Coding the Institution is a remote panel discussion with technologist Noya Kohavi and critic Mike Pepi and moderated by CCS Bard Graduate Student Natasha Matteson that will focus on the implementation of technologies that produce the art audience as “user” and applications of artificial intelligence in the museum sphere. While galleries and auction houses have made use of algorithms for sales and targeted marketing, and many artists have already critically explored machine learning and AI, museums and arts institutions have been less inclined to examine or consider integrating these tools. The panelists will discuss how data-based technologies from zoom panels and digital exhibition guides to public websites and machine vision algorithms for navigating collections databases are being taken up by museums, as well as their unfolding infrastructural, ideological, and cultural consequences. The panelists will explore how classification, a process that is at the core of both algorithms and museums, can create epistemological violence, and how this can be critically engaged through a consideration of emergent technologies in the art world.

Noya Kohavi is a technologist, writer, researcher and consultant. Her work utilizes computer vision and computational linguistics to generate new narratives and insights, focusing on data ethics and a queer approach to computing. Noya teaches and lectures regularly, most recently as an associate adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she taught data science and machine learning methods to data journalists as well as algorithmic accountability and machine bias. Noya is a member at NEW INC, the New Museum incubator at the intersection of design and technology. Previously, she worked as a computational linguist and software engineer at Intel. Noya holds a BA in philosophy and linguistics from Tel Aviv University and an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the recipient of a Maria Moors Cabot Prize scholarship and a Magic grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Mike Pepi writes about art, culture, and technology. His work has appeared in frieze, e-flux, Flash Art, Art in America, DIS Magazine, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Spike Art, The Brooklyn Rail, Rhizome, and The New Criterion. He also organized Cloud-Based Institutional Critique (CBIC), a reading group focused on emerging digital technologies and their relationship to cultural institutions. In 2015 he was co-guest editor of the Data Issue of DIS Magazine with Marvin Jordan. In 2018, he guest-edited a special issue of SFMOMA's Open Space entitled Heavy Machinery. He is based in New York.

ASL and CART will be provided at this program thanks to Interpreting Services.

Criteria is curated by Natasha Matteson as part of the requirements for the master of arts degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

In addition to support provided by CCS Bard, the public programming presented in conjunction with Criteria was made possible by the generous support of the Bard College Computer Science Program and the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, sponsored by the Open Society University Network.

Philippe Parreno, Flickering Light, 2013. LED light and 1 programmed chip, 47 1/4 x 8 1/16 x 6 1/8 in. (120 x 20.5 x 15.6 cm). Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Coding the Institution: Noya Kohavi and Mike Pepi