhibition itself into material, asking how museums judge cultural value, what happens when these processes become automated and public, and what is place for people?
