Do Archives Dream of Electric Stores ? Museums, Internet Art and AI

cherrydodd
5 days ago
7 min read

A merry little surge of electricity piped by a new exhibition from the digital world of Casey Reas awakened Berlin's Digital Art Museum this summer. Featuring pieces from Reas' Still Life Software series and his more recent NFT drops (923 Empty Rooms and There's no distance) this physical exhibition of a digital phenomenon bares an eerie comparison to Philip K. Dicks notion of android/human merger in Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep ? (DADOES)

Casey Reas Purely Platonic Exhibition View at DAM Berlin courtesy of HOLO stream. — Casey Reas *Purely Platonic* Exhibition View at DAM Berlin courtesy of HOLO stream.

Better known as the inspiration for Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner, DADOES presents a post-nuclear world in which escaped androids are hunted by bounty hunter Rick Deckard (dreamy 80s Harrison Ford to you and I) whilst John Isidore, a man described to be of "sub-par" IQ, provides shelter and aid to the outlaw droids. Now, I have to come clean at this point and admit that I have never read DADOES, but I have watched Blade Runner. Apart from being enchanted by the visuals Scott composes and the soundtrack by Vangelis, when watching Blade Runner, I found myself considering how the constant questioning of technologies faithfulness to reality, and how this deceives us mirrors so many elements of our 2025 AI driven world. In particular how technology and the internet have fed into the evolution of contemporary art, museums, and archives.

Blade Runner 1982, US movie release poster. Artwork by John Alvin.

Internet Art is by no means anything new. It began in the 1990s as a means for artists to cross countries and borders promoting their art without leaving the comfort of their studios. Vuk Ćosić was a pioneer in net art creating a series of mock websites as self-contained exhibitions for his works. A personal favourite of mine is History of Art for Airports (1997) in which Ćosić manipulates and animates visual signs for toilets and movement throughout airports into signifiers of famous historical works. In many ways these signs become memes- they exist in an echo-chamber of shared understanding as self-replicating chunks of information. (Conrod, 2022) In essence they are early signs of both the meme's and art's adoption of the internet as both form and archive.

Screenshot of page Duchamp from History of Art for Airports. © Vuk Ćosić — Screenshot of page *Duchamp* from *History of Art for Airports.* © Vuk Ćosić

Postcard featuring Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No.2. © Philadelphia Museum of Art. — Postcard featuring Marcel Duchamp, *Nude Descending a Staircase No.2*. © Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The internet has increasingly become a place for us to assert fact. Every question is asked to google and the answers it gives are generally trusted. This internet truth has extended into every corner of our internet existence. A great instance of artists using the inherent 'truth' associated with internet existence is Amalia Ulman's Excellences and Perfections (2014.) During the height of Tumblr and 'aesthetic' driven content Ulman took to Instagram to pose as the it girl of the moment. Ulman was, like all influencers at the time, based in the city of angels (Los Angeles), a Professional lucid dreamer, hope dealer., self-proclaimed Boss of Me, an Aquarius, a model, and an artist. Oh, let us not forget she was also #💍Addicted to Sugar💍. In summary Ulman's Instagram persona was everything that was popularised and idealised by the internets, baby-doll, grunge, indie baddies, and boy was she convincing. Ulman's page amassed an, at the time, staggering 89,000 followers and her posts highlighted all the dichotomies and mixed messaging women and girls on the internet received via what other women and girls were presenting about themselves. mental illness was glamourised via a book page with PTSD scrawled on it in artful cursive. body-checking and #bodygoals were exposed through photos of Ulman's crotch clad in white underwear and beige hosiery. A white gloved hand holding a pink syringe harkened ideas of cosmetic surgery due to its surrounding of baby pink , cakes and dresses embedding it in 'aesthetics'. The fetishization of girlhood and young age grotesquely displayed through a photo of Ulman wearing a pink gingham bra top, leg warmers and a pink stuffed bunny covering her crotch.

