Welcome to The Interface: Imagining Future Language through the Looking-Glass of the Curatorial

My proposed research project is centred in the responsibility of the curatorial to adapt to changing modes of representation in a world dominated by a new digital language. It uses the investigation of language mutation as the medium through which to confront the convergence of the curatorial with the digital. Comprised of a programme of exhibitions, the project will use art collaboration and installation to hypothesise about a fictious, future language/interface.

Three curatorial events will use the exhibition space as a testing ground for the representation of digital art. These will address the function of the analogue archive verses the digital database within this pursuit. My research will focus specifically on A.I. technology and the algorithmic database’s role in generating a new visual language within contemporary art practices. With practice-based research feeding into my written work, the project will culminate in a textual component conceived as a manual for operating a future, linguistic structure for communicating with machines. Through the imagination of this interface, the project seeks to integrate language and architecture. As it attempts to delineate a future beyond our contemporary linguistic and physical structures, it pursues fiction as a curatorial framework for examining emerging modes of visual language.

Anna Skutley is an independent curator and researcher originally from Seattle. Now based in the UK, she works to facilitate collaborative projects which focus on the intersection of new media, fiction, and the role of the archive in contemporary art production. Her PhD research uses the idea of ‘the interface’ as a kind of proxy to explore both the screen and the curatorial setting, as spaces of interpretation and reading.