Five questions to Mario Bäumer, curator of Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg on his exhibition “Out of Office. When robots and AI work for us”:
What is most fascinating about this exhibition?
“As a curator, I prefer to present exhibitions on socially relevant topics such as mobility and capitalism. This social relevance is particularly present in the current exhibition, which deals with the question of how we work in the current development of artificial intelligence and robotics, how we want to live at all, and how we expect to live. Public discourse confronts us daily with reports about transformations and disruptions through AI and robotics. The fascinating thing about the exhibition is that the visitors are sensitized to think for themselves and are directly involved in the discussion. They can also express their opinion on conceivable models for the future.”
Why should people come and visit?
“It`s worth it for two reasons: iit classically informs on what is actually understood by artificial intelligence robotics, and on the other hand it turns the museum into a place of debate in which the evaluations of the visitors are asked for and evaluated participatively in the user-generated content. This contribution to society as a whole is a great challenge since it goes far beyond individual expressions of opinion.”
What is new about the accompanying chat guide?
“The chat guide is an ideal supplement because it sensitizes the reader to the approach of the exhibition. In a playful way, I am confronted with the big questions around the topic and can deal with them individually. The exhibition itself does not make any dystopian or utopian statements, but offers the possibility of classifying the individual visitor via chat guide.”
What is your feedback from the visitors so far?
“The exhibition as a whole is perceived very positively. For the current period of the presentation, we are registering a record number of group bookings. Also a new public field opens up, since many, many companies visit the exhibition. This positive feedback is especially important as for this exhibition, you as a visitors do not immediately have an idea what type of presentation to expect.”
What are your next plans:
“We want to develop new exhibitions on socially relevant topics and continue the discussion with the museum audience. Here, it will be important to continue to deal with changing visitor expectations and consumer behaviour and to emphasise the museum strengths in the course of audience development. I think that the museum is increasingly becoming a place of information and debate.”
The exhibition can be visited until May 19, 2019. More info on www.outofoffice.hamburg
Here, you can test what kind of future type you are: http://zukunftstyp.museum-der-arbeit.de