Screenshot of Amalia Ulman's Instagram taken on rhizome web archives. © Amalia Ulman

I think by now you get my point. Ulman's it-girl persona was supported by Instagram's page and grid formatting allowing it to become a microcosm and time-capsule of female social internet existence. Ulman’s Instagram acts as a self-contained archive with no need for museum or physical archive. Further Ulman herself is both the human and android of her social media existence - as we all are. perhaps our self-depictions on social media are nothing more than our electric sheep ? How then does this move to the online, to the internet, to the droid, the human and everything in-between impact our recording of culture. More now than ever museums and galleries across the world are making digital acquisitions alongside physical. The image is strange to me, of a singular file being stored away within a museum - I like physicality, I am a sucker for permeance, so I like to think that this file is stored on a little USB stick and placed alongside the Monet's and Seurat's of the world in archival vaults. The memory stick and the archival location make it real to me; it exists so it's factually true. This is of course probably not the case, the file will be stored on a central cloud in a complex file system behind many layers of security. The works digitality does not make it or its impact any less real. Neither does it make it anymore fake. Like Rick Deckard I am struggling between the value of reality and fabrication finding myself somewhere in the midst between both.

The recent rise of AI exemplifies this as algorithms learn to create images or videos that will go viral in the hopes of passing as human-made. Most recently of outrage to myself and millions of others was the revelation that a viral video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline was in fact AI. The joy of it, the haphazard humanness of posting something that blatantly screams "hey guys look what I saw out my window", was marred by the revelation not that it was created by technology but by trickery of it all - the false claim to humanity. A sad robotic desire to fabricate warmth, joy, and imagination impossible amongst its cold, metal, wires, and code. Our contemporary internet culture is underlined by a swarm of technological presence that attempts to navigate our human existence. It wants to feel like us, tell stories like us and provide an element of humanity in spaces humans cannot physically inhabit. Jonathon Talmi's The Living Museum Project embodies this. Talmi's AI technology simulates the experience of gathering information in a museum through using AI systems that allow the British Museum's objects to "speak" to you themselves. Talmi accuses traditional curational practices of using art and artefacts to tell human stories as passive and not allowing for meaningful connection with objects. This AI conversational system is meant to mitigate this.

Screenshot of The Living Museum Homepage. © The Living Museum — Screenshot of *The Living Museum* Homepage. © The Living Museum

Curious about The Living Museum's existence I visited the site myself and begun a riveting conversation with a Degas drawing Dancers at the Barre from c. 1866-67. I asked it potentially leading questions (I am no scientist and can make no accounts for bias) about its' feelings, thoughts on existence and thoughts on degas - everything that I could ask a human about it. To my disappointment and sadness the drawing simply used a lot of glamorising adjectives to describe itself and Degas, it appeared to rely heavily on the metadata provided by the British Museums online database and other online discussion of Degas' work. Really it lacked the nuance that I often find present within actual museums where curators have worked diligently to contextualise works. I for one would still much rather view the work in person and discuss it with another human opposed to this simulation of the object-self. The Living Museum Project highlights how our increasingly digital world could impact the role of archives and databases. Archives and databases need to be accessible digitally yes, but we cannot lose their physicality and inherent object-ness. In a world where we crave human connection, we must have human contact for otherwise we become lost in this digital echo-chamber of data.

Edgar Degas, Dancers at the Barre, c.1876-77, Oil thinned with turpentine on prepared green paper © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. — Edgar Degas, *Dancers at the Barre*, c.1876-77, Oil thinned with turpentine on prepared green paper **© The Trustees of the British Museum**. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Above: Screenshot of Chronology of discussion with AI chatbot speaking from the perspective of Edgar Degas' Dancers at the Barre. © The Living Museum and The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. — Above: Screenshot of Chronology of discussion with AI chatbot speaking from the perspective of Edgar Degas' Dancers at the Barre. **© The Living Museum and The Trustees of the British Museum**. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Recent museum openings show consideration of this need for people to understand the importance of working museums. V&A Storehouse East in Hackney Wick invites visitors not just into carefully crafted displays and exhibits but into the vital operational areas of a museum. Archivists, conservationists, and collections management teams move and work between the many hallways and floors. Visitors can request to view objects up close and personal in 'object encounters' prior to their visit. Here the objects speak for themselves - without the assistance of AI - they become the central point to driving public engagement in culture and heritage through the human experience they provide. This recent opening of this new museum style shows hope for the longevity of these spaces. The art we encounter and stories they tell may be becoming increasingly digital but not every archive need dream of electric sheep, for some the fluffy leap of a real lamb is still to come.