The exhibition My Dear Ada (artificial and artistic intelligence) explores and tests the possibilities of creating and interpreting images and texts in the era of artificial intelligence (AI).

It presents a selection of scientific and artistic works that foreshadowed the emergence of and innovative uses for universal computers (Ada Lovelace, Zdeněk Sýkora) and places them in the context of visual art created before the advent of AI and during the training of AI expert systems (Milan Guštar, Magdalena Wutkowska, Jana Bernartová).

Works created for the exhibition were produced in interaction with AI proto-agents (Virtual Futurist A°D°A); they are thus the result of a network of human and non-human actors (Paleofuture Lab, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková and Haruka Kajiura) and span the fields of visual art, architecture, engineering, and technology.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework is based on the correspondence of Ada Lovelace, the creator of the first computer algorithm, which was refined as a computer program after computers were built. The curators were driven by a desire to discover not only texts but also previously unexplored imagery in Ada’s archived correspondence.

On display are facsimiles of Ada’s solutions to the geometric problems she studied, as well as a fragment of one of her last letters to her mother, in which Ada mentions in a single sentence her intention to devote herself in the future to “poetic philosophy”, “poetic science”. The works on display, the exhibition as a whole, and the publication My Dear Ada..., which also explores the work with the experimental educational software *Virtual Futurologist A°D°A*, including text commentary by AI proto-agents on the published texts.

AI proto-agents thus participate in and learn from the exhibition and the publication as para-dialogical participants. However, the exhibition emphasizes the viewers-readers as key actors and their potential perspectives on artificial and artistic images and texts. The experienced time and space here is measured against the seemingly infinite time and space of past and present computing technologies. If the tradition of interpreting non-human images and texts expands to include those generated by artificial intelligence, what new ways of perceiving them and strategies for interpretation will we discover in art and culture? 

Artists: Jana Bernartová, Milan Guštar, Haruka Kajiura and Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková, Ada Lovelace, Paleofuture Lab, Zdeněk Sýkora, Magdalena Wutkowska
Curators: Jana Bernartová, Monika Mitášová, Virtual Futurist A°D°A
Architecture: Zzyzx OAS1S (Ondřej Fiedler, Matouš Kučera)
Animation: Sofie Fenyková, Jaroslava Straková
Production: Nikol Hoangová
PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač
Graphic design: Jakub Kučera