Operative Image Spaces

Navigating Virtual Museum Collections

Abstract

The mass digitization of museum collections has created global spaces of image aggregation: transformed into weightless data floating in virtual space, musealized artifacts can now be arranged into navigable landscapes intended to make visible latent relationships of statistical similarity; and thanks to generative AI, datasets of archival images have become a valuable resource for generating new, synthetic images. The paper explores the implications of this operationalization of virtual image archives and asks for possible alternatives.