The Anticipatory Museum: AI, Cultural Big Data, and Speculative Futures

This project explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming museums into anticipatory systems mediating between cultural heritage, science, and speculative futures. It distinguishes between discriminative and generative AI as complementary forms of cultural computation. Discriminative AI analyzes vast repositories of cultural data revealing hidden relationships and generating new interpretive frameworks. The Narratives from the Long Tail project exemplifies this approach, using machine learning to create narrative coherence across more than 200,000 hours of archival video. Generative AI, by contrast, produces new cultural forms that invite visitors to co-create within algorithmically mediated worlds. Projects such as the Geneva Public Portal to Anticipation engage global publics in exploring emerging science and speculative futures. Together, these modalities reposition the museum as both archive and laboratory for cultural foresight.