Exhibiting contemporary artworks co-produced with Artificial Intelligence.

This article analyses the exhibition of AI co-produced artworks in art museums from a dual perspective, focusing on their historical, aesthetic, and institutional implications. The first part of the study, grounded in theories of contemporary art and curatorial studies, examines how AI technologies accentuate the core characteristics of contemporary art through the emergence of a new artistic format: performative AI installations. The second part of the article adopts a semiotic approach to reflect on the categories under which these installations circulate in museum contexts (e.g., digital art, new media art, generative art), and proposes an analysis of both their materiality and exhibition space in order to understand the new types of experiences they propose, and the visitors’ practices they elicit. Drawing on case studies such In Love with the World by Anicka Yi (Tate Modern), and Unsupervised by Refik Anadol (MoMA), the article explores how AI-based performative art challenges institutional frameworks and engages in a renewed form of institutional critique, while reshaping the public’s experience and interpretation of contemporary art.